In the Woods of Memory

by Shun Medoruma

  Loneliness suddenly creeps upon you. You light an incense stick and place it upright in the burner before the altar. You face the mortuary tablet, fold your hands, and bow deeply.

  You raise your head and look at the mortuary tablet. The apparition appears again! Drawing back in terror, you lose your footing and fall backward onto the table. You tumble off the mahogany tabletop and stagger toward the veranda. As you try to crawl away, your right hand goes numb. Unable to support yourself, you fall forward and hit your chin. You want to call out for help, but you can’t speak. Saliva dribbles from the corners of your mouth, like the apparition of Seiji you just saw. A foul odor makes you notice that you’ve wet your pants. After you lift yourself up with your left hand and lower yourself onto the paralyzed right side of your body, you hear a woman shrieking. Is it Hatsu? The screams come closer and closer. Over the hedge outside the window, you see a young woman with long disheveled hair running past. The name of this woman, screaming as if fleeing from some unspeakable horror, is on the tip of your tongue. But you just can’t remember it.

  Nae! Nae!

  The name you try to call gets caught in your throat. The shrill buzzing of the cicadas echoes in your head, and an intense pain cuts into your back. You try to turn around but fall down again. Pummeled by the stones that fly at you one after another, you scream. But both your screams and groans are drowned out by the intense droning of the swarm of cicadas.

  HISAKO [2005]

  She could hear footsteps running toward her in the dark. Then the woman’s feet and calves appeared, dashing across the village road covered with white sand. Blood dripped down, forming a speckled pattern on the woman’s sand-covered feet. Her disheveled black hair repelled the sunlight, and her exposed breasts swayed, while sweat and tears splashed onto the road from her transparent skin, through which the veins were visible. The woman’s screams cut through the sounds of the crashing waves and buzzing cicadas, and pierced the hearts of all who heard them. As the woman ran past, a group of spectators stared at her glazed eyes and gaping mouth. Even after she’d disappeared into the woods, her final scream lingered in their ears as their eyes filled with tears.

  —Are you okay?

  Hisako awoke to someone shaking her, the tears flowing from her eyes. The pillow under her head was wet.

  —You have the same dream again?

  Her husband’s voice was husky but soft and gentle. Consoled by his voice, she reached up and touched the hand resting on her shoulder. Just as when they were young, he entwined his fingers in hers and caressed her palm with his thumb. Behind the white lace curtains drawn across the window, the day was dawning.

  —It’s still early, so you can sleep in late.

  In the dim light, the outline of her husband’s shadow was indistinct, and she knew he’d fade away soon. Refusing to let go, she tightly squeezed his hand. The sensation passed away like gentle water flowing through her fingers. Fresh tears fell from her eyes before the previous ones had even dried. Lying on her back with her eyes closed, Hisako desperately tried to hold on to his fading presence. But her efforts were in vain.

  —Come again, she whispered.

  Once the loneliness had settled in her heart, she took a deep breath and climbed out of bed. She washed her face, changed her clothes, and glanced over at the clock. It was only six twenty. Breakfast started at seven. She wasn’t hungry, but considering the day’s schedule, she knew she should at least have something light.

  She couldn’t recall how many decades had passed since her last trip alone. Kōsuke, her late husband, had loved to travel, so for the ten or so years after his retirement, they had gone on trips together twice a year. Thanks to him, she was used to traveling, but it was completely different now, on her own. The stress of trying not to forget the keys when leaving the house made her realize how much she’d depended on him.

  At the restaurant on the first floor, she had a simple breakfast of rice porridge, pickled plums, and miso soup. When she’d finished eating, she returned to her room and packed her bag. Then she sat in the chair in front of the veranda and looked out the glass door. Puffy white clouds appeared in the deep blue sky. Looked like it was going to be a hot day. Through the aluminum railings, she could see fishing boats and ferries moving in and out of the harbor. Her room was on the eighth floor of a hotel near Naha Airport. She wondered if the white ferry loaded with freight was heading to the Kerama Islands.

  If Kōsuke were here, she could’ve asked him. Her eyes moved to the bed, and she was again reminded that the comforting voice she’d heard upon waking from the dream was also just a dream. Her nightmares about the woman had started only three months ago, more than a year after Kōsuke’s death. He couldn’t possibly have ever consoled her about them. The realization deeply saddened her. She had another two hours until checkout, but she picked up her bag and left the room.

  It was a short walk to the bus stop from the hotel. Within five minutes, a bus bound for northern Okinawa arrived. Hisako stared in disbelief as four chattering high school girls cut in front of her and climbed the steps. Then she boarded the bus behind them. The facial features of the passengers and the general atmosphere made her keenly aware that she was now in Okinawa. But making the distinction pricked her conscience.

  After sitting in one of the second-row seats reserved for the elderly, she placed her bag on her lap and looked out the window. It was her first trip to Okinawa in three years. The last one was with Kōsuke to visit her parents’ grave. The memory depressed her, so she tried to focus on all the new buildings and other surprising changes in scenery. However, she didn’t succeed.

  She was filled with regret that on their last trip to Okinawa together, she hadn’t taken her husband to the island. But that had been utterly impossible. This would be Hisako’s first trip there since returning as a child with her family to Naha sixty years ago, shortly after the war ended. After moving to Tokyo as an adult, she had rarely even visited her hometown on the main Okinawan island. If she hadn’t started having these bad dreams, she probably wouldn’t have considered visiting at all. That was how alienated from the island she’d become.

  Sixty years ago, her father had sent her and her brother to the island before the Battle of Okinawa started. At first, he’d considered sending them to Kyushu, but after hearing that the Americans had torpedoed a ship loaded with evacuating civilians, he quickly changed his mind. Instead, he sent them with Hisako’s mother and grandmother to stay with relatives on the remote island in the north. During the war, the four of them ended up spending many days huddled together in dark air-raid shelters, which caused her to resent having been sent away. But a few years after the war, once Hisako fully understood all that had happened, she appreciated what her father had done. Many of her classmates had gotten caught up in the war with their families, and many had lost their lives.

  When the bus entered Urasoe, Hisako saw a US military base beside the road. She lowered her eyes and stopped looking out the window. She didn’t want to see any American soldiers in their camouflage-colored military uniforms. After she started having the dreams about the screaming woman, other fragmentary memories started bubbling up out of her subconscious, too. She saw several American soldiers swimming toward her from across the ocean. And who was the girl that took her hand as she frantically rushed to shore, tripping over the waves and choking on the salty seawater? She recalled that it was still light out, and that the sand clinging to her wet feet was still hot. When the soldiers closed in, they became huge black shadows blocking the light. Laughing, they grabbed the girl hugging Hisako and carried her away. Hisako also vividly recalled the thorny green leaves of the screwpine trees. When she saw the soldiers heading under them, she could hardly breathe and had to struggle not to scream. She couldn’t think about what happened next.

  Hisako raised her head and glanced out the window. Behind a wire fence topped with three rows of barbed wire, green grass stretched off into the distance beneath the blue sky. She didn’t
want to think the lawn was beautiful. Considering such a possibility risked being drawn into the agenda of those who had built the base. Ammunition wasn’t the only thing hidden beneath that well-kept grass; also buried there were the multi-layered history of the people and the sad and painful memories of the land.

  The bus passed the base entrance. Two American soldiers in camouflage fatigues stood beside the guard box, next to a large sign on which was written the name of the base. Hisako dropped her head again, closed her eyes, and struggled to control her breathing. Though she felt chilly from the air conditioning, she began to sweat. She reminded herself that she was no longer that ten-year-old child of long ago. Nowadays, American soldiers could no longer do whatever they wanted—as they could back then. But telling herself this didn’t stop the sweating.

  She recalled what had happened ten years ago up in northern Okinawa. An elementary school girl had been raped by three American soldiers. The incident made the front pages of every newspaper in the country and led to intense protests throughout Okinawa. When Hisako read about it in the newspaper, she suddenly had difficulty breathing, causing her husband and children to worry. How much had things really changed since then? The question made her feel guilty for having so long avoided her memories of Okinawa and for not knowing what was happening in her own hometown.

  But what else could I have done? How else could I have gotten through all these years? That was what she told herself ten years ago in order to keep going. But after she started having these dreams, she could no longer shake off the feelings of guilt. She decided to go to Okinawa in order to resolve those feelings. A year had passed since Kōsuke’s unexpected death, so she wanted to tie up all the loose ends of her life.

  Kōsuke had collapsed suddenly at the go club he’d been devotedly attending since retirement. Apparently, he was in the middle of a game when he fell across the board, causing the black and white stones to scatter across the floor. He was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, and Hisako hurried to his side as soon as she’d heard what had happened. He was already unconscious when she arrived. After an emergency operation for a brain hemorrhage and a mere two days in the intensive care unit, he passed away.

  Hisako had struggled through the hectic period from her husband’s death up until the important memorial service commemorating the forty-ninth day after his death. She wasn’t able to consider her situation calmly until another six months had passed. She became obsessed with the idea that she herself could collapse any day now, just like her husband. Her three children took turns visiting with her grandchildren, so that she wouldn’t feel alone. Thanks to their attentiveness, she never suffered any serious bouts of depression.

  Even so, the daily words she’d shared with Kōsuke for decades now had nowhere to go. They withered, crumbled, and piled up inside her heart. The burden slowly robbed her of energy. To compensate, she tried to get out and talk with people as much as possible, but she felt distant from others. And the feeling grew worse with each passing day. Sometimes a fragment from the pile of words would whirl up like dust and float inside her without meaning, causing her considerable unease.

  Gradually, she stopped going out. Talking to people who weren’t members of the family began to feel like a nuisance. That was when she started having the dreams about the running woman. The sound of footsteps in the dark closed in on her from behind. Hisako shuddered when the young woman with long disheveled hair ran past. The woman was practically a girl. Her obi sash had come undone, and the front of her kimono was open. Her breasts swayed, and blood flowed down between her legs to her ankles. The woman stopped in the middle of an open space and screamed something incomprehensible. Then she began to flail her arms as if fighting some invisible enemy. Somebody held Hisako’s hand. The woman repeatedly stamped on her own shadow, which the strong sunlight cast on the ground. Beating her breasts with her fists, she shrieked with a ferocity that made Hisako’s hair stand on end. When the woman dashed off toward the woods in the northern part of the village, a woman of about forty and a girl of about ten, both in tears, chased after her.

  The first time Hisako had the dream, she couldn’t stop crying for a while after she woke up. She knew immediately that the dream was connected to the island she’d been evacuated to. But why would scenes that she’d witnessed sixty years ago revive in her now? She didn’t know. Even so, the conviction that she should go to the island to find out grew stronger day by day. The young woman with glazed eyes and a gaping mouth made a lasting impression on her. Everything else in the dream was a blur. She had even forgotten the woman’s name, though that was something she wanted to find out.

  After she’d started having the dreams about the woman, other memories also started to return. American soldiers with guns were standing around a cave in the woods. Behind them, the villagers watched, too. Hisako was among them. Clinging to her mother, she stared at the cave under the cliff. Several scorched tree trunks stood nearby, and the sloped ground was covered with rocks and stones that had rained down from sections of the cliff pulverized by the bombing. In the dull sunlight, the combat uniforms of the soldiers looked faded, compared to the shiny green of the trees, which glistened as if wet. Before long, a young man emerged from the cave. He screamed like a wild beast, and the moment he raised his right hand, a gunshot rang out. The man’s body jerked back in reaction, and then his knees buckled, and he fell forward. The American soldiers screamed, and Hisako’s mother covered Hisako with her body.

  The next thing she remembered was the man being carried away on a stretcher. His swollen and distorted face was covered with splotches of gray, purple, and red. His slimy skin glittered in the light. Tears flowed from his eyes, which were swollen shut. At this point, the memory jumped ahead again, and Hisako saw her mother yelling something as she threw a stone. This was the only memory she had of her mild-mannered mother showing such rage. The stone struck the back of a man who was heading down the hill through the woods. One after another, the other women started throwing stones, too. Copying them, Hisako threw a jagged stone of her own.

  As with the young woman, Hisako couldn’t remember the name of the man who’d been shot or of the man at whom they’d thrown stones. But she felt certain they were both from the village. However, she couldn’t understand how these memories were connected to the screaming woman. Or maybe she just wasn’t letting herself understand. The thought made her realize that the memories were alive inside her, but that she was afraid of letting them come to the surface.

  But, then, there must’ve been a good reason why she’d forgotten. As soon as she graduated from high school, she’d moved to Tokyo and started working there. Her parents had pleaded with her to come home, but she’d refused and ended up settling in Tokyo. In those days, Okinawans needed a passport to travel to Japan, and typical Okinawan surnames, such as Shimabukuro, were still considered unusual and led to people talking behind your back. Maybe that was why she’d left Okinawa and avoided going to the island during her rare visits; she had wanted to completely cut off all those memories.

  That was probably the case, but after sixty years everything had grown hazy. On the one hand, she wanted to confront the past and piece together the fragments that were floating up out of her fading memory. On the other hand, she was terrified about knowing the past. Up until now, she’d lived without remembering, so surely there was no need to dredge up what she’d forgotten. But at the same time, she knew that if she left everything in its current vague state, she’d end up regretting it later. If her health took a turn for the worse, she wouldn’t be able to travel to the island anymore, and then it would be too late.

  About a month ago, Hisako contacted her cousin Masao in Naha and asked him to find out if someone named Fumi Matsuda was living on the island. Fumi was a grade-school classmate who’d often taken her to pick up firewood or search for shellfish. She was the one who’d treated Hisako with the most kindness. If Fumi had gotten married, her last name would’ve changed, but Hisako remember
ed that Fumi had lived in a house facing a large open space near a huge banyan tree.

  About a week later, Masao called with some information. He explained that he’d gone to the island over the weekend and asked around. He found out that Fumi had gotten married, and that her family name was now Toyama. She’d left the island and was now living in Nago, just to the south. After his explanation, Masao gave her Fumi’s current address and phone number.

  Instead of calling right away, Hisako wrote a long letter first. It wasn’t just a matter of etiquette. If she’d phoned, and Fumi didn’t remember her, it would’ve been awkward. So she wanted to be cautious. In the letter, she wrote about some of the things they did together, and asked Fumi to reply if she remembered her. She ended with an apology for her rudeness in sending a letter so suddenly, after neglecting to write for nearly sixty years. After putting the letter in an envelope, she hesitated for another two days before finally mailing it. Hisako had lived on the island for only about a year, so she’d forgotten the names of almost all her classmates. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Fumi didn’t remember her. Hisako mailed the letter without expecting a reply, but she received a phone call from Fumi three nights later.

  Fumi spoke as amiably as if they’d been in constant contact. Her voice sounded like that of an elderly woman, but her tone and use of the island language reminded Hisako of the girl from her childhood. After exchanging several letters and phone calls, Hisako wrote about her dream and asked Fumi if she knew what it might mean. She added that since she’d be visiting the island in a few days, Fumi could tell her what she knew then. An answer came in a letter. This was unusual because Fumi hated to write and usually phoned. In her letter, Fumi wrote that she knew the place of Hisako’s dream and would guide her there when she arrived in Okinawa. She added that she would also explain everything about the woman in her dream and the man in the cave.