Notes
1. For an incisive analysis of the 1995 schoolgirl rape, see Linda Isako Angst, “The Rape of a Schoolgirl: Discourses of Power and Women’s Lives in Okinawa,” in Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 135–160.
2. Although the author does not make the protagonist’s gender explicit, we have elected to use the male pronoun to draw a parallel with the American boy.
3. See Tada Osamu, Okinawa imeeji no tanjō: Aoi umi no karuchuraru sutadiizu (Tokyo: Tōyō keizai shinpōsha, 2004).
4. This fertility is both literal and figurative. In a discussion of “Droplets,” Medoruma Shun explains how enormous gourds proliferated in Okinawa after the Battle of Okinawa, seemingly nurtured by soil enriched by the corpses of war dead. Figuratively, the Battle of Okinawa is the central theme of postwar literature.
5. Alan Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” Positions: East Asia critique 1, no. 3 (1993): 633.
6. John Dower, Japan in War and Peace (New York: New Press, 1996), 171.
7. Eric Johnston, “Futenma Base Relocation Plan Has Little Hope Left,” Japan Times, December 16, 2011.
8. Stephen Harner, “Paying Tribute to Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga: Japan’s Bravest Man,” Forbes, September 15, 2015.
9. For a discussion of these pioneering works of the pre- and postwar eras, see Davinder L. Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (London: Routledge, 2008).
10. For in-depth analysis on the transmission of memory in Medoruma’s writing, see Kyle Ikeda, Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun (London: Routledge, 2014).
11. Sakiyama Tami, “Shimakotoba de kachaashii,” in Imafuku Ryûta (ed.), ‘Watashi’ no tankyû (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2002), 157–180.
12. Yamanokuchi Baku, “A Conversation,” in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, ed. Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), 47.
FICTION
HOPE (1999)
Medoruma Shun
Translated by Steve Rabson
IT WAS THE LEAD STORY on the six o’clock news. The small child of an American soldier had been missing, and today the corpse was found in the woods not far from the Koza city limits. All eyes of the customers and employees in the diner were glued to the television screen. Strangulation marks had been found on the body, and now the prefectural police were using evidence from the abandoned corpse in their search for the murderer. After citing the usual “crime story” details, the report shifted to interviews of people on the street. “Now I’m afraid to let my kid walk around outside. Okinawa’s getting to be a dangerous place.” When the waitress saw the woman of about fifty who appeared on the screen, she yelled out gleefully, “Hey, it’s Fumi. Look! She’s on TV!” A fat woman wiping the sweat off her face came out of the kitchen; but the screen had already changed, and both women groaned in disappointment. Now the reporter was commenting on the killer’s declaration that had been mailed to the office of a local newspaper. I looked at the evening edition with a photograph of the declaration on the front page that lay next to me. “What Okinawa needs now is not demonstrations by thousands of people or rallies by tens of thousands but the death of one American child.” It had been written in menacing red characters with sharp angles and straight lines.
A taxi driver slurping a bowl of Okinawan noodles grumbled, “They better nab him quick and give him the death penalty.” “We barely make money to begin with,” the waitress chimed in. “What’ll happen if tourists stop coming?” After panning pictures of the woods and Koza city from a helicopter, the report continued with statements by the governor and high U.S. and Japanese officials. They expressed “outrage” and “revulsion” at a crime targeting an innocent child. Stifling a laugh, I shoved a spoonful of curried rice into my mouth. There was no way their pompous pronouncements could hide their exhaustion and bewilderment. That Okinawans—so docile, so meek—could use such tactics was something the bastards had never even imagined. Okinawans were, after all, a people who followed their leaders and, at most, held “antiwar” or “antibase” rallies with polite protest marches. Even the ultraleft and radical factions staged, at most, “guerrilla warfare” that caused no real harm and never carried out terrorism or kidnappings against people in power or mounted armed attacks. Okinawans were like maggots who clustered around the shit of land rents and subsidy monies splattered by the bases. And Okinawa was called “a peace-loving, healing island.” It made me want to puke.
I left the diner, crossed the pedestrian bridge at Goya Corners, and walked along Airport Avenue. Orders must have come down restricting all military personnel to their bases. No American soldiers in civilian clothes were out walking the streets. A camouflage-colored jeep drove past. A patrol car, its red alarm light gyrating, was parked in front of the gate at Kadena Air Base. High above a row of poinciana trees, a white crescent moon hovered like the fang of a poisonous habu snake. I stood, transfixed. Only the worst methods get results, I muttered to myself. On the other side of the street, a television camera was swiveling. I turned into a side street and was careful not to quicken my pace as I walked back to my apartment. From the refrigerator, I took out a can of iced tea and drained it in one gulp. Then I sat down at my desk and wrote the address of the newspaper office on the envelope I had put there. Opening one of the drawers, I took out a small cellophane bag containing strands of straw-colored hair. The child’s face in profile came again before my eyes.
The kid had been sleeping in the backseat of a car parked in the supermarket parking lot. A white woman who looked only about twenty yelled several times, but the kid didn’t wake up. After she went into the market alone, pushing a shopping cart, I tossed my empty iced tea can into the trash bin and cut across the parking lot. I got into the car that had been left idling with the air conditioner on and pulled out onto the prefectural highway. I drove north for about fifteen minutes, then turned off into the woods on the north side of a municipal housing project. Only after the car began rattling along this bumpy road did the kid wake up. When I heard crying from the backseat, I stopped the car. Turning around, I saw that the kid had gotten up and was trying to open the door. He was a boy and looked about three. I quickly stopped the car, turned around, and tightly grasped his little crying and screaming body. As I finished strangling him from behind, something burst in the back of his throat, and a gob of filth soiled my arm. I wiped it off with the kid’s shirt and started the car again. I drove around to the rear of the woods and parked in the shadows of an abandoned pig shed. After wiping the steering wheel and door handles with my handkerchief, I moved the kid to the trunk of the car. Then I twisted some strands of his straw-colored hair around my fingers, ripped the hairs out, and folded them up in my handkerchief. When I closed the trunk, the sun shone from the cloudy sky. All over my body, covered with sweat, gooseflesh had broken out. On my way out of the woods, I buried the car keys and, after walking to the national highway, transferred taxis twice on the way back to my apartment.
The air-conditioning in my car had little effect, and even when I opened the windows, my sweat kept pouring. I took the envelope containing the hairs to Naha city and dropped it in a mailbox. On the way back, I stopped at the seaside park in Ginowan. This had been the site of that farcical rally after the twelve-year-old girl was raped by the three American soldiers, when 80,000 people gathered here but could do absolutely nothing. Now it seemed so long ago. I had finally done what I’d thought about doing that day as I’d stood on the edge of the crowd. I felt no remorse now or even any deep emotion. Just as fluids in the bodies of small organisms that are forced to live in constant fear suddenly turn into poison, I had done what was natural and necessary for this island. When I reached the center of what had been the rally site, I poured a bottle of gasoline, syphoned from th
e car, on my jacket and pants. The fumes stung my eyes. Then, taking a hundred-yen cigarette lighter from my pocket, I spun the flint wheel. Flames sprang up in the darkness, and toward the walking, tumbling fire, a group of middle school students came running, then cheered as they took turns kicking the smoking black lump.
THE KUNENBO ORANGE TREES (1911)
Yamagusuku Seichū
Translated by Carolyn Morley
THE TERRIBLE RAGING STORM had stopped. Quite suddenly everything settled, as if to the bottom of a deep ravine. On the shore, a single beached ship with a broken mast had run aground, red planks fallen over and split in two. Amid the pure white shells scattered on the beach lay a chaotic litter of broken sea urchin husks, dead red crab shells, and the remains of sea anemones entangled in amber seaweed. A crowd gathered around the wrecked boat. The sun cast waves of wintry light over everything, as if from an oil lamp.
In the wake of the storm, the sea’s surface settled to a deep indigo; flocks of white gulls flew silently, low over the waves. Far off, the colors of the sky and sea merged in harmony.
For two continuous days and nights, the wind and rain had thrashed and roared. Then, on the third day, they stopped.
It was early November by the old calendar, just about time when the islanders changed yellow hemp robes for singlets of deep indigo, and even the island felt the chill morning and evening.
Amid this tranquility, N, the isolated southern seaside village, was exposed to a salty breeze unique to the Ryukyus. The leaves of scrawny trees, like the beach hibiscus and Indian coral, had curled up, an earthen brown. Their trunks stood in rows, still black with dampness. Even so, the thick leaves of such subtropical plants as the aloe, windmill palm, betel nut, brindle-berry, and banyan, like ceramic saucers dipped in deep green, had mopped up still-moist whitish salt.
At the Matsudas’, the stone wall behind the house had collapsed, and the goat shed was smashed to bits. Throughout the night of the storm, Matsuda and his handyman worked tirelessly to repair it by the wavering light of a box lantern bearing the family crest. Still, all three of the goats were dead, their coats spattered in blood. Stuck to the red tiled roof and the white plastered walls were leaves, bits of straw, branches, trash, and pebbles. In the garden, the potted evergreen, so lovingly tended by its master, had tumbled into the flowerbed, and its dark-red Chinese ceramic pot had shattered into pieces. White threads of slime leaked among the pottery shards from clay stuck in the roots. The onion patch was completely obliterated. Circling the patch were twelve or thirteen ancient kunenbo orange trees,1 planted by the great-grandfather. The trees were a type called aotō, which bore fruit highly prized for delicate skin, plump sections, and abundant light-yellow, translucent juice. The fruit was a bit acidic, and it was said that if you sucked too many, your teeth would rot. Nevertheless, they were greatly admired. They had just begun to ripen, and their pure, iodine-like yellow skin startled you from between sparkling green leaves where the clusters of fruit were truly magnificent. The view was like a painting of a scene found only in the southern islands. The fruit was already being harvested in the countryside, but for some reason, here in town the fruit was a month or two behind and only just ripening.
Every year as soon as the fruit began to ripen, the master, Matsuda Ryōhei, created a great commotion, sending out his handyman, Mozuru, morning and night to fertilize the trees or to prop up the branches. And so, for town trees, they were unusually full. It was the same every year. Half the fruit was generally divided between neighbors and relatives, and only the remaining half was then packed in a woven bamboo basket for the eldest daughter’s husband to sell. The proceeds went to the yearly school supplies of paper, brushes, and ink for the eldest son, Sei’ichi, and the second daughter, Tsuru, and the rest for camellia hair oil. This year, the crop was especially promising, so seven-year-old Tsuru and thirteen-year-old Sei’ichi went out almost every day to the field to count the green fruit, looking forward to its reddening.
Even Tama, their mother, had been saying, “When we sell the kunibu2 this year, we can buy New Year’s clothes for Tsuru and Sei.” The eldest daughter, already an adult at seventeen and no longer interested for herself, awaited the harvest with anticipation for her little brother and sister.
Since the neighborhood youth were likely to sneak in on moonlit nights to steal the fruit, the Matsudas had stuck broken glass and ceramic shards atop the stone wall. You couldn’t at all make out the shape of the stones piled there because deep-green, delicately pleated vine leaves climbed all over the wall. Inside the walls, the orchard was set off from the garden by a low boxwood hedge.
A small wooden door,3 painted black, stood in one corner of the stone wall. The family gathered around the wind-damaged trees. They decided to pick at least the fruit that was either ripening or bruised. The handyman, who climbed the tree, wore a straw belt twined over a grimy jacket with a fish basket attached to his waist. Winter in the southern islands was still pretty hot during the day, and the pale red sun beat down relentlessly.
Along the copper skin of his rough calf, a light-blue vein pulsed in the shape of a rope. Straining hard, he hopped from branch to branch. When the tree swayed, the damaged fruit plopped to the ground. The two children bustled about the field with a large red cloth dyed in a striped pattern, gathering the green ones knocked down in the storm and the yellow ones shaken from the tree.
“Papa! Here’s one too. Look! It’s huge! This one’s mine.” “Sei! There’s one over here too! Look at this one!” “If you jump around too much you’ll fall and end up crying,” their father cautioned.
Gathered around the trees were the master, Ryōhei; his wife, Tama; the three Matsuda children; the kitchen maid, Kama; three lacquerware workers; and Ushi, a former geisha. The scent of men and women’s hair oil floated up in the air.
The estate was fairly large. Brindle-berry trees encircled the high stone wall surrounding it, where it faced the gravel road. From between the round, deep-green leaves, you could catch just a glimpse of the red tile roof, whitewashed along the edges. The family had been known for its lacquerware for many generations. Since the current master had taken over, they had flourished handsomely, extending their sales as far as distant Kagoshima and hiring four or five new workers. The house was really too big for the family, so the previous year they had agreed, at the suggestion of the village headman, to rent the front rooms to the newly appointed elementary school principal of K town, Hosokawa Shigeru. In the beginning, the rent was for room and board, but since spring, Hosokawa had redeemed “little doll Tsuru,” a geisha well known in the area, taking her in. She was called “Ushi.” After that, he depended on her to handle the cooking and housework. It was just a country town, and no one gave it a second thought. The principal was a native of Miyazaki.
While Ushi’s husband was at school, she often came to the Matsuda home to sell hair oil. Just the fact that she’d been a famous geisha meant that she had interesting tales to tell. The young lacquerware workers, hearts pounding, pressed her excitedly for stories of her love affairs. Often the young men went too far and made her angry. Her complexion was white like a doll’s, her face oval and glowing, and her body on the slender side. Her nickname, “little doll Tsuru,” came from that.
The Matsudas had gathered nearly two hundred kunenbo. Picking out the ripe ones, they distributed them as usual.
In the evening, the principal returned home. Beneath the lamp in the bright, eight-mat room, he sat opposite Ushi, exchanging sips of sake, when two patrolmen and Yokota, a police detective, barged in and arrested him. Ushi burst into tears and clung to the sheath of the patrolman’s sword. She became hysterical when he berated her and collapsed weeping in the middle of the room. When the Matsudas came to check on the commotion, the principal was just about to be taken away. A broad smile on his pale face, the principal drew a cape over his formal black robes and clapped a light-brown fedora over his brow.
In the room, small blue dishes of red sashim
i and boiled tofu had been set out. About half a bottle of sake remained, glittering yellow in the piercing light of the pure white lamp. Next to it on a round lacquer tray were placed three kunenbo oranges parceled out that morning. One of them had been peeled in a coil with skins of sucked sections set within.
It was 1894, the twenty-seventh year of Meiji.
Rumors had been circulating about Tōgaku bandits causing disturbances on the southern end of the Korean peninsula. People said they had spurred hostilities between the Chinese and Japanese armies. On August 1, the Imperial Declaration of War was announced.4
On the mountaintop of S town were the remains of a castle where the king had once lived.5 However, by now the castle had already deteriorated quite a bit and had been given to the Kumamoto army detachment as barracks. Still, the stone wall of the perimeter, the Chinese gabled buildings, and the old sculptures remained in fine condition. On Sundays, it was an easy bet that the soldiers would be out hunting women in broad daylight, prowling the entertainment district. From time to time, drunk, they’d lay in ambush in a dark corner for a pretty young girl, follow her, then have their way. Wearing yellow hats and black uniforms with a red stripe, they were disparagingly called “Yamato beasts.”
When the war began, new hordes of soldiers poured in.
Startling reports of Japanese victories filled the newspapers every day. Each time a ferry from the mainland arrived, it was full of books and magazines about the war. Everywhere you looked along Ōmon Avenue, Nishi no Mae Street, Ishimon Street, and all the main thoroughfares where Okinawans had opened general stores, storefronts were covered with pictures of red color prints or lithographs of the war. It was the greatest war in history, so national excitement was at a peak. In the Ryukyus, citizens had never been armed. Inexperienced in weaponry, they were bewildered and frightened by the scenes of war.
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