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
