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영어

Shuriken (1983), the first stage play of New Zealand playwright Vincent O’Sullivan (1937- ), is based on the real-life mass shooting of Japanese prisoners that occurred during World War Two at New Zealand’s only prisoner-of-war camp. 48 Japanese and one New Zealander died in the shooting, and it remains the only incident of its kind to have occurred on New Zealand soil. O’Sullivan’s play, although mostly fictionalized in terms of its characters and the events that precede the shooting, constitutes an attempt to understand why this tragedy (or massacre, as some have deemed it) occurred. This paper, taking its lead from O’Sullivan’s stated conviction that there was nothing that could have alleviated the Japanese prisoners’ distress at being incarcerated by an enemy, nor anything that could have helped their New Zealand captors to appreciate fully the true nature of their despair, examines how the play ominously foreshadows the fatal shooting through a series of cultural misunderstandings on both sides. In doing so, it demonstrates how O’Sullivan’s play refrains from overtly blaming either the Japanese prisoners or the New Zealanders for the tragedy. In addition to arguing that the cultural clashes depicted in Shuriken have universal relevance, this paper also examines how the play employs elements of non-naturalism to illustrate the cultural gulf between the two sides.