Reading Shun Medoruma’s masterwork, In The Woods Of Memory (2017) translated by Takuma Sminkey, was something of a revelation- like a shot from the dark as Stone Bridge Press continues to publish important and relevant Japanese titles that have been overlooked by other publishing houses. Medoruma’s masterwork is about the reverberations of two incidents that took place during the Battle of Okinawa and their ripples through time that affect people’s lives 60 years later. The first incident is the rape of a young Okinawan woman by four American soldiers and the subsequent act is a young man’s attempt to get revenge on the Americans for the rape. The powerful story that addresses the impact and legacy of WWII in Okinawa, which is still home to a large number of American military bases, is also notable for Medoruma’s experimental narrative style that sets it apart from most contemporary novels.
The story is told through a series of different points of view from eight different characters including two Americans. Two chapters are from characters points of view in 1945, the rest take place 60 years later in 2005. In Sminkey’s informative preface, he discusses the challenges that this novel presented for a translator in terms of the experimental use of narrative techniques such as mixing of voices, lack of pronouns, avoidance of using quotes to denote speech, and use of the Okinawan language. The later issue, use of an Okinawan language, was specifically a difficult issue. The dialect depicted in the novel is a spoken language that Medoruma has rendered in the original with a Japanese gloss so that readers can seemingly “hear” the language even though the average standard Japanese speaker would not understand the language. As a result, Sminkey has chosen to avoid this issue since it was impossible to recreate the complexity of these sections of the novel accurately. This is most notable in the section narrated by Seiji, the young man seeking revenge, which was from 1945. This section has a complex mixed narrative that begins in the present, and moves into the past seemingly along with hallucinations before returning to the present. There is also a section narrated from Seiji in 2005. Notably absent from the novel is a chapter narrated by Sayoko, the girl who was raped and suffered the most in the novel.
In the preface, Sminkey points out the several parallels of actual events in Okinawa that reverberate throughout the novel which itself is based on a true story. Medoruma has stated that the central incident of the rape was based on a story he heard from his mother that took place on a small island, Yagaji Island, in the north part of Okinawa Island as war raged on fiercely in the south. One significant parallel is the 1995 incident where three American servicemen raped an elementary student. In addition, there is also a parallel with the 1945 Katusyama incident where some villagers killed three US Marines in retaliation for the repeated rapes of women from their village.
The afterword by Kyle Ikeda discuses Medoruma’s literary career and output. It seems that several of his most well-known stories, including the Akutagawa Prize winning story “Droplets”-a short story that was acclaimed for the use of magic realism and literary sophistication, have been translated into English. However, Medoruma has not published a novel since The Woods of Memory, which was published as book in 2009. However, there are two unpublished critically acclaimed novels, Fuon: The Crying Wind (2004) and Niji no tori (Rainbow Bird, 2006) that will hopefully find translation and publication in English in the near future. Ikeda explains that the recent lack of production reflects Medoruma’s current role as a protester to the American presence in Okinawa. Most recently, in April of 2016, he was detained for paddling his canoe into a restricted area near a construction site.
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