堀田昇一「モルヒネ」論

This paper focuses on Hotta Shoichi’s Morphine, in order to consider how a Japanese novelist depicted Japan’s morphine policy in Korea. Although the proletarian novelist Hotta Shoichi is rarely discussed today, I will identify the path that led to his interest in the morphine problem among Zainichi Korean laborers as part of his own process of self-formation, which took him from anarchism to syndicalism, and finally to a commitment to Marxism. By this time, Hotta had already published several works based on his origins as a worker, but Morphine was a unique work, as it entrusted subjectivity solely to the characters of Zainichi Korean laborers. Taking as its theme the potential for solidarity between Japanese and Korean workers, Morphine offers a portrait of Korean workers employed in Japan under harsh conditions, as they reproduce their labor using morphine. Their fate, underpinned by Japanese policy toward morphine on the Korean peninsula, reveals the schema of Japanese colonial rule. In the prewar era, the Korean peninsula was both a major opium-producing region for Japan ,and a site of morphine consumption. This paper locates Hotta’s Morphine as part of a counter-discourse problematizing Japan’s morphine policy.