The novel describes two related incidents that took place on a small island during the Battle of Okinawa: the rape of a young woman, and a young man’s attempt to get revenge. These two main stories are narrated through various points of view, including those of two Americans. Two chapters are set in 1945, while the other eight are set in 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war. The focus of the novel, then, is on how past events have impacted the present.
The opening scenes of the novel take place in the middle of May 1945. At this point in the Battle of Okinawa, US forces had occupied the northern parts of the island, even though intense fighting was still raging in the south. The main setting of the novel, though never directly mentioned, is a village on Yagaji, a small island just off the northwest coast of the Okinawan mainland. The port at which the US soldiers are working is certainly the one at Unten, located on the mainland directly across from Yagaji. US forces occupied the port early in the battle, long before fighting ended in the south.
For Americans—and for mainland Japanese, too—it’s difficult to see the connections between World War II and the present, but for Okinawans, those connections are a daily fact of life. This is partly because of the great costs of the Battle of Okinawa, which involved heavy bombing, group suicides, and large numbers of civilian casualties, nearly one-third of the population. As a result, nearly everyone who experienced the war suffered some degree of trauma. Not only do most Okinawan families have relatives who died in the war; they have relatives who were traumatized, too. In addition, the US military bases scattered throughout the prefecture are a constant and visual reminder of the lingering effects of the war. The negative effects of the base economy, the threats to public safety and health, and the regular occurrence of crimes and accidents have kept the bases on the front pages of Okinawan newspapers practically every day.
Shun Medoruma often bases his stories on accounts he’s heard from relatives. Although the main plot lines of In the Woods of Memory are fiction, they are based on various real-life incidents. In a May 2016 interview published in the Okinawa Times, Medoruma said that the rape was based on a story he heard from his mother, who lived on Yagaji during the war. He also discusses the incident in one of his collections of essays. There are also parallels to the infamous 1995 Okinawa rape incident, in which three US servicemen raped an elementary school girl.
The revenge plot has similarities to the 1945 Katsuyama killing incident, in which Okinawans from a village near Nago murdered three US Marines in retaliation for raping village women shortly after the Battle of Okinawa. Medoruma’s descriptions of prewar education, detention camps, and the role of interpreters during the war are all accurate.
About this translation
In the Woods of Memory poses many challenges for a translator. Medoruma’s experimental use of narrative techniques, mixing of voices, avoidance of quotation marks, and use of Okinawan language make the text a difficult one to render into English. Needless to say, I did my best to produce a translation faithful to the original, but I’d like English readers to be aware of some important changes I decided to make. First, I added chapter titles that identify the point of view and setting of each chapter. Since there are no titles in the original text, Japanese readers are likely to be initially confused before figuring these out on their own, but for English readers the burden would be even heavier, especially for those less familiar with Japanese names or Okinawan history. In addition, I’m sure the titles will make it easier for readers to remember the names and to discuss the novel with others. By the way, I divided the first chapter of the original into two chapters, since they’re narrated from completely different points of view.
Second, I decided to use quotation dashes to more clearly mark dialogue, except in the final chapter, where their use would have been inappropriate. In the Japanese text, Medoruma usually refrains from using quotation marks, no doubt to create a more stream-of-consciousness feel to the narration. In Japanese, speakers can be indicated through levels of politeness, the use of pronouns, and in other ways unique to the language, so a direct translation without quotation marks would be confusing. Using dashes seemed like a good compromise in the spirit of the original. In addition, I used italics to mark internal dialogue.
Third, I avoided using the asterisks and letters that Medoruma uses in place of names in some of the later chapters. Replacing names with a letter, blank space, or symbol is a Japanese literary convention not often seen in English literature—and one that I’ve never liked—so I solved the problem by using pronouns, using the implied name, or assigning a name to the character. Concerning names, I followed the Western convention of putting the given name first. Readers will notice, of course, that most Japanese characters are referred to by their given names, with the obvious exceptions of Kayō, the ward chief, and Matsumoto, the Okinawan writer’s friend.
There was, however, one difficulty in translating the novel for which I couldn’t find a satisfactory solution: how to translate Okinawan language. Translating dialect or a secondary language is always difficult for translators, but the problem is especially daunting for In the Woods of Memory. To begin with, the Ryukyuan languages are not dialects but independent languages, which are not mutually intelligible with Japanese. More importantly, Okinawan language reflects Okinawa’s complex political relationship with
