Triangle Republics: Cross-Border Literary Transits Between the Cold War Koreas and Japan

by I Jonathan Kief

Overview

In Korea, the end of the Second World War in 1945 brought both liberation from Japanese colonial rule and the division of the nation by the triumphant Allies. The peninsula was not only decoupled from its former colonial metropole but also carved up into two halves that were subsequently incorporated into the rival blocs of the emerging Cold War order. Although the two Koreas are typically seen as isolated from each other, texts continued to circulate between them—with the assistance of Korean diasporic and other colleagues in Japan—throughout the ensuing decades.

I Jonathan Kief follows the triangular flow of texts linking North Korea, South Korea, and Japan from 1945 until the 1980s, revealing overlooked paths of interaction and exchange. He highlights the creative ways in which poets, playwrights, novelists, critics, and academics crossed boundaries of language, ideology, genre, and geography to challenge the stability of the Cold War. By showing how writers in North and South Korea engaged in dialogue via the mediation of a multiethnic set of colleagues in Japan, Triangle Republics offers a new perspective on this era, emphasizing its vibrant, dynamic, and interconnected nature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231219853
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

I Jonathan Kief is an assistant professor of Korean studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Reverberations: South Korean Literature Between 1950s–1960s North Korea and Japan
2. Mother(s) of the South: Figures of Revolution and Fracture Between the 1960s–1970s Koreas and Japan
3. Critical Connections and Critical Limits in 1950s South Korea: The Human and Nonhuman Across the Cold War and East Sea Divides
4. Tragic Returns: Writing Border-Crossing Pasts in 1960s–1980s South Korea
Epilogue. The Cold War in Korea: Suspended Animation
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Triangle Republics provides a meticulously researched exploration of the complex flow of texts, information, conversations, and political discourse across and within the contested borders of the two postcolonial Koreas and Japan. A must-read for anyone seeking to complicate the received literary histories of the Cold War.

Christina Yi

I Jonathan Kief’s painstaking research on print culture in Korean and Japanese demonstrates the importance of moving past the determining power of national and linguistic boundaries and points to Japan and its diasporic writers as important nodes in the formation of the literary fields on the Korean peninsula.

Dafna Zur

Kief’s book brilliantly retrieves and analyzes subterranean forces that challenged the official narratives of the Cold War order in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan and the dominant politics of these bounded yet porous nation-states. Triangle Republics is a major revisionist work of literary scholarship and intellectual history that transforms the study of the Korean peninsula, postwar Japan, and the Cold War era.

Jin-kyung Lee

Challenging the notion of closed borders, Triangle Republics offers a unique approach to understanding transnational literature, writers, and literary cultures in North Korea, South Korea, and Japan.

Immanuel Kim