قصة الكتاب :
Kōdansha (Kōdansha Bungei Bunko), 1997. 400 pp. ¥1,200. ISBN
978-4-06-197584-2.
“Yuhi” originally published in Gunzō, Nov. 1988; “Nabi taryon” originally
published in Gunzō, Nov. 1982.
Lee Yangji
Born in 1955. Graduated from Seoul University in 1988. Won the 100th Akutagawa Prize
for “Yuhi” in 1989. Other works include “Nabi taryon” and “Kazukime” [Diving Maiden].
She died of illness in 1992; in the following year her collected works were published by
Kōdansha.

This book is a collection of four short stories written in Japanese by the secondgeneration
Zainichi Korean writer Lee Yangji, including her Akutagawa Prize–
winning story “Yuhi.”
Sadly, the author’s life was cut short by illness in 1992, when she was 37, but
the stories in this book display her importance as a writer who brought vital issues
into contemporary Japanese literature from her perspective as an ethnic Korean.
In this way, she introduced what the minority writer Nakagami Kenji called
something “tangibly new” within the literary currents of ethnic Koreans writing
in Japanese.
The story “Yuhi” centers on a protagonist of the same name, an ethnic Korean
woman raised in Japan who has hidden her Korean heritage. She moves to South
Korea to study and lives in a boarding house in Seoul, but finds it hard to get used
to the Korean people and their language. Ultimately she gives up and returns to
Japan.
“Nabi taryon” [Sorrow of the Butterfly] is another story told from the perspective
of an ethnic Korean woman living in Japan, depicting incidents in her life that
range from the marital discord of her parents to the deaths in quick succession of
two older brothers, her adulterous relationship with an older Japanese man, and
her studies in South Korea.
The characters in these stories vacillate between the Japanese nation in which
they were raised and the Korean nation of their parents. These autobiographical
works depict young female protagonists in search of their identity. By creating
pieces that straddle two cultures and languages, Lee opened up new possibilities
for contemporary Japanese literature and earned the admiration of other minority
writers of her generation, such as Nakagami and Levy Hideo. (NM)