동북아역사재단 2022년 08월호 뉴스레터
- Kim In-deok, Professor at Cheongam College
This film is based on Yang Seok-il's novel, 『Blood and Bones』 (1998). Yang Seok-il was born in 1936 in Ikaino, Osaka. His parents are from Jeju Island. He has been writing poems since he was 18 and briefly engaged in art printing to make a living. One day, while wandering around the country after failing in his business endeavors, he read Henry Miller’s 『Tropic of Capricorn』 in a rural bookstore he stopped by and decided to become a novelist. He worked as a taxi driver in Tokyo until leading a life as a writer. Based on this background, he published 『All Under the Moon』 (original title: 『タクシ狂躁曲』).
In 1993, Director Choi Yang-il made a film based on this novel and received public attention by sweeping awards at various film festivals, including the Berlin Film Festival. Afterward, Yang Seok-il published 『Blood and Bones』, which depicts a violent and monstrous Korean-Japanese living in colonial Japan, using his father as a model.
Plot of Novel 『Blood and Bones』
In 1923, Kim Jun-pyeong left Jeju Island and moved to Osaka, Japan, during the Japanese Occupation. He was a terrible person. After moving to Osaka, he semi-coercively married Lee Young-hee and had a daughter Hanako and a son Masao. He committed domestic violence and left home when the Pacific War broke out. After returning from the war, he suddenly opened a fish cake factory. When the fish cake factory was flourishing, Takeshi, his son out of wedlock, came to visit him. Takeshi demands money from Kim Jun-pyeong, and the two quarrel. Taking some money from Lee Young-hee, Takeshi left the house but died in vain after being shot by yakuza in a cabaret in Hiroshima.
Later, Kim starts a separate life with Kiyoko, who lost her husband in the war. Kim becomes a loan shark. He became increasingly obsessed with money, and the fish cake factory eventually closed. Her daughter Hanako married a man she did not love only to escape her father. When Kiyoko became ill, Kim brought his new girlfriend Sadako home. He sexually abused Sadako as he did with other women.
Kim, who became tired of taking care of Kiyoko, suffocated Kiyoko to death with a damp newspaper. Witnessing the murder, his son Masao left home to work at a hog farm owned by Tae-su and Young-su. When Lee Young-hee fell from cancer, Masao visited Kim Jun-pyeong to discuss the cost of her mother's treatment. However, Kim Jun-pyeong had no intention of giving money. Kim Jun-pyeong suddenly appeared at the funeral of his daughter Hanako, beat his son-in-law and went on a rampage. During the disturbance, he suddenly collapsed from a stroke. Seeing Kim Jun-pyeong unable to control himself due to the stroke, Sadako ran away with her children with his money.
Kim Jun-pyeong did not give in and began furiously building his fortune. After the death of his wife Lee Young-hee, he went to her funeral and felt that he had to tie up the ends. Kim Jun-pyeong went to Masao and urged him to work for him, but only harsh words returned from his son. One day, Kim Jun-pyeong met Sadako's young son, Ryuichi, and dragged him to North Korea, basically kidnapping him. He donated all his money to North Korea and lived a poor life. Kim Jun-pyeong's stingy and unkind personality was inherited by Ryuichi. In the end, Kim Jun-pyeong dies lonely in an old thatched house in the neglect of his son.
Korean Japanese Director, Choi Yang-il
The person who made the film, Choi Yang-il(崔洋一), is Korean-Japanese. Born in 1949 in Saku, Nagano, to a Korean father and a Japanese mother. He lived alone with his mother until the age of four. He began living with his father after moving to Tokyo in the first grade in elementary school.
His father was a left-wing activist. Choi Yang-il attended Tokyo Korean Senior High School. He agonized over national consciousness and identity. His values formed during this period and were reflected throughout his works later. “When the tightly occupied Japanese talk about ‘Korean-Japanese,’ a legacy of the 36-year-long colonization of and aggression on the Korean Peninsula by Japan’s imperialists, this series of stories took away ordinary desires such as love or romance from me. Where in heaven's name is the ‘homeland in fantasy’?”
Choi Yang-il, a Korean-Japanese, began to think differently from what was defined as a collective identity in the form of a nation. He tried to recognize that each individual has different lives and existences, even in the lives of Korean Japanese people. In his late teens, Choi Yang-il formed his own identity and values in the flow of his time.
After making his debut as a director, Choi Yang-il disclosed his own values through films dealing with Korean-Japanese. His works describe the internal conflicts of the Korean Japanese community and the conflicts between generations.
Choi Yang-il thought that Korean-Japanese were the minority from the beginning and made films as a way to communicate with mainstream society. Jeong Eui-sin, a Korean-Japanese film director and playwright, described Choi Yang-il as follows; “Choi Yang-il has always said, ‘I don’t make minor films’ and ‘I play in the major league.’ Because Korean Japanese people are minorities, if you talk about them in minor films, they will become trivial subjects. It's not that he denies the minority. There is nothing wrong with being the minority, but he wanted to become a majority. In other words, he has a strong will to make a breakthrough in the Japanese film industry and Japanese society in the mainstream.”
A Film Depicting Korean-Japanese as Uncomfortable People
The main actors in Blood and Bones are Takeshi Kitano (Kim Jun-pyeong), Kyoka Suzuki (Lee Young-hee), Tomoko Tabata (Hanako/Daughter of Kim Jun-pyeong), Hirofumi Arai (Masao/Son of Kim Jun-pyeong, Narrator), and Mari Hamada (Sadako/Caregiver and second concubine of Kim Jun-pyeong), Yudaka Matsushige (Shingi/Kim Jun-pyeong's relative and son-in-law), Jo Odagiri (Takeshi/Son of Kim Jun-pyeong, illegitimate son), and Yuko Nakamura (Kiyoko/Kim Jun-pyeong's concubine). Choi Yang-il expressed the characters' psychological state through the narration of Masao, the main character's son, from a first-person perspective.
Takeshi Kitano participated in this film only as an actor. Although he has an ordinary look, he has great charms as a director and actor. He realistically portrayed Kim Jun-pyeong, a rough and heartless character. Kim Jun-pyeong is depicted as a monster among monsters, obsessed with money and patriarchal position while working recklessly for success. Kim Jun-pyeong, a mercenary man and terrible miser, wields violence against his wife and daughter without hesitation. Not only that, he makes the employees of the fish cake factory he runs the victim of his violence, verbal abuse, low wages, and exploitation.
The running time of two hours and twenty minutes is full of uncomfortable scenes. The film reveals the difficulties of the times, misery of a patriarchal era, and violence of the Korean-Japanese father through the brutalities of Kim Jun-pyeong.
Korean-Japanese people had to survive discrimination in the foreign country of Japan. This film deals with the life of Korean-Japanese who lived in misery during the difficult times following the war.
Bones of Korean-Japanese, Motherland
A sound is heard in the dark. This sound is a mixture of noisy chats in Korean and the percussive performance of samulnori. The sound was heard on the boat heading for Osaka from Jeju Island.
Jeong Eui-sin describes this scene: "Director Choi Yang-il thought we should show the scene of Koreans going to Japan. At that time, Osaka flourished so enormously that it was called Manchester of the East. It even had a larger population than Tokyo. Colonial people thought Japan was El Dorado. They thought they could make money and find women if they went to Japan. Everyone came to Japan dreaming of success. Kim Jun-pyeong was one of them.”
Choi Yang-il expresses Korean-Japanese through the film noir, which tends to be hard-boiled. Just as blood and bones are the core components of the human body, ‘blood’ and ‘bones’ in the film have symbolic meanings. In the film, blood has multiple meanings, symbolizing both family and violence at the same time. He wanted to use blood to illustrate the family's violence, cruelty, and resistance. The violence of Korean-Japanese, recreated in Choi Yang-il's film, was one of the means to survive in Japan outside their homeland. In other words, Kim Jun-pyeong's violence was also resistance to the empire.
In Choi Yang-il's films, bones mean the root, or in other words, the essence. The symbolic meaning of bones in his films may have been their hometown or homeland and something that does not deteriorate even after death. Through Kim Jun-pyeong’s character, Choi Yang-il attempted to explain that the hearts of the first-generation Korean-Japanese are oriented toward their homeland.
동북아역사재단이 창작한 '최양일 감독과 영화 『피와 뼈』 ' 저작물은 "공공누리" 출처표시-상업적이용금지-변경금지 조건에 따라 이용 할 수 있습니다.
