In the Woods of Memory

by Shun Medoruma

  Maybe you’ll say that I’m overanalyzing everything. I’ve searched for vindication, and I’ve told myself that I didn’t do anything wrong. However, the girl’s stare and scream trump all my arguments, leaving me with unbearable guilt. As long as I have these feelings, I can’t allow myself to accept your proposal.

  This has turned into a long letter. It’s taken me over a week to write. I’ve never told this story to my family. I’ve confided in you because you’ve been sincere in listening to and recording the stories of old veterans like myself. But let me repeat: please don’t make this story public. It probably wouldn’t cause any trouble if you did, since the entire episode ended sixty years ago. Even so, I want you to keep the story to yourself.

  If Seiji and Sayoko are still alive, they’d be in their late seventies. I have no idea what happened to them afterward. But I’d like to believe that they got married and are living together happily. I know this is just a way to console myself, but I really do hope that that’s how things turned out.

  When you read this letter, I trust that you’ll understand my feelings. I sincerely hope that you’ll continue your work of recording the war and that you are rewarded for your efforts. I want the younger generation to read your record of our testimony so that such a war never occurs again. This is not a wish easily granted, I know. However, it remains this old soldier’s fading but sincere hope.

  Sincerely,

  Robert Higa

  (US Army Retired)

  AFTERWORD

  In the Woods of Memory by Shun Medoruma is an important work of Japanese literature for its combination of insightful social commentary, literary sophistication, and compelling narrative. Informed by Medoruma’s intimate understanding of and exposure to the long-lasting psychological aftereffects of the Battle of Okinawa on the lives of his parents, the novel presents significant insights concerning war memory and trauma. It portrays not only the events of the war past, but also how the experiencing, perpetrating, and witnessing of wartime sexual violence traumatizes and haunts multiple lives across decades and disparate locations.

  Additionally, the novel invites readers to re-evaluate their own understanding of Okinawa’s contemporary social, economic, and political situation through the multiple interweaving narratives that draw from and comment on Okinawa’s historical and ongoing relationships with Japan and the United States. Medoruma’s skillful use of shifting perspectives and multiple focal characters, various narrative styles, and experimentation with the representing of a fractured consciousness through an Okinawan linguistic filter makes In the Woods of Memory his most complicated and sophisticated work of literature to date.

  Although In the Woods of Memory is a work of fiction, it reflects historical facts and incidents of military rape and sexual violence against Okinawan women during and after the Battle of Okinawa that possess the potential to disturb and complicate narratives of the war that exclude or suppress such incidents. Medoruma has acknowledged that the core story is based on his mother’s experiences during the war in which she saw American soldiers swim across the ocean and take women from her village away.1 In addition, numerous accounts of wartime rape committed by American soldiers in Okinawa have been documented by both American and Okinawan researchers.2 And, similar to the reluctance the characters in the novel have about publicly discussing the rape of Sayoko, survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have been reticent about reporting cases of rape. Although second-hand reports and rumors of sexual violence exist, first-hand accounts and detailed descriptions of rape and retaliation have been all but non-existent. The lack of first-hand accounts does not mean that such incidents did not occur. It rather attests to the constraining and silencing conditions of war and military occupation, to the pain and difficulty of recalling traumatic experiences, and to the social costs of disclosure. One example, the Katsuyama incident, where Japanese soldiers and village men worked together to kill a group of American soldiers who were repeatedly visiting an Okinawan village and raping the women there, remained a secret for over fifty years after the war; the details concerning the incident are still unclear.3 Research on sexual violence perpetrated by members of the US military both during and after the war in Okinawa indicates a serious and recurring problem. Last year in June of 2016, a former US marine was charged by Japanese prosecutors for the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old Okinawan woman.

  In the Woods of Memory’s engagement with painful, taboo, and disturbing war experiences and memories contrasts with attempts by conservative nationalist groups around the time of the novel’s initial publication to silence and erase critical narratives of the Japanese army’s role in atrocities committed against Okinawan civilians during the war. When In the Woods of Memory initially appeared as a serialized novel between 2004 and 2007, various attacks on Okinawan war memory practices were launched, including the 2005 lawsuit against Nobel prize–winning writer Kenzaburō Ōe for defaming Japanese Army officers in his work Okinawa nōto (Okinawa Notebook, 1970) by writing that they had ordered civilians in Okinawa to commit group suicides during the war. Additionally, in March 2007 the editorial board recommendations from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology called for the removal from high school textbooks of any references to the military ordering group suicides during the Battle of Okinawa.

  Large protests in Okinawa took place in reaction to the recommended changes to the history textbooks, and Ōe eventually won the lawsuit filed against him. In contrast to these public contestations over the acknowledgment of Japanese acts of violence against Okinawan civilians, In the Woods of Memory engages taboo stories not only of sexual violence against Okinawan women committed by the American military but also those perpetrated by Okinawan men. Medoruma’s critical gaze severely scrutinizes Okinawan society and how it remembers the war while sensitively situating acts of remembrance within complex historical and social contexts.

  The novel also portrays how the aging of the war generation and the context of the sixtieth anniversary (2005) of the end of the war in Okinawa shape and affect how war memories are recalled, expressed, and received. With the passing of sixty years since the war, the war survivors in the novel are in the later stages of their lives and Okinawan society is acutely aware of the aging and passing away of the wartime generation. For Hisako, buried and suppressed memories of war begin to appear in haunting dreams, connected to the increasing isolation and loneliness that the passing of her husband due to old age and living separately from her grown-up children generate.

  For some characters, such as Kayō and Tamiko, efforts made by oral historians and peace education programs to record and pass on the experiences of the war trigger painful memories that are difficult to share. In the third chapter, Kayō withholds information from the young researcher recording war experiences, presumably so Kayō can avoid disclosing his role in helping the American soldiers capture Seiji. Kayō even tells the young researcher not to go to the village for more details, attempting to keep his actions secret and at the same time revealing a possible way to uncover what happened. After the researcher leaves, haunting visions and the pain of being pelted with stones during the war assault Kayō. In the “Bullied Girl (2005)” chapter, at a middle school in Okinawa as part of peace education, during her talk about her war experiences, Tamiko reluctantly decides to share the painful story of Sayoko’s rape. In the Woods of Memory highlights how agonizing experiences from the war that survivors want to forget or avoid remembering can be triggered by living conditions related to old age and society’s desire to have the memories of the war passed on to later generations.

  The novel also invites readers to consider how celebratory acts of commemoration for service during the war can be entangled with unacknowledged and unresolved feelings of guilt. The ceremonies mentioned in the final chapter to honor former US military interpreters, mostly nisei Japanese and Okinawan Americans, for saving Okinawan lives during the Battle of Okinawa, parallel actual commemorations held in Los A
ngeles and Hawaii as part of the 4th Uchinanchu Festival in 2006. Within Okinawa it is commonly known that Okinawan American nisei interpreters attached to the United States military used their knowledge of local language, dialect, and culture to save numerous Okinawans from committing suicide. Yet, the nisei soldier’s story in the novel of haunting guilt for standing on the side of the rapists of Sayoko and his declining of the invitation to the ceremony of recognition contrasts starkly with the commonly known stories of lives saved and the award ceremonies of war commemoration. By exploring through literary narrative such private stories of guilt, Medoruma invites readers to think anew about how the Battle of Okinawa likely affected nisei soldiers in conflicted ways that have remained unacknowledged and hidden.

  Medoruma also comments on the social and historical conditions of Okinawa by portraying how characters have been impacted by widely known historical incidents and how these are connected to the ongoing US military occupation of the islands, the Battle of Okinawa, and America’s global military actions. For example, when Hisako sees the gate and fences of the US military bases during her bus ride to meet Fumi, she breaks out in a sweat and recalls the 1995 incident when a female Okinawan elementary school student was gang raped by US soldiers. Here Medoruma is associating the contemporary US military presence with Hisako’s experience during the war, including her suppressed memory of witnessing Sayoko’s rape, suggesting that this presence is a continuing source of trauma for Okinawans. Additionally, in the “Okinawan Writer (2005)” chapter, Medoruma links the Battle of Okinawa to the September 11, 2001, attack on the Twin Towers in the United States by having Jay, the grandson of the American soldier who raped Sayoko and was stabbed by Seiji, die in the towers during the attack. Medoruma additionally pushes readers to consider how ongoing US global military actions are connected to, if not extensions of, the Battle of Okinawa and the military bases on Okinawa when the character Matsumoto mentions that he couldn’t help noticing how “the shape of the harpoon point began to look like one of those planes that flew into the towers.”

  In the Woods of Memory is Medoruma’s longest, most complex, and experimentally ambitious war-memory narrative to date. In the vein of his earlier prize-winning stories “Droplets,” “Mabuigumi,” and the critically acclaimed “Tree of Butterflies,” the novel explores how survivors of the Battle of Okinawa have lived with unresolved war-related guilt, haunting visions, and trauma that have eluded public disclosure. Whereas these earlier works typically focus on a single survivor of the Battle of Okinawa, In the Woods of Memory engages multiple perspectives concerning an act of wartime sexual violence and its repercussions, revealing various character motivations, reactions, and levels of traumatization. The shifting perspectives in relation to an incident of rape may bring to mind similarities with Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” (Yabu no naka) or the Kurosawa film Rashōmon, which is based on that story, but, as Yoshiaki Koshikawa has pointed out, In the Woods of Memory differs from Akutagawa’s “In a Grove” in regard to the core incidents of the rape—there is no doubt as to what happened to Sayoko in Medoruma’s novel.4 Additionally, as I have noted elsewhere, “In a Grove” only presents spoken testimonial accounts, whereas In the Woods of Memory additionally portrays the inner thoughts and unspoken memories of the involved individuals and witnesses.5 The novel even extends beyond Okinawan perspectives to explore how the rape and Seiji’s retaliation have affected one of the American soldiers who raped Sayoko, as well as the aforementioned nisei interpreter. Medoruma also includes transgenerational perspectives with his chapters focusing on the Okinawan writer and the bullied girl.

  Although In the Woods of Memory reveals and explores war memories and experiences typically not shared publicly, it gestures to the issue of silence and lack of voice through the omission of a chapter from the perspective of Sayoko, the primary victim and most severely violated character in the story. Medoruma, when asked during an interview why Sayoko doesn’t have a chapter in the novel, responded that Sayoko is unable to narrate her trauma, and that there are undoubtedly numerous war survivors who have never been able to talk about their traumatic war experiences.6 By refraining from presenting how the rape has affected Sayoko from her perspective, Medoruma symbolically gestures to the extreme difficulty and even impossibility of narrating traumatizing war experiences that are too difficult to recall. Another interpretation of this omission is that by failing to give Sayoko a voice, Medoruma renders her a silent victim without agency. Alisa Holm insightfully demonstrates in her undergraduate thesis, however, that Sayoko’s “voice” is her paintings, and that her rendering of her trauma through visual media is her way of expressing her experience.7 Articulation through narrative is not the only mode of processing and expressing the traumatic.

  The boldest literary and textual experiment Medoruma attempts in the novel and arguably his overall body of literary work, is the representation of Seiji’s consciousness in the “Seiji (2005)” chapter. Primarily a mixture of multiple voices that constitute Seiji’s memories, thoughts, and stream of consciousness, the chapter eschews visual description and places the reader in Seiji’s sensory realm that relies heavily on sound. The translator, Takuma Sminkey, creatively utilizes bold text and italics to help mark some of the shifts in voices that Medoruma indicates in the original through various orthography, verb endings, and linguistic gender codes not available in English.

  Medoruma’s boldest experiment, however, lies in the extended passages written in a highly Okinawan-inflected Japanese presented with phonetic guides running parallel to the Japanese. The phonetic guides, what would conventionally be rubi or furigana in Japanese, however, are given not only for the kanji (Chinese) characters that may have various readings but also for the already phonetic orthography written in hiragana. In other words, Medoruma uses the space next to the characters typically used to clarify the pronunciation of Chinese characters to present the actual sounds of the language Seiji is using itself, while the so-called main text is actually a gloss or translation for readers unfamiliar with the Northern Okinawan (Kunigami) language. In my personal conversations with literate native Japanese speakers unfamiliar with the Northern Okinawan language who have seen the “Seiji (2005)” chapter, the phonetic guides on the side are incomprehensible alone and become a nuisance in the reading experience. As Sminkey has explained in the Translator’s Preface, conveying the linguistic difference of Northern Okinawan with the rest of the text within a translation proved to be too impractical.

  Medoruma’s attempt to write the Northern Okinawan or Kunigami Ryukyuan language through Japanese glosses, however, represents a significant, innovative, and provocative literary maneuver. Fiction writers from Okinawa who incorporate Okinawan words in their writing, including Medoruma, typically write their fiction primarily in Japanese, with brief moments of the Okinawan language used to represent the spoken dialogue of characters. In other words, modern Okinawa fiction writers such as Medoruma do not write in Okinawan or Ryukyuan languages but rather in Japanese for the narrative descriptions in their works.

  The Ryukyuan languages have primarily been oral languages, with written forms of literature existing primarily in the Ryukyuan poetic form. Considering, too, that Japan’s cultural and linguistic assimilation policies since the annexation of Okinawa in the late nineteenth century have meant the lack of a widely used written form for modern Ryukyuan languages, the absence of a modern work of fiction written primarily in a Ryukyuan language should not be surprising.

  It is surprising, then, to see a Ryukyuan language used as the primary writing language for the narrative descriptive parts of a modern work of fiction. For Katsunori Yamazato, a native of the Motobu peninsula and native speaker of Northern Okinawan, the passages portraying Seiji’s consciousness in the “Seiji (2005)” chapter represent a provocative and innovative attempt at writing Northern Okinawan using the Japanese language. At a colloquium on literature from Okinawa at the University of Hawaii in 2015, Yamazato said that when he
first read the “Seiji (2005)” chapter it felt like he was reading his native language in written form for the first time.

  While Medoruma’s provocative use of phonetic guides to represent Kunigami language in textual form may be lost in English, the vast richness and complexity of the novel is still captured in Sminkey’s translation. In other words, this loss via translation does not diminish the powerful impact the novel still delivers in Sminkey’s rendering. The various elements of literary sophistication, critical social commentary, and compelling narrative that expand our understanding and knowledge of the personal and social costs, legacies, and ongoing repercussions of war make In the Woods of Memory a powerful novel and important work of literature.

  Medoruma’s thought-provoking and engaging works of literature, coupled with his social commentary and anti-base activism, have made him a public figure and brought him local, national, and international attention. His critical perspective on issues of social injustice in Okinawa and his work as an anti-base peace activist inform and enhance his literary writing. Yet, it is also clear that Medoruma’s literary output has slowed immensely since the publication of In the Woods of Memory as his participation in protests and resistance to the construction of a new US military base in Henoko near his hometown in Nakijin has required his full attention.

  In April of 2016 Medoruma made headlines in Japan for being taken into custody by US forces personnel and arrested by the Japan Coast Guard for paddling his canoe into a restricted area near the construction site. He was in the news again in October 2016 denouncing the Japanese riot police for using ethnic slurs against himself and other Okinawan protestors. For readers interested in reading more of Medoruma’s work, although he has not published a full-length novel since In the Woods of Memory, many of his critically acclaimed and prize-winning short stories, such as “Droplets,” “Mabuigumi,” “Hope,” “Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal,” and “Tree of Butterflies” have already been published in translation.8 Two other provocative and finely crafted novels by Medoruma, Fūon: The Crying Wind (2004) and Niji no tori (Rainbow Bird, 2006), have yet to be translated, but hopefully will be in the near future.