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
