The literary works written by Tachihara Masaaki (1926-1980), a Korean-Japanese writer, are commonly divided into two categories, a small number of belles- lettres works and an enormous body of popular stories. The former represents his intricate stance towards ethnicity and his contradictory feelings about hybridity, while the latter varies in terms of themes, such as love and an appreciation of Japanese medieval tradition. Since Tachihara accepts this literary dichotomy, his popular stories tend to be read separately from his Korean ethnicity. This tendency also amplifies Tachihara's image as a writer who seeks to assimilate himself into Japanese tradition. In this paper, I question the established view on Tachihara's popular works by analyzing how his posture toward ethnicity influences his popular works from a postcolonial perspective.
In his popular stories, Tachihara reveals an appreciation of Japanese medieval tradition and regards Heimat-loss, or loss of one's birthplace, as a common characteristic between his Japanese medieval precursors and himself. I elucidate how his desire to escape from hybiridity drives Tachihara towards an appreciation of Japanese medieval aesthetics. This paper examines the strategies that Tachihara attempts to use in order to resolve the conflict within himself, such as assimilation and self- denial for selfless state, the ideal state of Zen, where the ultimate aesthetics can be accomplished. Furthermore, using the postcolonial concept of "mimicry," I analyze Tachihara's strategy of mimicking modern mainstream writers who had successfully achieved a medieval sense of beauty. This paper also discusses how Tachihara's adherence to a third- person narrator as a strategy to maintain his objective posture towards ethnicity is utilized for elaborating various materials in his popular stories. Thus Tachihara's popular works strongly demand to be reread from the above-mentioned postcolonial perspective.