점령지에서 탄생된 현대판 녹림고사— 중일전쟁 시기 화북점령지 작가 畢基初의 향촌서사 연구 = A Study on the Rural Narratives of Bi Jichu, a Writer in the Occupied Areas of North China

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Bi Jichu(畢基初) was one of the important writers in the literary circles of the occupied areas of North China during the Sino-Japanese War. He was also a writer who brought about the rise of local literature in the literary circles of the occupied areas with works full of the atmosphere of the green forests such as 《盔甲山》. However, there has not been enough research on him in today’s academic world, and he can be said to be a forgotten writer of the 1940s. However, when rereading the eight novels he published in Beijing during the Sino-Japanese War, we find the following important meanings.
First, his novels resonated with the entire Chinese literary world at the time because of their rich local characteristics. As a Shandong writer, he successfully portrayed the temperament of a Shandong man, and all of the characters in his novels used the local colloquial language, thereby fully conveying the local color of Shandong.
Second, some of his short stories (<金交椅>, 1944) were comparable in artistic quality to the masters of Western short stories such as Somerset Maugham and Anton Chekhov. Not only did he place the characters in the typical power structure of a rural village at the time, which was violent and greedy, but he also delved into the abyss of the characters’ psyche to successfully create a negative character, Luo Hongrui, who sat on the throne of the rural village.
Third, his work vividly and faintly revealed the actual history of the Shandong countryside under occupation. This was something that the authoritarian perspective on resistance history had neglected or deliberately pushed out of orthodox history. The confrontation and conflict in the work mainly arose around the contradictions between the government troops and civilian armed forces (or bandits) in the county, not between the Japanese and the Chinese, which may have come as a surprise to readers.
Today, mainstream anti-Japanese history interprets the struggle at that time as a Chinese resistance against Japan, and the scenes of struggle where “Chinese fought against Chinese” (excluding battles between the Nationalist and Communist parties) are rarely mentioned. On the other hand, the assumption and interpretation that Pil-bi-cho was in the literary world of the occupied territories and thus his works were forcibly suppressed by the Japanese military’s cultural control and thus it would have been difficult for him to describe the anti-Japanese struggle is excessive. This is because the Japanese military’s efforts to control the culture of writers in the occupied territories of North China at that time were generally ineffective.
To summarize, Pil-chi-cho’s work powerfully depicts the actual history and the suffering of the people in Shandong Province during the Sino-Japanese War with a high degree of artistic perfection, thereby supplementing a lost aspect of local history in the 1940s.