In the Woods of Memory

using ethnic slurs against himself and other Okinawan protestors. For readers interested in reading more of Medoruma’s work, although he has not published a full-length novel since In the Woods of Memory, many of his critically acclaimed and prize-winning short stories, such as “Droplets,” “Mabuigumi,” “Hope,” “Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal,” and “Tree of Butterflies” have already been published in translation.⁸ Two other provocative and finely crafted novels by Medoruma, Fūon: The Crying Wind (2004) and Niji no tori (Rainbow Bird, 2006), have yet to be translated, but hopefully will be in the near future.

Kyle Ikeda

University of Vermont

NOTES

1.See “Okinawa o kataru: shōsetsuka Medoruma Shun-san,” Okinawa Times, May 8, 2016, page 2.

2.In English, see George Feifer’s Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992), for mention of the rape of Okinawan women during and immediately after the Battle of Okinawa by US soldiers on pages 178, 338, and 495–99, and in Japanese, see Suzuyo Takazato et al., “Postwar US Military Crimes Against Women in Okinawa” (Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, 1998).

3.See Kyle Ikeda, Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), Chapter 5, for my discussion of similarities and parallels between the Katsuyama incident and the rape of Sayoko in the novel.

4.Koshikawa’s review of In the Woods of Memory is available on the Japanese publisher’s website http://www.kageshobo.com/main/books/menookunomori.html.

5.See endnote 6 in Ikeda, Okinawan War Memory, page 138.

6.See “Okinawa o kataru,” Okinawa Times, May 8, 2016, page 2, for his explanation for Sayoko’s silence.

7.Alisa Holm, “The Forest in the Depths of Her Eyes: Sayoko’s Silence and Art-Making as a Reparative Force in Medoruma Shun’s Me no oku no mori,” undergraduate thesis, UVM, 2015.

8.“Droplets” appears in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), edited by Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson; “Mabuigumi” appears in Living Spirit: Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa (Manoa, July 2011), edited by Frank Stewart and Katsunori Yamazato; and “Hope,” “Taiwan Woman: Record of a Fish Shoal,” and “Tree of Butterflies” appear in Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2016), edited by Davinder L. Bhowmik and Steve Rabson.

TAKUMA SMINKEY (né Paul Sminkey) is a professor in the Department of British and American Language and Culture at Okinawa International University. He has been living in Japan for over twenty years and acquired Japanese citizenship in 2010. He received a master’s degree in English literature from Temple University and a master’s in Advanced Japanese Studies from Sheffield University. His translations include A Rabbit’s Eyes by Haitani Kenjirō (2005) and Ichigensan—The Newcomer by David Zoppetti (2011).

KYLE IKEDA received his doctorate in Japanese from the University of Hawaii—Manoa in 2007 and is now an associate professor at the University of Vermont. He is one of the leading researchers in English on Shun Medoruma. His comprehensive analysis of Medoruma’s work, Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma, was published in 2014.