3. Caricature of a Bohemian 1) "Cafe France"

In some cases, there are Korean poems that are almost identical to Jeong Ji-yong's Japanese poems. "Cafe France," cited at the beginning, was published in Japanese, but the Korean version includes an opening section not found in the Japanese original. What follows is my translation of the Korean version into Japanese. In Korean, it is pronounced "Kapepeuranseu," but the 'ka', 'pe', and 'peu' are pronounced with an accompanying puff of air, lacking the soft, airy quality of the Japanese "kaffue." It is a sound that gives a harder, more modern, and sophisticated impression. The warm, hazy feeling of Taisho Romanticism is not felt in the Hangul spelling "Kapepeuranseu." Therefore, I chose to use the katakana "Cafe France" instead of "Kaffue France." Here, I would like to examine the background of this poem in detail.

Under the transplanted palm tree
The streetlamp is crooked.
Let's go to Cafe France

There's a guy wearing a rubashka
And a guy with a bohemian tie
A gaunt man leads the way

On a night when the drizzle falls like a snake's eyes
The lights flicker on the pavement.
Let's go to Cafe France

This guy's head is a painted apple
That guy's heart is a worm-eaten rose
A man like a wet swallow flutters away

*

"Oh, Mr. Parrot! Good evening!"

"Good evening!"(Hey, how are you?)

Are you dozing off again tonight, Ms. Tulip,
Behind the chintz curtains?

I am not a viscount's son or anything.
My hands are strangely white and sad

I have no country and no home
My cheek touching the marble table is sad

Oh, puppy of a foreign breed
Lick my feet
Lick my feet

("Cafe France," Hakucho, Issue 1, June 1926, my translation)

This cafe is not a bright coffee shop, but a somewhat decadent Western-style bar with waitresses. Since palm, tulip, chintz, and marble are vocabulary from the Namban literature favored by Hakushu and Mokutaro Kinoshita, it seems necessary to consider this poem in relation to the "Pan no Kai" (Bread Club) art movement that Hakushu and others developed in cafes at the end of the Meiji era.

"In the room of love, I was always painting / My beloved, you were my model / When we were twenty, loving each other / (...) / While holding my empty stomach / Dreaming of the arrival of a rainbow / With my friends, in the corner of a cafe / Reading the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine." These are the lyrics Akihiro Miwa sings in Japanese for the chanson "La Bohème," and they clearly express the most common image of a bohemian held by modern people: that of a poor young artist. This type of artistic bohemian image was born in Paris at the beginning of the 19th century and became popularized and spread around the world at the end of the 19th century. The Pan no Kai art movement in Japan was an imitation of this, and Jeong Ji-yong belongs to the generation that began their literary training while admiring the artists of the Pan no Kai. The reason this poem is titled "Cafe France" is that the young people who appear in it are descendants of the 19th-century Parisian bohemians.

<Cafe>

Under the transplanted palm tree
The streetlamp is crooked.
Let's go to Cafe France

What comes to mind from these lines is "La Bohème," the opera Puccini based on the novel "Scenes of Bohemian Life" by French writer Henri Murger (1822–1861). It was Murger's novel that made the image of the bohemian—a young, poor artist—definitive and popular. This novel was serialized in newspapers from 1845 to 1849 and became a huge success when it was adapted into a play in 1849, but it was Puccini's opera, performed in Turin in 1896, that triggered the spread of the meaning of bohemian as described above. (I note in particular that my information regarding cafe culture relies primarily on Eiko Imahashi's "Longing for a Foreign City: The Japanese in Paris" (Kashiwa Shobo, 1993)).
In other words, the archetype of the young artists gathering in cafes is to be found in 19th-century Paris, the setting of "La Bohème." In the opera "La Bohème," a young, poor poet, painter, musician, and philosopher live in the same house. One day, Schaunard, who earned money by playing music for a dying parrot in a rich man's house, proposes to his friends that they go to Cafe Momus in the Latin Quarter while sharing the money with them. "Look, the cafe is right nearby / Let's go to Momus! (Vedi il caffè vicin / Andiam là da Momus!)," "To Momus! / Let's go! (Là da Momus! Andiam!)." (Puccini, "Bohème," Ongaku no Tomo Sha, 1987). I do not know when this opera was first performed in Japan, but at least around 1920, Kokko Soma saw a performance by a Russian opera troupe at the Tokyo Imperial Theatre (Kokko Soma, "Moku-i," Josei Jidaisha, 1939). It is not certain whether Jeong Ji-yong was conscious of "La Bohème" itself. However, such images of cafes and bohemians had been spreading among young artists in Japan and Korea since the end of the Meiji era.
Around the time the opera "La Bohème" was released, that is, at the end of the 19th century, bohemian life had become popularized as an object for the bourgeoisie to enjoy a pseudo-experience in cafes and cabarets. And the foreigners living in Paris at that time—artists who had come from England, America, and Japan, many of whom were painters—brought that popular bohemian lifestyle back to their own countries. In Japan, Toru Iwamura (1870–1917), a researcher of Western art history who returned to Japan in 1893, wrote "Art Students in Paris" (1903), in which he depicted Parisian cafes and lamented that there was no place in Japan for artists to gather and talk. This essay had a profound influence on the budding artists of the time, and furthermore, painters and writers who had breathed the air of Europe, such as Seiki Kuroda, Ogai Mori, Bin Ueda, Daigaku Horiguchi, Kotaro Takamura (Takamura was a student of Iwamura and later participated in the Pan no Kai), Kafu Nagai, and Toson Shimazaki, conveyed the local life and trends of artists, stirring the longing of young people, which became the catalyst for the birth of cafes in Japan as bases for art movements.
By the way, let's examine the question of where Cafe France (the cafe that served as the model) is located. As seen in "A Day in the Life of Kubo the Novelist" by Park Tae-won (novelist, 1909–1986), tea rooms and cafes in Myeong-dong and Jongno became important settings for novels in Korea in the 1930s. However, in the early 1920s, there were almost no tea rooms or cafes in Gyeongseong. It was from the late 1920s that new entertainment facilities imported from Japan, such as tea rooms, bars, and cafes, began to appear in Gyeongseong. (Kim Byung-ik, "History of the Korean Literary World," Ilchisa, 1973, p. 154). Let's listen to the testimony of Kim Dong-in (novelist, 1900–1951): "The Baekjo group had many similarities to bohemians. (...) If cafes like the ones today had been popular back then, they would naturally have become regulars. They frequented gisaeng houses." ("Literary Reminiscences," "Complete Collection of Kim Dong-in's Criticism," Samyeongsa, 1984, p. 393). As a literary work in which a cafe appears in Gyeongseong in the late 1920s, there is "Love and Sin" by Yeom Sang-seop (novelist, 1897–1963) (serialized in the Dong-A Ilbo from August 1927 to May of the following year), but this cafe was located at the foot of Namsan, which was the Japanese residential area at the time, and the regular customers were almost all Japanese. Since the Korean "Cafe France" was published in the June 1926 issue of "Hakucho," and considering that cafes had not yet spread in Gyeongseong at the time the poem was written, that Jeong Ji-yong was studying in Kyoto, and that the poetic speaker expresses a deep sense of alienation by saying, "I have no country and no home," it is natural to think that the setting of this poem is a cafe in Japan. Cafe Printemps and Maison Konosu, which were built in Tokyo at the end of the Meiji era, were elegant Western-style restaurants, but the cafes that became popular in the early Showa era were Western-style bars where waitresses provided service, and sometimes those waitresses also worked as prostitutes. And as in Yeom Sang-seop's novel "Before the March First Independence Movement," the heavily made-up waitresses were the women students could most easily approach, and they often became the objects of their romantic interests.

There's a guy wearing a rubashka
And a guy with a bohemian tie
A gaunt man leads the way

<Rubashka>

Tsune Nakamura's portrait of the blind Russian youth Eroshenko (Vasilii Eroshenko, 1889–1952, who stayed in Japan from 1914) wearing a rubashka is well known, but for Eroshenko, the rubashka was just everyday clothing. There is also a photograph of Hakushu Kitahara in a rubashka. This costume itself did not have any ideological meaning.
However, in the early Showa era, the rubashka began to take on the nuance of a symbol of leftist ideology. The actors of the Tsukiji Little Theater, which was a leftist theater troupe, wore Russian student caps, rubashkas, and long boots, and the audience dressed similarly. (Fuchi Asami, "A Side History of the Showa Literary World," Tokyo: Kodansha, 1996, p. 75). Shigeharu Nakano and Park Pal-yang, who were anarchists, and Kim Ki-jin (critic, novelist, poet, 1903–1985), a standard-bearer of proletarian literature, also wore rubashkas. There is no doubt that Yeom Sang-seop was referring to the rubashka when he described people in the budding period of proletarian literature as wearing "clothes that had no buttons and were pulled on over the head (...) and tied tightly with a belt made of black thread with tassels at the ends" ("Complete Collection of Yeom Sang-seop," Vol. 12, Minumsa, 1987, p. 238). In "Cafe France," it can be interpreted that the rubashka-wearing man represents a devotion to leftist ideology. However, the rubashka man who appears in this poem corresponds to the later "this guy's head is a painted apple," and he is merely dressing up in red ideology as a fashion statement. At one time, Marxism was also a trendy design. The fourth verse of "Tokyo March," written by Yaso Saijo and a hit in 1929, was originally "Marx boy with long hair / Holding a red love again today." "Yaso wanted to laugh at those 'red radishes' who were white on the inside but only red on the surface." (Ren Saito, "Dancing to Jazz and Staying Up Late with Liqueur," Iwanami Shoten, 2004, p. 92).

<Bohemian necktie>

A Bohemian necktie is a piece of cloth about 15 centimeters wide and 120 centimeters long, tied in a bow in front of the chest. It is known for being a favorite of Baudelaire, and in Japan, it was worn by painters who had returned from Paris. Nagai Kafu, who returned to Japan from France at the end of the Meiji era, also attracted attention by strutting through Ginza wearing a Bohemian necktie, and it seems that Hakushu and Sakutaro Hagiwara were also fond of it. Korean youths studying in Tokyo also brought it back to Keijo. "Students returning from Tokyo would walk around energetically wearing Bohemian neckties and thin trousers, with sailor pipes in their mouths" (Hong Hyo-min, 'A Side History of the Korean Literary World'). As for Liang Zhu-dong, it is said that he walked the streets of Tokyo and Keijo in a bizarre appearance, wearing a rubashka with a Bohemian necktie and shoes he had designed himself (Liang Zhu-dong, 'Venus Era'). It can be said that the Bohemian necktie is a symbol of art lovers.
The second and fourth stanzas correspond to each other. That is, the head of the guy wearing the rubashka is a "painted apple," and the heart of the man with the Bohemian necktie is a worm-eaten rose. The metaphor of a "painted apple," as mentioned above, refers to pseudo-socialists who are all talk and no action. Let us recall that before the NAPF (All-Japan Federation of Proletarian Arts) and the KAPF (Korean Artista Proletaria Federatio) were devastated by suppression, pretending to lean left was a kind of trend. Although this is a Japanese example, Mitsuharu Kaneko wrote, "Literature was in the era of the flashy debut of the proletariat, and journalism was swept away by left-wing writers. (...) In the world of poets, anarchists were in their heyday. (...) We no longer had any right to speak, and no matter what kind of work we wrote, it was not accepted from the start" (Mitsuharu Kaneko, 'Poet', in 'Writer's Autobiography 13: Mitsuharu Kaneko', Nihon Tosho Center, 1994, pp. 138-139). Kaneko was advised by a friend to convert to an anarchist or a Bolshevik if he wanted to return to the literary world. Like these Marx-boys who were only into fashion, the worm-eaten rose is the figure of a pseudo-artist who looks flashy at first glance but is rotting on the inside.
Regarding this poem, its connection to Blake's 'The Sick Rose' has already been pointed out by Korean researchers. Blake's poem was quoted in Haruo Sato's 'The Melancholy of the Countryside' (1919) as the phrase "O Rose, thou art sick!" and, having made a strong impression, it was generally familiar.

A night when the drizzle falls like a snake's eye
The lights flicker on the pavement.
Let's go to Cafe France

The lights reflected on the wet pavement flicker slickly, giving an unstable feeling. In Korean, the snake's eye is often used to express thinness, but here it plays a role in further stirring up the anxiety of a rainy night.

This guy's head is a painted apple
That guy's heart is a worm-eaten rose
A man like a wet swallow jumps and goes

A man as light and frivolous as a swallow runs through the rain in a miserable state, like a bird whose wings are wet and cannot fly.

This is the first half, and the scene changes with the symbol *, and the second half consists of the interior of the cafe and the speaker's monologue.

"Oh, Mr. Parrot! Good evening!"

"Good evening!"(Hey, how are you?)

The use of Gothic script is a visual representation of the parrot's voice, which is different from a human's. In the original Korean text, the Chinese characters (鸚鵡) are written alongside the word 'parrot' written in Hangul. (In the Japanese version 'Kaffue Furansu', it is written as 'Mr. Parrot [Parotto]', and foreign words like cafe, curtain, and table, which are usually written in katakana, are deliberately written in hiragana to give off an 'exotic mood' in the style of Nanban literature). When I encounter such Nanban literature vocabulary in a Korean work, I feel a strange sense of nostalgia, but for modern Koreans, it seems to be a mysterious word of unknown origin.

Is Miss Tulip sleeping again tonight
in the shade of the chintz curtains?

<Tulip>

'Ukon' (turmeric) is turmeric in English and is known as a spice for curry and the like. It arrived in Japan as a spice in the early Heian period, so it is literally 'Ukon-ko' (turmeric incense). Hakushu also often used the word 'Ukon' to describe color, and in the Tang poem 'Gongzi Xing' (Liu Yanzhi), a young woman named Ukon-ko appears. "A beautiful woman in a brothel, Ukon-ko." It is likely that a beautiful prostitute is perfuming her clothes with the scent of turmeric (Yukio Yoshikawa, Tatsuji Miyoshi, 'New Tang Poetry Selection', Iwanami Shinsho, 1952, pp. 169-174). In other words, Ukon-ko is linked to the image of a bewitching beauty.
On the other hand, Ukon-ko also means tulip. In Hakushu's usage, some works have the reading 'ukon-ko' for the Chinese characters for Ukon-ko, while others use 'tulip'. In 'Cafe France', it is of course a tulip, but the poet loved the form of the Chinese characters with many strokes more than just writing 'tulip' in Hangul. The combination of the character 'U' (melancholy), which is gorgeous and noble gold, and 'Ko' (fragrance) is a structure that can be said to be the same as 'Les Fleurs du Mal' (The Flowers of Evil) and 'Spleen et Ideal' (Spleen and Ideal) by Baudelaire, the original Bohemian (?) who loved exotic scents (Parfum Exotic).
Thinking about it this way, isn't it natural to see 'Miss Tulip' in 'Cafe France' as representing a cafe waitress rather than an actual flower? If we interpret it as a young and lovely waitress, like a spring flower, who is not yet used to the life of a late-night cafe and is dozing off in the shade of the curtains, the decadent atmosphere of the cafe will be conveyed even amidst the glamour. Kim Hwa-san (critic and poet, 1905-?), a member of Jiyong's 'Yoran' (Cradle) era, parodied 'Cafe France' in 'Devil's Way -- From the Diary of a Dadaist' (1927), which includes the passage: "Transplanted palm tree. Distorted street lamp. 'Oh! Give me wine! Miss Tulip -- Wine. Wine. Wine. Wine. Wine." This shows that Kim Hwa-san also saw the tulip as a waitress.

<Chintz>

'Sarasa' (chintz) is originally a Portuguese word, and 'Sarasa' is a kanji assigned by Japan. Hakushu used 'Sarasa' in the first edition of his debut poetry collection 'Jashumon', which is a landmark event in the history of book design. Hakushu loved chintz so much that he named a series of short poetry collections 'Indian Chintz'. Palm trees also appear many times in 'Jashumon', and these are all words that evoke an exotic and tropical mood.

I am not the son of a viscount or anything
My hands are strangely white and sad

I have no country and no home
My cheeks touching the marble table are sad

<White hands>

Jiyong was not financially well-off during his Doshisha days. This passage is likely a scene where the speaker, who is not the son of a rich man, ruminates on his contradictory behavior of drinking alcohol at a cafe. The white hands here signify the intellectual class that does not perform labor. In Korean, 'baeksu' (white hand) usually means an unemployed person, but the white hands (hin-son) in this poem have nothing to do with that. When one hears the phrase 'The Hunter of White Hands' (Rofu Miki), one usually associates it with European or Russian aristocrats who hunt as a hobby. When Sakutaro Hagiwara started a magazine called 'Tabletop Fountain' (1915), he declared, "We are aristocrats. We are luxurious, our hands are white and smooth, and we do not know labor. That is our pride." Also, in Rilke's 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge', there is a scene where Malte, a young poet from a Danish aristocratic family, looks at his own clean hands (though he doesn't call them white hands) at the National Library in Paris and thinks that although he is poor and his clothes and shoes are worn out, he can prove that he is a child of a good family because he has clean hands. "Because these are still hands of good birth, hands that I wash four or five times a day." Where did these images related to hands begin?
Let's look at another example. "The worker with white hands is truly sad. / Reading a banned book, / with tears in his eyes." This is a tanka poem published in 1911 by Aika Toki, a poet who was a close friend of Takuboku Ishikawa. ('Sosaku', June 1911 issue. Quoted from 'Japanese Modern Literature Series 55: Modern Tanka Collection', Kadokawa Shoten, 1973, p. 170). The "banned book" is thought to be the work of Kropotkin or Shusui Kotoku. Aika was the person who lent Takuboku an English translation of Kropotkin to read, but here, "worker with white hands" refers to people like Aika himself, who was working at a newspaper company at the time, and Takuboku, who were intellectuals but not wealthy and did hard labor. Aika also wrote the following poem titled "Hand" in 'Gaijo Fuhei' (Street Discontent), published in March 1915: "I always truly shed a scoop of tears / over my workers, - / their circumstances, their fate, / their knowledge, / their thoughts, their feelings. / Yes, over their entire lives. // But, I also always hesitate, / 'Hold out your hand, show me that hand.' / Thus I shout to myself. // Hold out your hand, show me that hand, - / Indeed, shouting this, can I / without the slightest hesitation, without the slightest shame, / hold out these two hands of mine before my own face? / Ah, they are too white, too supple, / just the softness of holding a pen. (...)" (Quoted from the supplementary notes on p. 453 of the aforementioned book).
It seems that "white hands" have a much older history. Perhaps this image of white hands originates from Turgenev (1818-83). There is a work called "The Worker and the Man with White Hands," which was introduced as a short story in the November 14, 1923 issue of the 'Dong-A Ilbo' in a translation by Kim Dong-jin, in Turgenev's prose poems. The first half of this poem, written in 1878, is a scene where a worker and a man with white hands are talking. To the worker's question of why he came, the "man with white hands" says that he is a comrade of the workers and that he was put in prison for fighting for them. The second half is a scene two years later where two workers are talking. They are gossiping as if it were someone else's business that the "man with white hands" was hanged for resisting the authorities for the sake of workers and farmers. "It wouldn't matter if there were no people who play and eat."
Of course, it was easy for the intellectual youths of the time to access Turgenev's works in Japanese or English. The inaugural issue of 'Baekjo' (January 1922) and the second issue (May of the same year) carried Turgenev's prose poems in a translation by Na San (Na Do-hyang, novelist, 1902-26), and the May 1921 issue of 'Changjo' also carried prose poems translated by An So (Kim Ok, poet and critic, 1893-?). Chae Man-sik (novelist, 1902-50), who was the same age as Jiyong, also loved reading Turgenev around 1920. The 'Chosun Ilbo' featured a special feature on the 50th anniversary of Turgenev's death from August 22 to 26, 1933, and as Hong Hyo-min (critic and novelist, 1904-76) wrote, "When I first became a literary youth, I usually read Turgenev's works," all the literary youths of the 1920s read Turgenev. Regarding the prose poems, An So wrote, "The reason I first heard the name Turgenev and knew his works 'On the Eve' and 'Prose Poems' was entirely thanks to Chunwon-sensei (Yi Kwang-su, translator's note)" ("Deep Impression of 'On the Eve'", 'Chosun Ilbo', August 22, 1933), and Yi Chong-myong wrote, "I first knew Turgenev around 1925. I read the prose poem collection translated by Shungetsu Ikuta, and I surrendered to this literary master at once." The Turgenev 'Prose Poems' translated by Shungetsu Ikuta was published by Shinchosha in 1917. People who loved reading Turgenev in their youth held a memorial service for the 50th anniversary of Turgenev's death at "Nakrang Parlor" on August 22, 1933, and Yi Ha-yun (poet and English scholar, 1906-74) was the moderator, and Jiyong also attended this ('Chosun Ilbo', August 24, 1933 article "Turgenev 50th Anniversary Memorial Festival"), and since the phrase "On the Eve" appears in the poem "Covered Wagon" that Jiyong wrote in Kyoto in 1925, it can be asserted that Jiyong was also one of the youths interested in Turgenev. Aika Toki, mentioned earlier, was also a lover of Turgenev.
According to Kropotkin, who passionately respected Turgenev, Turgenev's novels feature the main archetypes of intellectuals who left their mark on each era of Russia. (Translated by Sei Ito, Kropotkin, 'Lectures on Russian Literature, Vol. 1', Kaizosha, 1938, p. 166). The speculation that Turgenev created and popularized the image of white hands is fully valid. And the sadness of the "white hands" originated from the anguish of the Russian aristocratic intelligentsia of the 1870s who shouted "V Narod" (to the people), that is, intellectuals who passionately loved and were frustrated by the abstract concept of "Narod" (the people = farmers), and the image of "white hands" as their symbol was already known among young Korean intellectuals at least by the early 1920s.

<Son of a viscount>

We must pay attention to the fact that it says "son of a viscount" here, not "viscount." In this regard, Yu Jong-ho (critic, 1935-) points out the existence of Koreans who were granted peerage at the time for their contribution to the "Korea-Japan Annexation." (Yu Jong-ho, 'What is Poetry', Minumsa, 1995, p. 26). Among the children of those who received peerage and amnesty money from the Japanese Emperor, some walked proudly, while others were ashamed and spent their days drinking. What the speaker envies is not those who became aristocrats through treasonous acts, but their sons, that is, people who became aristocrats without directly dirtying their hands, such as Yi Hae-chun in Yeom Sang-seop's 'Love and Sin'.

"Then why did you accept the title?"
"I didn't accept it. I received it as the price for my ancestors' sins (...)."
("Love and Sin", Collected Works of Yeom Sang-seop Vol. 2, Minumsa, 1987)

Here, we cannot help but recall the existence of the "second generation" rich boys of the Shirakaba school. The members of the Shirakaba school also participated in the Pan no Kai, and considering that Takeo Arishima and Saneatsu Mushanokoji lectured at the Doshisha University English Department, and that Jiyong likely heard Saneatsu's lectures directly, it is not unnatural to think that Jiyong was strongly conscious of the Shirakaba school. Furthermore, the English and American poetry that Jiyong translated were by Blake and Whitman, and Yanagi is known as a pioneering researcher of Blake, while Arishima is known as an introducer of Whitman. Although Yanagi and Arishima did not have titles, they came from prestigious families, and Saneatsu Mushanokoji, a representative figure of the Shirakaba school, was literally the "son of a viscount." Not all people in the Shirakaba school belonged to the aristocracy in a strict sense, and not all of their families were wealthy. However, in any case, they were the children of people in high social positions, people born with silver spoons in their mouths who attended Gakushuin, a school for the nobility—in other words, people who never had to dirty their own hands.
However, there were not a few people who felt antipathy toward the Shirakaba school. From the eyes of those who did not belong to the upper class, the glamorous activities of the Shirakaba boys looked as if they were saying that one had no right to do art unless one was the child of a rich person.

As an aside, I cannot help but feel some resentment toward the Shirakaba school at the time of its rise. While they preached humanity and philanthropy with their mouths, their arrogant attitude fully showed their contempt for the common people.
"Unless you are a wealthy aristocrat, you cannot create good art!"—they made some of the literary youth of that time believe this.
(Ki Kimura, "Meiji/Taisho Literature and Economic Consciousness", Bungei Tozai Nanboku, Heibonsha, 1997, p. 205)

In Jiyong's essay "Upstream of the Kamo River," there is a scene where he is taking a walk with a female friend who is also a Korean international student, and they encounter a site where Korean laborers are working on the cable car construction for Mount Hiei. Although he was not from the working class, Jiyong was also a poor young man. Yet, he wears a student uniform with "five gold buttons" ("Seasickness"), goes for walks with a girlfriend even though he has a wife in his hometown, and is studying English literature in Japan. The heavy responsibility that the family system based on traditional Confucian thought places on the eldest son—Jiyong was already married at the age of eleven—and the skepticism toward himself for turning his back on his hometown where this awaits him and immersing himself in literary studies just like the "son of a viscount" is the core of this latter part.
In short, the "son of a viscount" here can be said to be a symbol of the privileged class who can be obsessed with art without having to work with their own hands, rather than referring to one specific aristocratic class. For example, a friend like Hong Sa-yong, who was a senior from his days at Hwimun Higher Common School and was wealthy (though he later fell into ruin), could buy any book he wanted and publish a splendid magazine like "White Tide" to engage in glamorous activities, was a "son of a viscount" to Jiyong, who was barely able to attend school as a scholarship student.

Oh, puppy of a foreign breed
Lick my feet
Lick my feet

<Puppy of a foreign breed>

This puppy must naturally be a high-class dog of a foreign breed that fits the atmosphere of a cafe, but why is it specifically called a "foreign breed" instead of just saying foreign or Western breed? It is to emphasize not just that it came from "outside," but that it came from a "different" country, a country that is essentially alien in some way. In other words, the puppy of a foreign breed projects the lonely figure of himself in a foreign country. Although it is an animal that does not understand his language, he feels a sense of closeness as if they are living together in a foreign land, so he asks the puppy to "lick my feet," to comfort his sadness and loneliness. Just as the speaker in Blake's poem "Spring" says to the lamb, "lick my neck," the speaker of "Cafe France" and the puppy are in an equal relationship. "Little Lamb, /Here I am;/Come and lick/My white neck;/Let me pull/Your soft wool;/Let me kiss/Your soft face:". In both "Spring" and "Cafe France," a certain sexual image can be read into the relationship between the speaker and the animal. Also, Ryu Jong-ho points out the connection with Turgenev's prose poem "The Dog." In this poem, "I" and the "dog" are staring at each other in silence, and they feel that they share the same feelings. "In the two eyes of the animal and the human, the same life seeks each other and timidly draws near." (Turgenev, "The Dog", ending part)