Yang Kui (; 18 October 1905 – 12 March 1985) or Yō Ki was a prominent writer in

Japanese Taiwan The island of Taiwan, together with the Penghu Islands, became a dependency of Japan in 1895, when the Qing dynasty ceded Fujian-Taiwan Province in the Treaty of Shimonoseki after the Japanese victory in the First Sino-Japanese War. The sho ...

. Raised in Japanese-language schools, he went to the Japanese mainland, where he experienced both persecution and acceptance, especially by Japanese communists. Under these influences he became a proletarian novelist. After World War II, he was imprisoned by the

Kuomintang The Kuomintang (KMT), also referred to as the Guomindang (GMD), the Nationalist Party of China (NPC) or the Chinese Nationalist Party (CNP), is a major political party in the Republic of China, initially on the Chinese mainland and in Tai ...

government from 1949 to 1961. After being released from prison, he had to learn the Chinese language from his granddaughter , as Japanese had been the common language of Taiwan until the time of his imprisonment.

Life

Early life

Yang Kui was born the child of a tinsmith family. He entered Daimokukō Public School in 1915, having delayed doing so due to health problems. In 1915, Yang was a witness to the Jiaobanian Incident, which changed his view of the Japanese negatively. After graduation from Daimokukō Public School, Yang studied at Tainan No. 2 High School, where he read the literary works of

Natsume Sōseki , born , was a Japanese novelist. He is best known around the world for his novels ''Kokoro'', '' Botchan'', ''I Am a Cat'', '' Kusamakura'' and his unfinished work '' Light and Darkness''. He was also a scholar of British literature and writer ...

, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

, as well as works of Russian literature and Revolutionary French literature, including especially '' Les Miserables'' by

Victor Hugo Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...

, which "particularly touched" him due to its description of social conflict. In 1923, having read the book ''Taiwan hishi'' (A Record of Taiwanese Rebels) that went against his experience of the Jiaobanian Incident, Yang began to write to "correct history". He moved to Tokyo in 1924 to escape a proposed marriage to his parents' adoptive daughter and to study social thought. In Tokyo, Yang encountered "proletarian literature", reading leftist magazines and participating in leftist movements. In 1926, Yang founded a cultural studies group and met avant-garde playwright Sasaki Takamaru, and in 1927, he founded a "Study Meeting for Social Science". He was later arrested for being involved in an anti-Japanese lecture.

Return to Taiwan

Yang returned to Taiwan in 1927, joining the Union of Taiwanese Farmers. In 1928, he was elected to the committee of the

Taiwanese Cultural Association The Taiwanese Cultural Association (TCA; ) was an important organization during the Japanese rule of Taiwan. It was founded by Chiang Wei-shui on 17 October 1921, in Daitōtei, a district in modern-day Taipei. History After World War I, an epid ...

, through which in 1929 he met his mentor Lai He. Both organizations were later disbanded in March 1931 by the colonial government in their suppression of Taiwanese communists. With radicalism having been suppressed, Yang began again to write heavily.

Writing

Yang Kui's debut in Japanese literary circles was through his work ''Jiyū rōdōsha no seikatsu danmen'' (A Slice of the Life of Free Laborers), which was published in 1927 in the official magazine of the Journalists Association of Tokyo, ''Gōgai''. In 1932, Yang published his work ''The Newspaper Boy'' in ''Taiwan xinminbao'' (Taiwan New People's News). It was published in Chinese as ''Songbaofu''. Yang published under the name Yang Kui instead of his original name Yang Gui, having been convinced to do so by Lai He. In 1934, ''The Newspaper Boy'' won second prize in the Tokyo leftist magazine '' Bungaku hyōron''. Yang was influenced by Russian

realist literature Literary realism is a literary genre, part of the broader realism in arts, that attempts to represent subject-matter truthfully, avoiding speculative fiction and supernatural elements. It originated with the realist art movement that began with ...

, Karl Marx's

Capital Capital may refer to: Common uses * Capital city, a municipality of primary status ** List of national capital cities * Capital letter, an upper-case letter Economics and social sciences * Capital (economics), the durable produced goods used f ...

, and Japanese proletarian movements, using them to influence his socialist ideas. He had also been influenced by anarchism, having read

Mikhail Bakunin Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (; 1814–1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, socialist and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major founder of the revolutionary ...

and

Peter Kropotkin Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin (; russian: link=no, Пётр Алексе́евич Кропо́ткин ; 9 December 1842 – 8 February 1921) was a Russian anarchist, socialist, revolutionary, historian, scientist, philosopher, and activis ...

after the death of

Ōsugi Sakae was a radical Japanese anarchist. He published numerous anarchist periodicals, helped translate western anarchist essays into Japanese for the first time, and created Japan's first Esperanto school in 1906. He, Itō Noe, and his nephew were mu ...

. Yang identified as a "humanitarian socialist", and associated with Japanese socialists and unionists. He defended realism, and believed that literature "had to come from the indigenous soil" instead of being about "the war effort or personal aestheticism".

References

Citations

Bibliography

External links

"The Indomitable Rose-- The Yang Kui Literary Memorial Hall ,"
Taiwan Culture Portal, 15 May 2007 *
壓不扁的玫瑰
(The Indomitable Rose) by Yang K'uei *
楊逵文學的流變佮伊的意義
(The Significance of Fluctuating Yang Kui's Literature). * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Yang Kui 1905 births 1985 deaths Taiwanese male novelists Taiwanese prisoners and detainees Writers from Tainan 20th-century novelists 20th-century male writers