"Neighbors" Under One Roof: The Trope of the Family in Lü Ho-jo's Colonial Fiction.

This paper examines the Taiwanese writer Lü Ho-jo's (1914-1951) 1942 short story, "Neighbors" (Rinkyo), as a powerful critique of Japan's colonial tropes of familial intimacy and neighborly kinship. Beginning in the 1910s imperial Japan deployed the trope of the family in order to contain the otherness of the colonized within the multi-ethnic Japanese empire. As the new colonial ideology of imperialization was implemented in place of that of assimilation in the late 1930s, several literary works appeared that dealt with amiable relationships between the colonizer and the colonized. The publication of Lü's "Neighbors" in 1942 is particularly important in this context. After critically evaluating the extant literature on the piece, the paper analyzes the previously overlooked effect of the narrative emphasis on the contagious power of maternal love, and demonstrates how "Neighbors" exposes the deceit inherent in a colonial ideology that operates behind the alibi of spontaneous affection and familial affinity to avoid scrutiny. The paper also highlights the interrelated questions of the family and identity as it examines the import of the first-person narrator, "I," as a character devoid of any concrete familial ties or evident identity, and shows the powerful effect of his ambivalence as it culminates in the final and most disenchanting scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]