A novel on the border of repentance and excuse

The trouble with Chae Man-sik’s “A Sinner of the Nation,” this reading says, is that, in how it treats collaboration with Japan, the work sits on the border between repentance and excuse. Like other literary figures who, under a time that expected them to confess past wrongs, seek pardon, and turn to building a new country, this novel, the writer argues, cannot be forgiven through literature alone. No publication year is given in the text, and none is supplied here. The setting named is the liberation period, and that wording is left as given in this reading.

Researchers have split sharply over whether the novel’s thematic effect belongs to repentance or to excuse. That split, this reading says, itself shows how hard the novel’s web of meaning is to grasp. Some readings refuse to be swept up in that binary and interpret the book more cautiously. Yoon Dae-seok, speaking of the psychology of memory and forgetting, called Chae’s novel a narrative structure that newly reconstructs the writer’s own identity and, through the novel, the identity of the Korean people. Bang Min-ho, in “Chae Man-sik and a conception of a Joseon modern literature,” and Ryu Bo-seon, in “A strange reversible reaction of cynicism and the sublime: the problem of collaboration and repentance in Chae Man-sik’s literature,” somewhat suspend judgment on the question.

It is hard to avoid discussing the authenticity of the repentance, this reading says, because a literary person’s self-awareness of cooperation with Japan at the end of the colonial period is, in a work of literature, an uncommon case. Even so, the writer holds that if Chae acted as a collaborator, admitted the wrong, and published this novel, nothing is thereby changed, and pardon cannot simply be won by bringing the book out.

The writer’s reading, and a view from the left

The content of “A Sinner of the Nation,” in this reading, is entirely a union of the protagonist’s repentance with the narrator’s self-excuse and self-defense, so that the authenticity of repentance is not found. Through a confession of a collaborative record, the protagonist finds a role again and re-establishes an identity, and the negative work of an inauthentic excuse and defense is thereby completed. There is also, this reading adds, a view from the left: that the novel, by confessing a past wrong, props up the present and opens the future. Conversely, many share the position that it cannot be forgiven, and that it is not a genuine repentance for a record that amounts to a crime.

At the head of this line this reading places Kim Yoon-sik’s “On Chae Man-sik: A Sinner of the Nation and a nation of sinners.” Jeong Ho-ung, in a study of Chae’s nihilism and the problem of the subject who bears history, is said to have seen the novel as offering a distinctive logic of self-excuse and a national self-criticism. Lee Dong-ha, in a study of liberation-period works by Yi Kwang-su and Chae Man-sik, is said to have read it as testing the chance of an indulgence. Saegusa Toshikatsu did not make the critique sharp, but judged that Chae confused a writer’s self-critique with turning that critique into a novel, and tried to survive by putting an end to a moral problem — a view close to the same position. No years are given for these studies in the text, and none are supplied here.

The writer also holds that, in the inward turn of the work’s gaze, satire was not made into a genuine repentance toward the self. In Chae’s literary world of the liberation period, the function of the novel, as put in this reading, was to end the satire of earlier work and to publish, through self-excuse, self-defense, and self-explanation, a book without genuine repentance.

A liberation-period confession, set beside two contemporaries

The novel is certainly a problematic work, this reading says. Its problematic character lies in the fact that, in a Korean history that lived through a colonial period under Japan, it occupies the place of a literary report on the question of cooperation with Japan. The book is set on the same track as Yi Kwang-su’s “My Confession” and Kim Dong-in’s Mangukin-gi, a title this reading names. In Yi’s case this is confirmed, this reading says, in an appendix, “A Pro-Japanese Figure’s Plea,” which in fact becomes a pragmatic self-excuse close to a threat against the national community. In Kim’s case there is no room at all for reflective thought about himself, and the writing is said to stop at an expression with no recourse.

“A Sinner of the Nation,” too, as a narrative of confessing a collaborative record, is said not to have a noteworthy personal authenticity. It has been received with differing judgments as a problematic novel that treats a collaborative past. Interpretations have been handed down within a method that divides them into “repentance” and “excuse”; if one looks from the side of the form of a confession of collaboration, this reading says, one can go beyond that binary and understand even the inner connections of Chae’s liberation-period fiction.

The confession is carried out, they add, by a narrative strategy in the pattern “repentance plus excuse and defense,” and by an oppositional structure of recollection. That debate is why, in the world of Chae’s liberation-period fiction, the novel has a problematic character. It sits between the satirical literary novels that appeared again in some number in the liberation period and the works of the late career that either dropped satire or treated history in a novelistic way. Hence an analysis of the novel’s argument, the writer says, cannot be avoided if one is to fix clearly the change of thematic effect, or of tendency, in Chae’s fiction of that time, and to look for its meaning. The same Korean essay, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student essay on settling accounts with pro-Japanese literature, centered on Chae Man-sik’s “A Sinner of the Nation.”
2. Readings by Yoon Dae-seok, Bang Min-ho, Ryu Bo-seon, Kim Yoon-sik, Jeong Ho-ung, Lee Dong-ha, and Saegusa Toshikatsu, left without years where the text gives none.
3. A comparison with Yi Kwang-su’s “My Confession” and Kim Dong-in’s Mangukin-gi, and a narrative pattern of repentance plus excuse and defense.

Last updated: 14 November 2026