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 Angeles 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
