Arts, Faculty of
Asian Studies, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Chen, Ruikun
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
Half a century has passed since Okinawa’s 1972 reversion to Japan after 27 years of American military rule, but the region continues to struggle with unfinished histories of colonization, war(s), and occupation. Despite this troubled past and present, mainland Japan has often depicted Okinawa Prefecture as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima), exoticizing it while reinforcing its colonial status. Medoruma Shun (b. 1960), a significant literary voice from Okinawa, has proactively written about war memories of the Battle of Okinawa and its aftermath through his innovative fiction. This thesis examines how Medoruma’s short stories “Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) and “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998) challenge hegemonic narratives about Okinawa’s war experiences and its portrayal as “healing islands” through their representations of human bodies within and against various natural, linguistic, and social landscapes. In the main chapters, I analyze “Droplets” and its use of bodily sensation to explore war experiences excluded from official historical accounts. This approach reveals the complex position of Okinawans as both victims and victimizers. My close readings demonstrate how the protagonist’s mysteriously swollen foot and the water it exudes function to disrupt the alignment between body and nation, thereby subverting the absorption of individual Okinawan experiences into simplified accounts of sacrifice and victimhood. I also read “Spirit Stuffing” as a challenge to the “healing islands” narrative through its portrayal of community tensions and the dynamic interplay between human bodies and environmental imagery. The story’s narrative perspective and treatment of gendered bodies unmask how supposedly “healing” landscapes operate as repositories of unresolved trauma. By examining these literary interventions, I argue that Medoruma’s writing constitutes a form of decolonial resistance specific to the Okinawan context. Rather than offering paths to reconcile war memories, both texts expose fundamental contradictions between mainland Japan’s portrayal of Okinawa and war survivors’ trauma. Through his focus on embodied experience and environmental connection, Medoruma creates a literary space where voices excluded from colonial frameworks become audible while also inviting readers to engage as active listeners in a process that transcends the binary of colonizer and colonized.
BENEATH THE HEALING ISLANDS: CORPOREAL MEMORY AND DECOLONIAL WRITING IN MEDORUMA SHUN’S WAR FICTION by Ruikun Chen B.A., Beijing Language and Culture University, 2022 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Asian Studies) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2025 © Ruikun Chen, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Beneath the Healing Islands: Corporeal Memory and Decolonial Writing in Medoruma Shun’s War Fiction submitted by Ruikun Chen in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Asian Studies Examining Committee: Christina Yi, Associate Professor, Asian Studies, UBC Supervisor Sharalyn Orbaugh, Professor, Asian Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Ayaka Yoshimizu, Associate Professor of Teaching, Asian Studies, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract Half a century has passed since Okinawa’s 1972 reversion to Japan after 27 years of American military rule, but the region continues to struggle with unfinished histories of colonization, war(s), and occupation. Despite this troubled past and present, mainland Japan has often depicted Okinawa Prefecture as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima), exoticizing it while reinforcing its colonial status. Medoruma Shun (b. 1960), a significant literary voice from Okinawa, has proactively written about war memories of the Battle of Okinawa and its aftermath through his innovative fiction. This thesis examines how Medoruma’s short stories “Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) and “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998) challenge hegemonic narratives about Okinawa’s war experiences and its portrayal as “healing islands” through their representations of human bodies within and against various natural, linguistic, and social landscapes. In the main chapters, I analyze “Droplets” and its use of bodily sensation to explore war experiences excluded from official historical accounts. This approach reveals the complex position of Okinawans as both victims and victimizers. My close readings demonstrate how the protagonist’s mysteriously swollen foot and the water it exudes function to disrupt the alignment between body and nation, thereby subverting the absorption of individual Okinawan experiences into simplified accounts of sacrifice and victimhood. I also read “Spirit Stuffing” as a challenge to the “healing islands” narrative through its portrayal of community tensions and the dynamic interplay between human bodies and environmental imagery. The story’s narrative perspective and treatment of gendered bodies unmask how supposedly “healing” landscapes operate as repositories of unresolved trauma. iv By examining these literary interventions, I argue that Medoruma’s writing constitutes a form of decolonial resistance specific to the Okinawan context. Rather than offering paths to reconcile war memories, both texts expose fundamental contradictions between mainland Japan’s portrayal of Okinawa and war survivors’ trauma. Through his focus on embodied experience and environmental connection, Medoruma creates a literary space where voices excluded from colonial frameworks become audible while also inviting readers to engage as active listeners in a process that transcends the binary of colonizer and colonized. v Lay Summary This thesis examines how the Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun challenges conventional war narratives and portrayals of Okinawa Prefecture as “healing islands” through his short stories “Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) and “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998). Okinawa has a long history of colonization, war(s), and ongoing U.S. military occupation. Despite this fact, the mainland Japanese government has minimized military atrocities while simultaneously marketing the islands as an exotic tourist destination. I analyze how Medoruma’s fiction resists these simplifications through the portrayal of transforming bodies. In “Droplets,” a protagonist’s mysteriously swollen foot disrupts prevailing assumptions about the body and the nation, revealing Okinawan civilians’ complex position as both victims and victimizers. In “Spirit Stuffing,” supposedly idyllic landscapes hide unresolved trauma. By focusing on how characters navigate physical deformity, community tensions, and ghostly encounters, I demonstrate how Medoruma’s literary works create spaces where voices silenced by colonial narratives can be heard. vi Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Ruikun Chen. No Generative Artificial Intelligence tools were used in the research process, development, or writing of the thesis. vii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................................v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... ix Dedication ................................................................................................................................... xiii Chapter One: Introduction .......................................................................................................... 1 Hegemonic Narratives Regarding Okinawa’s Past and Present ............................................. 3 Medoruma Shun’s Writing and His Criticisms through Body and Landscapes ..................... 7 Chapter Summaries ............................................................................................................... 11 Chapter Two: Disturbing the Alignment of Body and Nation in “Droplets” (1997) ............ 14 National Narratives on the Battle of Okinawa ...................................................................... 16 Bodily Memories: When the Past Refuses to Evaporate ...................................................... 22 Disturbing the Alignment of the Body and Nation ............................................................... 32 Conclusion: A Melancholy Ending ....................................................................................... 39 Chapter Three: Challenging the “Healing Islands” Narrative through Community Division and War Memory in “Spirit Stuffing” (1998) .......................................................................... 42 Narrative Strategy/Perspective and Language ...................................................................... 44 The Tensions of Community vis-à-vis Landscape ................................................................ 51 Gendered Bodies and Bodies Are Situated Within Landscapes ........................................... 63 Conclusion: Unhealed Wounds beneath the “Healing Islands” Narrative ............................ 75 viii Chapter Four: Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 78 Literary Interventions as a Form of Decolonial Ethics ......................................................... 81 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................85 ix Acknowledgements Why are you interested in Okinawa, and why do you study Okinawan literature? These questions have deeply haunted me since my first day at UBC, and this thesis represents my response to them after three years. Taking this opportunity and privilege, I would like to express my gratitude to many people—thanking them for their support and assistance throughout this journey, and for their love and companionship. First and foremost, I bow in profound gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Christina Yi. I forever admire her passion and rigorous approach to textual analysis. Without her guidance and support, I wouldn’t be able to complete this thesis or achieve all that I have today. It was she who helped me confirm my absolute devotion to literature; she who led me to enchant myself in the dance of authors flickering between lines of text. If the Owl of Minerva indeed takes flight at dusk, then Dr. Yi has been the wind beneath my wings through numerous nights of exploration of Japanese-language literature these past three years, lifting me with her expertise, critiques, and encouragement. Likewise, I sincerely thank Dr. Sharalyn Orbaugh for reviewing my thesis drafts amidst her many commitments and offering insightful suggestions. I am grateful for how, in seminars and lectures alike, she expanded my interests and horizons in gender and queer studies through her expertise and enthusiasm, compelling me to continually examine this world through new perspectives. Suppose the boundaries of my language are indeed the boundaries of my world. In that case, Dr. Orbaugh, through her intellectual charisma and rich scholarship, has beckoned me across those borders into territories beyond what my words alone could envision. I wish to thank Dr. Ayaka Yoshimizu for making time in her busy schedule to join my thesis committee. As the instructor for whom I first served as a teaching assistant upon arriving at UBC and associate graduate advisor as I’m writing this thesis, I’m grateful to Dr. Yoshimizu x for her guidance and care in countless matters. Similarly, I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Christina Laffin, who introduced me to public humanities scholarship and supported my IUC 10-month program in Yokohama and PhD applications. I believe she is a truly exceptional educator who poetically inspired me to consider the relationship between human and non-human within the illumination of a futuristic possibility. I would also like to thank Dr. Aynur Kadir, who led me into the studies of Indigenous experiences and decolonization. During our seminars, discussing what a decolonial future might look like amid the lush splendor of Nitobe Garden or against the backdrop of gentle waves and sea breezes at Tower Beach, I came to understand that we enact our humanity through our discourses and actions—we choose to become human each day and every day. Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr. Joshua Mostow, Dr. Hyung-Gu Lynn, Dr. Fuyubi Nakamura, Dr. Bruce Rusk, Dr. Kay Duffy, and Dr. Christopher Rea, from whom I have had the opportunity to learn from during my academic journey, whether in class or through off-class conversations and/or lectures. I am grateful to Dr. Nina Langton and Dr. Haley Blum, with whom I worked as their teaching assistants, as such experiences helped me to understand what it means to be a graduate student. I also want to thank Ms. Tomoko Kitayama Yen for her extensive knowledge about Japanese studies and help with conducting research for the Yoshino-ki project and Okinawan studies as well. My sincere gratitude extends to Ms. Diane Zell for her generous support through the Patrick David Campbell Graduate Fellowship, which provided crucial financial assistance that allowed me to focus more fully on my research and academic development. My cohorts in the Asian Studies graduate program and my peers at UBC have made my journey a tremendous one. Among them, I would first like to express my gratitude to the xi following individuals (henceforth names are in alphabetical order of family names): Tianyu Li, Sydney Olney, Yuewei Wang, Roy Yan, and Ryan Zhao. Life is certainly a winding labyrinth with memories as our sole companions. Paths that might never have crossed have created ripples through our encounters here, as they revealed to me—in the long night, there are always people whose greetings dispel the black and white, filling the world with color. Therefore, I thank them for the many unforgettable moments we have shared over these three years, and for the suggestions and feedback they provided on my thesis drafts. There are many other amazing peers: Cheng Chi, Ying Han, Lilian Higashikata, Quinton Huang, Shota Iwasaki, Jiahe Miao, Aydin Quach, Anastasia Safina, Haruki Sekiguchi, Lavanya Verma, Skyler Wolf, Helena Xavier, Dalia Xu, Ai Yamamoto, Gwendolyn Yap, Jessica Zhang, Ruiying Zhang, Zoe Zhang, and my classmates at ASIA 592 (206), ASIA 516 (039), and ASIA 590 (036). To the resilient years we walked together and every moment of self-doubt—thank you for being the night watchers of my long dream. I extend my deepest gratitude to the remarkable faculty and staff at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies and support of the Toshizo Watanabe Foundation: Dr. Bruce Batten, Aoki Sōichi-sensei, Satō Tsukasa-sensei, Senda Akiyo-sensei, Satō Ari-sensei, Yuki Saori-sensei, and Otake Hiroko-sensei. Senda-sensei taught me everything from grammar to culture and shared her knowledge on crafting presentations and expressing the nuances and implications of written materials, as well as engaging with both general and specialized topics in a theoretical and abstract way. I would also like to thank Satō Ari-sensei for discussing Okinawan literature and culture with me and sharing her knowledge about Okinawa, as well as helping me complete my final presentation. I also wish to thank Ōshiro Sadatoshi-sensei and Shaolin Chen for their warm hospitality during my time in Okinawa. I am grateful to Ōshiro- xii sensei for taking me to Shuri Castle and kindly inviting me to his home to discuss Okinawan literature. Thank you to Shaolin for showing me around the University of the Ryukyus and driving me around. My heartfelt thanks also go to some of my longtime friends. I am especially grateful to Kaiyue Zhang for always standing by my side, for her unwavering trust and encouragement, and for the wonderful times we spent exploring the “Sijiucheng (four-nine city)” together. I would also like to thank: Yaqi Kang, Qingyi Li, Shuangxi Liu, Yuxin Ma, Fanzhu Pei, Chester Wang, Yifei Wang, Mengze Wei, Yi Yang, Anran Zhang, Karen Zhang, Ruihao Zhang, and Ting Zheng. In the boundless dark nights of winter, time is a flower; in the bustling warm winds of summer, we lost ourselves in days and nights where every conversation was a celebration. We reached out to each other, ending our wandering through the act of giving. And we will surely meet again at the end of the western wind where flowers bloom in spring. Finally, I would like to thank every member of my family and say I love you. To my parents, I am especially grateful for their unconditional love and support of my academic pursuits. I am particularly indebted to my mother. I would not exist without her and no amount of gratitude would ever be sufficient to thank her. Thank you to my aunt’s family and my dearest sister. This thesis is also dedicated to my late beloved grandfathers, CHEN Chaowang 陈朝万, and LIAO Renyi 廖仁义, for they always believed in me and inspired me to move forward. More than three years ago, the pandemic was ravaging the world. At that time, I could never have imagined that one day I would cross the Pacific Ocean to reach the other side of the world. I hope this thesis will be useful to the reader who has read this far, and I wish you all the best in your endeavors. Per aspera ad astra. xiii Dedication To all the deceased and survivors of the Battle of Okinawa and their descendants. May all souls rest in peace and may all memories find their way home. 1 Chapter One: Introduction 2022 commemorated the 50th year of Okinawa’s “reversion” to Japan by the United States. For half a century, post-reversion Okinawa literature has been tied to its unfinished histories of colonization, war(s), and occupation. Many writers have focused in particular on the Battle of Okinawa (April – June 1945) between U.S. and Japanese troops during the Asia-Pacific War, which devastated Okinawa’s major cities and resulted in the deaths of over 150,000 Okinawans, or roughly one-quarter to one third of the population.1 Following its unconditional surrender to the Allied Powers, Japan was put under Allied occupation. While the Occupation formally ended for the rest of Japan in 1952, the occupation of Okinawa ensued until May 15th, 1972. Even today, Okinawa still has the largest U.S. military installation in the Asia-Pacific region. Although it only contains 0.6 percent of Japan’s total area, 75 percent of the U.S. military bases in Japan are located on Okinawan territory.2 According to philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya, these American military bases incorporated Okinawa into a “system of sacrifice,” positioning Okinawa as an “internal colony” or even “a site where colonialisms intersect.”3 Despite this, the troubling past and present have been overshadowed by the mainland portrayal of Okinawa Prefecture as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima).4 While this quasi-orientalist gaze captures Okinawa’s natural beauty, it also exoticizes and exploits the islands, further reinforcing 1 ŌSHIRO Masayasu 大城将保, Okinawa-sen: minshū no me de toraeru sensō 沖縄戦：民衆の眼でとられる「戦争」 (Kōbunken 高文研, 2000), 80. 2 Miyume Tanji, Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa (Routledge, 2006), 1; and Nakaima Hirokazu, “Okinawa Governor Nakaima: An Irreparable Rift in Okinawa/Japan/US Relations Would Result From Forceful Construction of Henoko Base,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 9, Issue 39 no. 2, September 28, 2011, https://apjjf.org/2011/9/39/nakaima-hirokazu/3607/article. 3 TAKAHASHI Tetsuya 高橋哲哉, Gisei no shisutemu: Fukushima, Okinawa 犠牲のシステム 福島・沖縄 (Shūeisha Shinsho 集英社新書, 2012), 162-197; Nakazato Isao, “Okinawa as an Intersection of Colonialisms: Toward Creating a Place Open to and Interconnecting with Asia,” International Critical Thought 3, no. 2 (2013): 184. 4 I follow Victoria Young’s English translation of the phrase iyashi no shima as “healing islands” in this thesis. Although the two literary texts I focus on are set on the Okinawa main island (Okinawa hontō), I use the plural form here to acknowledge that Okinawa Prefecture consist of many islands. In other words, to serve the purpose of decentralization and decolonization, I acknowledge that not just the Okinawa main island is depicted as the touristic destination in hegemonic narratives, but also other islands that comprise the prefecture. See Victoria Young, “Inciting the Past: Okinawan Literature and the Decolonising Turn,” Japan Forum 32, no. 4 (2020): 579. 2 Okinawa’s subjugated status as a colonial other within the nation.5 A number of Okinawan writers have critiqued the persistent legacies of the Battle of Okinawa and Okinawa’s (post)colonial status quo by unearthing, recording, and interpreting Okinawa’s past. Among them is Medoruma Shun 目取真俊 (b. 1960), an Okinawan writer and social critic who writes frequently on the theme of war memory and oppression. Medoruma’s fiction is notable in its focus on the survivors of the Battle of Okinawa and their offspring and their complex positionalities of both victim and victimizer. Rather than situating Okinawa within the binary of center/periphery, Medoruma challenges the narrative of the Japanese nation-state from the perspective of different individuals in Okinawa. His writings make the reader realize that not only did Okinawa experience oppression from imperial Japan, but it also bears the historical burden of being a war perpetrator. I intend to probe such dynamics between these two inquiries: on the one hand, how Okinawans have represented themselves; on the other hand, how they have been represented by others, especially by mainland Japanese, who have exerted hegemony over Okinawa for more than a century. Therefore, in this thesis, I analyze two short stories by Medoruma—“Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) and “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998)—in order to shed light on how war memories intersected and entangled with the issues Okinawa faced after its reversion. I chose them for two reasons: first, each tells a story about “healing” from a different aspect; second, these texts engage in dialogue with each other. Through close readings of “Droplets” and “Spirit Stuffing,” this thesis examines how bodily experiences and narrative techniques function in Medoruma’s fiction as sites of resistance 5 See Hidefumi Nishiyama, “Decolonizing Knowledge of and from Okinawa,” Critical Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (2022): 552-573. In this thesis, I follow Hidefumi Nishiyama’s definition regarding “decolonial/decolonization” and “hegemonic and colonial claims.” For the former, it means the process and act of undoing colonial forms of knowledge; for the latter, it means, dominant narratives about the history of Okinawa and the identity of Okinawans/Ryukyuans. Nishiyama claims that “Japanese hegemonic narratives continue to posit that Okinawa is part of Japan and Okinawans are Japanese, erasing the actual history of forced annexation and assimilation in the late nineteenth century” (565). However, I extend these hegemonic narratives to the narratives concerning Okinawans’ war experiences and other dominant tourism-led depiction of Okinawa prefecture as “healing islands.” 3 against hegemonic narratives. In “Droplets,” the protagonist’s swollen foot and the water it exudes disrupt the alignment between body and nation, challenging the absorption of individual Okinawan experiences into simplified accounts of sacrifice and victimhood. Similarly, in “Spirit Stuffing,” the story’s sophisticated narrative perspective and treatment of gendered bodies reveal how supposedly “healing” landscapes actually function as repositories of unresolved trauma. Rather than offering paths to reconcile with war memories,6 Medoruma exposes the fundamental contradictions between mainland Japan’s portrayal of Okinawa prefecture as “healing islands” and war survivors’ persistent trauma and memories that lie beneath colonial claims, refusing to be easily buried or simplified. Hegemonic Narratives Regarding Okinawa’s Past and Present Before considering Medoruma’s literary writing as decolonial effort, we must first attend to the ways in which mainland Japanese dominant narratives regarding Okinawa and its war experiences have been conscripted into colonial or hegemonic systems. In his scholarship, Hidefumi Nishiyama has conceptualized the production of ignorance about Okinawa’s war experiences in Japanese historical narratives as a type of “mainland ignorance.” Drawing from Charles W. Mills’ concept of “white ignorance,” Nishiyama argues that this mainland ignorance is form of colonial unknowing that “produces a colonial ordering, which attempts to obfuscate the oppressive relationship between mainland states and islands and the colonial past and present of islands.”7 In Okinawa’s case, the 1972 reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty did not 6 In this thesis, I use the word “reconcile” in a different way than in the Canadian context in which the noun form “reconciliation” is generally understood as a move made by the Canadian state to build a renewed relationship with Indigenous peoples. However, inspired by Davinder Bhowmik’s assertion that fiction from Okinawa as a genre “continues to function as a creative space in which Okinawa’s authors express particular concerns that bear a relation to Okinawa’s past, present, and future,” I use “reconcile” to describe the struggles and process of accommodation with the past and trauma of war survivors. See Davinder Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (Routledge, 2008), 12. 7 Hidefumi Nishiyama, “Mainland Ignorance: Okinawa and Japanese Colonial Unknowing,” Geoforum 157 (2024): 104146, 2. 4 result in a substantial reduction or complete removal of U.S. military installations from Okinawa Island and even the broader demilitarization of the Ryukyu Islands, as many Okinawans had hoped.8 On the contrary, Okinawa, which had been under U.S. military control since the Asia-Pacific War’s end, simply became Japanese territory while maintaining its heavy military presence. Five decades after the reversion, the Japanese government has tried to gloss over the Japanese military’s atrocities towards Okinawan residents during the Battle of Okinawa; the tourism-fueled “Okinawa boom” that arose in the 1990s has also further averted the mainland’s attention from the colonial history of Okinawa and its neocolonial present. It should be noted that ignorance is not just a lack of knowledge; it can be seen as a product of social construction by individuals and institutions. It can be deliberately cultivated and carries social and political implications.9 Nishiyama’s research on the colonial unknowing presented in Japanese historical narratives offers important theoretical groundwork for the discussion of the colonial nature of hegemonic narratives from mainland Japan. Notably, such colonial narratives regarding Okinawan civilians’ war experiences as a form of colonial unknowing also operate through everyday settings like school textbooks and other media. For instance, Japanese school textbooks have consistently minimized the extent of imperial Japan’s violence against the Okinawan people during the Battle of Okinawa.10 Two particularly significant examples of this violence have been understated: first, the military-ordered “mass suicides” where Okinawan civilians were commanded to kill one another before they committed 8 Nishiyama, “Decolonizing Knowledge,” 552. 9 Hidefumi Nishiyama, “Base Built in the Middle of ‘Rice Fields’: A Politics of Ignorance in Okinawa,” Geopolitics 27, no. 2 (2022): 546. 10 See Aniya Masaaki, “Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan’s Textbook Controversy,” trans. Kyoko Selden, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, January 6, 2008, https://apjjf.org/aniya-masaaki/2629/article and Gavan McCormack and Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), 15-50. 5 suicide; and second, the direct killings of Okinawans by Japanese military forces under accusations of spying. It is against this backdrop that we should consider Okinawan literary representations of the war and its aftermath. As Kyle Ikeda notes, Okinawan war literature serves two important functions. First, it helps preserve public memory of how Okinawan civilians suffered during the battle, and second, it provides an alternative perspective to the dominant narratives from mainland Japan.11 As will be discussed later in this thesis, these dominant narratives include nationalistic narratives of sacrifice and officially sanctioned historical accounts found in textbooks. The disconnect between these sanitized accounts and the actual experiences of Okinawan war survivors has motivated many survivors to come forward with their testimonies about witnessing such incidents. In this way, Medoruma’s literary texts can be understood as offering counter-memories and alternative historical records, documenting violence perpetrated by soldiers against Okinawan civilians.12 As Nishiyama reminds us, “the production of ignorance sometimes overlaps with that of knowledge, which entails the marginalization of particular peoples, places, histories.”13 We can see the overlapping of ignorance and knowledge production in tourism-driven representations of Okinawa as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima). This commodified image emerged during the “healing boom” (iyashi būmu) of the 1990s, when mainland Japanese society experienced economic downturn and social anxiety. As Oliver E. Kühne argues, the socioeconomic crisis of this period directly contributed to reimagining Okinawa as an exotic paradise offering spiritual 11 Kyle Ikeda, “Writing and Remembering the Battle of Okinawa: War Memory and Literature.” in Routledge Handbook of Modern Japanese Literature, ed. Rachael Hutchinson and Leith Morton (Routledge, 2016), 184-186. 12 Ikeda, “Writing and Remembering,” 185. 13 Nishiyama, “Base Built in the Middle of ‘Rice Fields,’” 548. 6 and emotional healing for mainland Japanese.14 To put it differently, this tourism-driven narrative relied on strategically obscuring contemporary realities while amplifying stereotypical elements that catered to mainland Japanese fantasies. The representation deliberately excluded discussion of ongoing issues like the heavy U.S. military presence, high unemployment rates, economic inequality, and political tensions with mainland Japan. Instead, it promoted an idealized vision of Okinawa characterized by beautiful beaches, “gentleness” (yasashisa) and “comfort” (iyashi), traditional arts and spirituality, and a pre-modern lifestyle untainted by contemporary pressures.15 Ultimately, this selective representation produces a form of colonial unknowing that attempts to obscure the oppressive relationship between mainland Japan and the Okinawan islands. Significantly, many Okinawan writers and artists have actively resisted this reductive “healing islands” narrative through counter-narratives that insist on depicting the complexities of Okinawan cultural identity.16 Authors like Medoruma Shun create both fictional and non-fictional works that deliberately highlight ongoing struggles, the psychological impact of historical trauma, and diversity within Okinawan perspectives. Their literary resistance demonstrates how the tourism-focused narrative represents another manifestation of mainland Japanese hegemonic control over Okinawan representation—one that serves mainland needs while obscuring Okinawan realities. 14 Oliver E. Kühne, “Research Report: Historical Amnesia and the ‘Neo-Imperial Gaze’ in the Okinawa Boom,” Contemporary Japan 24, no. 2 (2012): 220-225. 15 Yasuhiro Tanaka, Joachim Bergstrom, and Olga Shmyglo, “The Media Representation of ‘Okinawa’ and US/Japan Hegemony,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (2003): 426, as quoted in Kühne, “Research Report,” 227. 16 Ina Hein, “Constructing Difference in Japan: Literary Counter-Images of the Okinawa Boom,” Contemporary Japan 22, no. 1-2 (2010): 185. 7 Medoruma Shun’s Writing and His Criticisms through Body and Landscapes Medoruma Shun emerged as one of Okinawa’s most significant literary figures in the late 1990s, gaining national recognition after winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1997 for his short story “Droplets.” Though he was already respected within Okinawa as the recipient of several regional literary prizes since the early 1980s, this national award marked a turning point in his career, drawing attention to Okinawan literature and his writing beyond the prefecture’s boundaries. His literary accomplishments continued with the Kawabata Yasunari and Kiyama Shōhei literary prizes in 2000 for the short story “Spirit Stuffing,” and his creative reach expanded when he wrote the screenplay for The Crying Wind (Fūon), which received the Montreal Film Festival Innovation Prize in 2004. Medoruma’s substantial body of work includes critically acclaimed fiction like the short story “With a Vision” (“Umukaji tu chiriti,” 1999), the novella “Tree of Butterflies” (“Gunchō no ki,” 2000), and novels such as Rainbow Bird (Niji no tori, 2006) and Forest at the Back of My Eye (Me no oku no mori, 2009). As Kyle Ikeda notes, his growing international recognition is evidenced by translations of his works into English, Chinese, Egyptian, Russian, and French.17 Born in Nakijin, a northern Okinawan town located on the Motobu peninsula facing the East China Sea, Medoruma grew up in a landscape marked by natural abundance. As Davinder Bhowmik notes, Nakijin was once the residence of the Hokuzan king during Okinawa’s three-mountain (sanzan) period.18 The town’s castle ruins, adorned with Japan’s earliest-blooming cherry trees each January, stand as a reminder of northern Okinawa’s historical importance as a cultural and economic center. The agricultural environment of his hometown—with its sugar cane, watermelon, leaf tobacco, greens, and pineapple fields—provided the backdrop for 17 Kyle Ikeda, Okinawan War Memory: Transgenerational Trauma and the War Fiction of Medoruma Shun (Routledge, 2014), 1. 18 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 131. 8 Medoruma’s early life.19 Additionally, the linguistic environment of Medoruma’s formative years proved equally significant in shaping his identity as a writer. Bhowmik recounts a pivotal incident from Medoruma’s childhood. In 1969, his teacher forbade the use of local dialect in the classroom, instructing students to replace elements of their everyday speech with standard Japanese equivalents. This imposition of linguistic standards left Medoruma with feelings of shame, as the mandated language felt alien compared to his natural mode of expression. Paradoxically, this experience led him to resist standard Japanese for years, until he began his university education.20 This linguistic tension reflects broader historical dynamics between mainland Japan and Okinawa and would later inform his literary approaches to questions of identity and cultural memory. While Medoruma addresses a broad spectrum of themes in his work, his writing about Okinawan war memory and trauma stands as his most recognized and significant contribution. Medoruma is the son of two survivors of the Battle of Okinawa, and approximately one-third of his fictional works focus on war survivors and the lingering effects of combat on their postwar existence.21 His non-fiction regularly analyzes Okinawa’s war legacies in relation to contemporary political issues and U.S. military bases, and he frequently appears as a featured speaker at symposia about the Battle of Okinawa in both Okinawa and mainland Japan.22 Through his groundbreaking fiction, editorial writing, essays, blog posts, and public speaking, Medoruma has consistently challenged conventional representations of the Battle of Okinawa, raising critical questions about the nature of Okinawan war memory and expanding the possibilities of war representation. 19 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 131. 20 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 132. 21 Ikeda, Okinawan War Memory, 1. 22 Michael Molasky, “Medoruma Shun: The Writer as Public Intellectual in Okinawa Today,” in Islands of Discontent: Okinawan Responses to Japanese and American Power, ed. Laura Hein and Mark Selden (Rowman & Little eld, 2003), 169-172. 9 In Japanese academia, Shinjō Ikuo’s Okinawa bungaku to iu kuwadate (2003) stands out as the earliest Japanese-language monograph to analyze Medoruma’s literary works. Shinjō, who is himself a scholar from Okinawa, argues that “Okinawa” as a circulating signifier is consciously dismantled by Medoruma in a way that allows readers who have been minoritized through historical circumstances and (post-)colonial structures to connect to each other in various ways through Okinawa as a medium.23 Here Shinjō’s analysis draws attention to how Medoruma distinguishes and breaks the narrative order of the Japanese nation-state. More recently, literary critic Murakami Yōko has analyzed Medoruma’s “Droplets” as a lens to clarify the concept of kyōyū (sharing) as well as the characteristics of “atomic-bomb literature” (genbaku bungaku) and Okinawan literature (Okinawa bungaku) in her monograph Dekigoto no zankyō (2015). Another scholar, Onishi Yasumitsu, has provided a more recent and wide-ranging Japanese-language study of Medoruma’s literary works. According to Onishi, Medoruma’s literature offers an avenue to protest the violence of the nation and internal community divisions.24 In English-language scholarship, Michael Molasky argues that Medoruma Shun and other accomplished Okinawan writers of fiction inevitably participate in “a discursive struggle in which their work serves to offset the facile, fragmented, and stereotypical views of Okinawa that dominate the public sphere.”25 Davinder Bhowmik’s study Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (2008) analyses five major works by Medoruma in relation to the genre of Okinawan fiction and examines the ways that Medoruma exploits the overlap that exists between regional and minority literature to transgress generic boundaries. Meanwhile, Kyle 23 Shinjō Ikuo 新城郁夫, Okinawa bungaku to iu kuwadate: kattō suru gengo, shintai, kioku 沖縄文学という企て：葛藤する言語・身体・記憶 (Impact Shuppankai インパクト出版会, 2003), 143. 24 ONISHI Yasumitsu 尾西康充, Okinawa: kioku to kokuhatsu no bungaku : Medoruma Shun no egaku shihai to bōryoku 沖縄:記憶と告発の文学:目取真俊の描く支配と暴力 (Ōtsuki Shoten 大月書店, 2019), 11-28. 25 Molasky, “Medoruma Shun,” 161-191. 10 Ikeda has examined Medoruma Shun’s war fiction through the lens of Holocaust second-generation war survivor literature, concentrating on how Medoruma’s war fiction contributes to a broader understanding of the Battle of Okinawa in different ways from survivor testimonies and historical narratives. As Kuan-Hsing Chen argues in Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialisation (2010), since colonialism is still present in Asia and continues to reorganize itself in the face of shifting historical processes, there is a continuing need for practitioners of literary and cultural studies to deconstruct, decenter, and disarticulate the colonial cultural imaginary in order to further the decolonization process.26 More recent articles by Ariko S. Ikehara and Victoria Young cite the decolonizing turn in Okinawan literary studies, although those articles do not focus on Medoruma Shun. Ikehara conceptualizes the “champurū text” as an interpretative tool that, in its critical and creative power of articulation, reveals the overlapping frontiers of place, “race,” and space that characterizes Okinawa’s postwar life and environment which formed in the backdrop of American military occupation and presence.27 Meanwhile, Young focuses on the writing of Sakiyama Tami (b. 1954). Young illustrates that Sakiyama inserts Okinawan dialect/Ryukyuan language into her works, expressing the multilingual reality of contemporary Okinawa against a history of war and oppression through such strategies.28 Both scholars’ works are useful for thinking about Medoruma’s efforts to write (post)colonial trauma and resist Okinawa’s ongoing neo-colonization. In this thesis, I argue that we can see these same decolonial efforts in both “Droplets” and “Spirit Stuffing” through Medoruma’s representation of human bodies within and against various 26 Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Duke University Press, 2010), 112. 27 In Ikehara’s definition, “champurū” is an Okinawan word for mixing and/or being mixed and often refers to the Okinawan way of blending cultures including culinary ones. See Ariko S. Ikehara, “Champurū Text: Decolonial Okinawa Writing” in Rethinking Postwar Okinawa: Beyond American Occupation, ed. Hiroko Matsuda and Pedro Iacobelli (Lexington Books, 2017), 121–147. 28 Young, “Inciting the Past,” 577–600. 11 natural, linguistic, and social landscapes. In “Droplets,” Tokushō’s mysteriously swollen foot and the water it exudes represent a bodily rebellion against national narratives that have sanitized Okinawan war experiences, while his linguistic oscillation between the “common language” and Okinawan dialect reveals the tensions between imposed national (Japanese) identity and suppressed Okinawan selfhood. Similarly, in “Spirit Stuffing,” Uta’s active female body disrupts expectations of docility through her physical confrontations with community authorities, while Kōtarō’s passive, deteriorating body inhabited by the āman (or hermit crab) becomes a site where unresolved trauma manifests. The supposedly idyllic landscapes in both texts—from the limestone caves in “Droplets” to the moonlit beaches in “Spirit Stuffing”—function not as healing spaces for tourism but as repositories of traumatic memories that resist national containment. I argue that by centering these embodied experiences and environmental connections, Medoruma’s literary writing itself becomes a powerful form of decolonial resistance against the epistemic violence of colonialism that has long characterized mainland Japan’s relationship with Okinawa. Chapter Summaries In Chapter Two, I examine Medoruma Shun’s milestone work “Droplets,” analyzing how the author employs bodily sensation to explore war experiences typically excluded from official historical accounts. The chapter begins by establishing the historical background of the Battle of Okinawa and its catastrophic impact on Okinawa’s modern history. Moving on to close reading and careful attention to the backdrop of the text, I focus on the protagonist Tokushō’s sudden bodily transformation, interpreting it as a rebellion of bodily memory against sanitized national narratives. My analysis in this chapter then shifts to explore how Medoruma’s embodied 12 narrative approach immerses readers in Tokushō’s experiences while examining his disciplined use of the “common language” and the day-night dichotomy of his body. Ultimately, I argue that “Droplets” functions as a counter-narrative challenging the epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism by revealing the complex position of Okinawans as both victims and victimizers. In Chapter Three, I analyze Medoruma’s “Spirit Stuffing” as a continuation of his critical intervention in hegemonic narratives about Okinawa. I situate the text within the context of the “healing islands” narrative that have dominated representations of Okinawa in mainland Japanese mass media since the 1990s. Through close reading, the chapter explores three key aspects: the narrative strategy aligning with the protagonist’s perspective, the treatment of community tensions, and the portrayal of gendered bodies within landscapes. My analysis reveals how the story’s narrative technique subordinates the narrator’s perspective to that of Uta, the elderly village priestess, while the community center scenes expose tensions within Okinawan rural communities and internalized colonialism. Finally, I turn my attention to the interplay of human bodies and non-human entities (environmental imagery), arguing that Medoruma exposes fundamental contradictions between the “healing islands” narrative and the unresolved wounds of war survivors. The concluding chapter summarizes how Medoruma’s works serve as powerful counter-narratives that challenge hegemonic and colonial claims. I discuss the implications of the thesis for understanding literature’s role in decolonial knowledge production, particularly how fiction can preserve memories threatened by historical revisionism in contemporary Okinawa. This chapter ends with a consideration of the limitations of my approach as an “outsider” to the Okinawan experience and suggests directions for future research, particularly how Medoruma’s 13 fiction can help us understand how literature can create spaces where voices excluded from colonial narratives can be heard. 14 Chapter Two: Disturbing the Alignment of Body and Nation in “Droplets” (1997) Introduction In 1997, Medoruma Shun published his milestone work “Droplets” (“Suiteki,” 1997) in the April issue of Bungakukai.29 The short story won the 27th Kyushu Arts Festival Literary Prize and the 117th Akutagawa Prize, bringing him national and international attention. “Droplets” emerged at a pivotal moment in the mid-1990s when Japanese society was grappling with how to preserve and transmit war memories. The 1980s had already witnessed public disputes over the accuracy of Okinawan war testimony, as perhaps best emblemized by the Ienaga Saburō history textbook lawsuits.30 Historian Ienaga Saburō (1913-2002) had stood at the center of the Japanese history textbook controversy for decades. His lawsuits, which began in the 1960s and continued through the 1980s, challenged the Japanese Ministry of Education’s de facto censorship of school textbooks. These legal battles particularly focused on descriptions of wartime atrocities, including the military’s actions against Okinawan civilians during the Battle of Okinawa.31 Published shortly after the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Okinawa’s end, “Droplets” appeared during a period marked by the heightened public interest in war remembrance as well as the establishment of new memorial sites like the “Cornerstone of Peace” (Heiwa no ishiji) by the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Museum in 1995. Moreover, the 1990s witnessed broader shifts in how Japan confronted its wartime past. The end of the Cold War enabled new articulations of historical justice and redress claims, as international movements 29 The Japanese citations in this thesis draw upon the version in MEDORUMA Shun 目取真俊, “Suiteki 水滴” in Akai yashi no ha: Medoruma Shun tanpen shōsetsu senshū 2 赤い椰子の葉 目取真俊短篇小説選集２(Kage Shobō 影書房, 2011), 189-227; I also refer to the English translation by Michael Molasky in Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa, ed. Michael Molasky and Steve Rabson (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 254-285. My in-text citations use Medoruma in parentheses to refer to this text. I list the English translation page number first, followed by the corresponding page number in the Japanese version. 30 See Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 56. 31 Yoshiko Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education in Post-War Japan, 1945-2007 (Routledge, 2008), xv-xvii. 15 brought attention to previously marginalized voices—from “comfort women” to Korean forced laborers and massacre survivors in China.32 Within this context, Medoruma’s “Droplets” represented a decisive intervention in writing about the Battle of Okinawa. Unlike earlier works that depicted the battle through militaristic heroism or straightforward victimhood narratives, Medoruma employed magical realism and an emphasis on bodily sensation to explore war experiences that typically had been systematically excluded from official historical accounts and public discourse.33 Literary works like “Droplets” reveal Medoruma’s efforts to resist sanitized official accounts of the Asia-Pacific War that minimized military responsibility and civilian suffering, highlighting instead the Battle of Okinawa as a key historical event through which to make visible ongoing contestations over memory, identity, and justice. “Healing” is a key narrative thread that runs through the protagonist Tokushō’s experience, thus providing an avenue through which to understand the impact of a “healing islands” discourse that in fact failed to provide any healing to war survivors. This chapter analyzes “Droplets” within the above-mentioned context of historical revisionism, focusing on the particular narrative techniques that Medoruma employs to explore hitherto hidden and unspeakable war memories. The unconventional narrative structure and perspectives of “Droplets” help illustrate the complex position of Okinawan civilians as both victims and victimizers—experiences that typically lack representations in public memory. I argue that the main protagonist Tokushō’s sudden bodily transformation—his swollen foot and 32 See Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins (Duke University Press, 2016), 5-7. For more on specific social and political trends of this period in Okinawa, see Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 57, as quoted in YAKABI Osamu 屋嘉比収, “Yūgun to gama: Okinawasen no kioku 友軍とガマ—沖縄戦の記憶,” in Okinawa ni mukiau—manazashi to hōhō 沖縄に向き合う—眼差しと方法, ed. 屋嘉比収 YAKABI Osamu, et al, (Shakai Hyōronsha 社会評論社, 2008), 22. 33 For the term “magical realism,” I refer to the definition provided by Davinder Bhowmik. Bhowmik employed five points of definition of this term, such as “Third, in these texts, readers may hesitate between two contradictory understandings of events and experience doubts. [...] The fifth and final feature of magical realist fiction is that it questions received ideas of time, space, and identity.” See Davinder L. Bhowmik, “Plain Water with a Twist of Lime (Stone): Magical Realism in Medoruma Shun,” PAJLS: Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies 4, (2003): 312. 16 the water it exudes—can be interpreted as a rebellion of bodily memory against the absorption of national narratives. In the second half of the chapter, I explore how Medoruma’s portrayal of Tokushō’s disciplined use of “common language” and the dichotomy of his body between day and night serve together to disturb the alignment of the body and nation. Finally, I argue that “Droplets” is a counter-narrative that challenges and resists the epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism, which wants to subsume Okinawans’ individual experiences into the national narrative. National Narratives on the Battle of Okinawa Throughout his literary career, Medoruma has grappled with the devastating impact of the Battle of Okinawa, the Asia-Pacific War’s final and most brutal campaign. The battle’s catastrophic impact on Okinawa’s modern history encompasses not only the immediate violence of warfare but also the complex legacies of colonialism, historical revisionism, and ongoing U.S. military-imperial occupation. The battle destroyed a number of urban areas and claimed over 200,000 lives, including 130,000-150,000 Okinawan civilians—more than one-fourth of the population.34 While mainland Japan regained sovereignty in 1952 following the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and ending of the Allied Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), Okinawa remained under direct U.S. military rule until 1972. Even after reversion to Japanese control, Okinawa’s military burden increased relative to mainland Japan; by 2011, for example, it housed 75% of U.S. military facilities in Japan despite comprising only 0.6% of Japan’s territory.35 One of the main reasons contributing to this enormous civilian toll is the total mobilization of Okinawan civilians. In order to prepare for the fight with the invading U.S. 34 HAYASHI Hirofumi 林博文, Okinawasen to minshū 沖縄戦と民衆 (Ōtsuki Shoten 大月書店, 2001), 5. 35 See Nakaima, “Okinawa Governor Nakaima.” and Tanji, Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa, 1 17 military before they landed on the island, nearly every Okinawa civilian was mobilized to help with the war effort. Along with students, women, and children, even the elderly were also organized and mobilized to participate in activities such as preparing meals for the soldiers, transporting military supplies, and assisting with the construction of fortified military positions.36 Although they were told to fight on behalf of the emperor as fellow imperial subjects, Okinawa civilians experienced atrocities from Japanese soldiers, including forced “compulsory group suicides” (shūdan jiketsu), the executions of suspected “spies” for speaking the Okinawan dialect/Ryukyu language, and the confiscation of food and shelter. As Kyle Ikeda notes, the violence inflicted on Okinawan civilians was deeply rooted in imperial Japan’s colonial relationship with the prefecture.37 In short, following Okinawa’s annexation in 1879, imperial Japan implemented aggressive assimilation policies, particularly through the kōminka seisaku (“policies for the production of imperial subjects”) in the 1930s, which pressured Okinawans to abandon local traditions and adopt Japanese cultural practices.38 While Okinawan survivors have consistently testified that the military forced civilians into compulsory group suicide, Japan’s official history has failed to fully acknowledge this coercion. According to Yoshiko Nazaki, during the 1970s, history textbooks had begun to include “the Battle of Okinawa” in their descriptions of the final stage of the Asia-Pacific War but without details or explicit mention of the murder by Japanese forces of Okinawan civilians. In 1981, Eguchi Keiichi, the co-author of the new high school Japanese history textbook named Japanese History (Nihonshi), was the first to attempt to include the murder of Okinawans by the Japanese forces in a history textbook. Yet, as his third revision was still rejected by the Ministry 36 Ōshiro, Okinawa-sen, 74-77. 37 Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 4-5. 38 Alan S. Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” positions: asia critique 1, no. 3 (1993): 614-615. 18 of Education and the deadline for textbook display was approaching, Eguchi was compelled to give up these references. This incident led to a textbook controversy that erupted the next year when major Japanese newspapers reported the state’s strengthened control over education and watering down of wartime invasion descriptions, triggering an immediate international and national censure against Japanese textbook screening.39 However, right-wing nationalist groups soon launched several counter-offensives in reaction, arguing that “each nation is entitled to decide the content of its own school curriculum” and viewing critical perspectives on Japan’s wartime conduct as “‘masochistic’ (jigyakuteki) and lacking ‘pride in the history of our nation.”40 Through both direct pressure on the Ministry of Education and what came to be known as the “guided self-censorship” of publishers, descriptions of wartime atrocities were gradually removed or softened in textbooks through the 1990s and 2000s.41 This conflict between lived memory and national narrative came to a head in 2007, when more than 110,000 Okinawans protested the Ministry of Education’s efforts to remove textbook references to military coercion in mass deaths.42 The unresolved articulation of war memories, which Medoruma consistently addresses in his writing, continues to shape Okinawan identity and politics. According to Toriyama Atsushi, in the immediate aftermath of the Asia-Pacific War, accounts of the Battle of Okinawa were predominantly centered on military perspectives. In response to this, two journalists who felt a strong sense of discomfort with such military-centric war chronicles compiled and published Typhoon of Steel (Tetsu no bōfū, 1950), a collection that aimed to shift the focus decisively on 39 Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education, 78-79. 40 Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education, 138&143. 41 Nozaki, War Memory, Nationalism and Education, 145. 42 Aniya, “Compulsory Mass Suicide.” 19 the experiences of Okinawan civilians.43 By including materials provided by local municipal mayors, personal writings and diaries, etc., Typhoon of Steel presented a more comprehensive and resident-focused narrative of the battle, offering a counterpoint to the prevailing military-centric accounts of the time. Yet, parallel with the publication of Typhoon of Steel, another trend began to occur in mainland Japan on how the Battle of Okinawa was remembered through mythologized narratives about the Himeyuri Student Corps (HSC), a group of female students who were mobilized as assistant nurses for the Japanese Imperial Army but eventually lost their lives on the battlefields. Daigo Shima has examined various narratives about the HSC produced between 1945 and 1953, including memoirs, novels, non-fiction works, films, and revues, in his dissertation. Shima demonstrates that these narratives vacillated between two primary types: one which depicted the female students as patriotic martyrs who willingly sacrificed their lives for the nation, and one which portrayed them as pure-minded victims who were forced to support and died for the Japanese Imperial Army.44 Among all these narratives, Shima argues that the 1953 movie Tower of the Lilies (Himeyuri no tō) had the biggest impact on the public memory of the HSC, reinforcing a shift in portrayal from patriotic martyrs to innocent victims. Most importantly, this movie explicitly diminished the issue of wartime responsibility, turning it into an emotional drama but dressed as a war-action movie. This portrayal resonated with broader postwar narratives that viewed HSC as a tragedy, and the issue of responsibility faded away. Since the 1953 movie occupied the biggest place in public memory of the Battle of Okinawa, it 43 TORIYAMA Atsushi 鳥山淳, “Okinawa-sen o meguru kikikaki no tōjō 沖縄戦をめぐる聞き書きの登場,” in Iwanami kōza: Ajia taiheiyō sensō 6: nichijō seikatsu no naka no sōryokusen 岩波講座：アジア・太平洋戦争６：日常生活の中の総力戦 (Iwanami Shoten 岩波書店, 2006), 382-383. 44 Daigo Shima, “The Purification of Victims: The Himeyuri Student Corps through the Lens of Okinawa, Japan, and the U.S. 1945–1953” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2015), 8-9, ProQuest (2519770609). 20 significantly influencing how the Battle of Okinawa would be remembered in subsequent decades.45 Nevertheless, by the late 1950s, the production of works centered on Okinawan perspectives began to decline. Suzuki Tomoyuki notes that this was primarily due to the application of Japan’s “Act on Relief for the War Wounded, the War Dead, and their Bereaved Families” (Senshōbyōsha senbotusha izoku tō engohō) to Okinawa in 1953 (though it was not formally implemented in Okinawa until 1957).46 On the one hand, as Toriyama forcefully contends, this historical context reveals that the postwar “support” provided by Japan to the residents of Okinawa was actually driven by political considerations aimed at supporting the Japan-U.S. security framework. In the intervening years, a movement arose in Okinawa to reject the U.S. military’s land requisitions. The Japanese government did not negotiate with the U.S. at the request of Okinawa’s representatives. Instead, it “sought ways to support U.S. governance through stabilizing the lives of Okinawa civilians, and one of the measures they focused on was providing relief to victims of the Battle of Okinawa.”47 On the other hand, the Japanese government’s decision to include Okinawan civilians as a special case under this law also allowed for Okinawan civilians’ war experiences to be co-opted into the Japanese war narrative. While Japan’s “Act on Relief” excluded “non-combatants” civilians from mainland Japan, it made a special exception for Okinawan civilians by creating the category of “combat participants” (sentō sankasha). In doing so, “Act on Relief” allowed Okinawan civilians to be included under the law despite not being formal military personnel. Specifically, many battlefield actions eligible for relief under the law were limited by the 45 Shima, “The Purification of Victims,” 150-156&164. 46 SUZUKI Tomoyuki 鈴木智之, “Gūwateki akui: Medoruma Shun to Okinawa-sen no kioku 寓話的悪意: 目取真俊と沖縄戦の記憶,” Shakai shirin 社会志林 48, no.1 (2001): 31. 47 Translation mine, Toriyama, “Okinawa-sen o meguru,” 385. 21 “Combat Participation Claims” (sentō sanka mōshitatesho) submitted to the Japanese government. The implementation of this “claims” process led to the concealment of instances of violence committed by the Japanese military against Okinawan civilians.48 At the same time, those who died in battle as defined under the “Act on Relief” were automatically enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine—including the HSC, who were enshrined as “civilians employed by the military” alongside other deceased soldiers. In this way, the suffering of Okinawan civilians on the battlefield was subsumed and romanticized under the idea of patriotism.49 In other words, the image of Okinawan civilians sacrificing themselves for the nation was further emphasized under the law, and those sacrifices were incorporated into a larger Japanese national war narrative of “Japanese nationals” fighting bravely. The transformation of the HSC as victims can be seen as part of this trend that diminished opportunities for critical reflection on the war’s impact on Okinawan society and thwarted efforts to pursue war accountability and responsibility beyond the victimizer-victim binary.50 Ōshiro Masayasu has shown that the cooperation of Okinawans during the war was frequently associated with groups like the HSC or the “Blood and Iron Imperial Corps” (Tekketsu kinnōtai), who were glorified as driven by “pure emotions and unwavering loyalty” and who sacrificed themselves out of love for their country and hometown.51 In sum, the legacy of the Battle of Okinawa became intertwined with nationalistic narratives that overshadowed the voices of Okinawan civilians and sought to align individual bodies with the nation, as seen in the “Act on Relief” and the enshrinement of the war 48 See Toriyama, “Okinawa-sen o meguru,” 385-386. According to Toriyama, to obtain the claim, it was necessary to prove that actions on the battlefield corresponded to at least one of twenty items (such as transport of ammunition and food, construction of positions, provision of food, offering of caves, “group suicide,” etc.). In many cases, this resulted in records that concealed the violence of the Japanese military. For example, the looting of food by Japanese soldiers was reworded as “provision of food,” and forcing people out of caves was rephrased as “offering of caves.” 49 See SHIMA Tsuyoshi 嶋津与志, Okinawa-sen o kangaeru 沖縄戦を考える (Hirugi-sha ひるぎ社, 1983), 193-205; Shima, “The Purification of Victims,” 163-164. 50 Toriyama, “Okinawasen o meguru,” 383. 51 Translation mine. Ōshiro, Okinawa-sen, 202-203. 22 dead at Yasukuni Shrine. This alignment demanded that Okinawan bodies represent their status as Japanese nationals, effectively subsuming individual experiences under a unified narrative of national sacrifice. It is my contention that Medoruma’s “Droplets” challenges this forced alignment by presenting a protagonist whose body refuses to conform to the expected national narrative. In “Droplets,” Medoruma sets its focal point on the war survivors to explore the multifaceted nature of war trauma and its lasting impact. Previous scholarship has praised the story’s critique of Okinawan war memory; for instance, Michael Molasky has noted the significance of its portrayal of the false testimonies made by an Okinawan war survivor,52 while Shinjō Ikuo has commended the story for portraying the ambiguous boundaries of survivor testimony through writing.53 Building upon such scholarship, this chapter focuses on how “Droplets” presents readers with war memories that cannot be articulated solely through the narrative utterances of its protagonists, instead depicting a diverse range of memories of war that are at odds with the Japanese nation-state narrative of victimhood and sacrifice. Bodily Memories: When the Past Refuses to Evaporate “Droplets” takes place in a northern Okinawan village fifty years after the Battle of Okinawa. It centers on the war survivor Tokushō’s body deformation and his ghostly encounters during the night. When his foot inexplicably swells to a gourd-size and begins dripping water from his toe one day, Tokushō falls into a state of paralysis that renders him unconscious. While Tokushō lies in bed during the daytime, his cousin Seiyū secretly collects and sells the dripping 52 See Molasky, “Medoruma Shun,” 182-83. 53 SHINJŌ Ikuo 新城郁夫, Tōraisuru Okinawa: Okinawa hyōshō hihan ron 到来する沖縄：沖縄表象批判論 (Impact Shuppankai インパクト出版会, 2007), 9. 23 water to other villagers as a miracle cure for baldness and impotence. Tokushō continues to be paralyzed in bed with a swollen foot dripping water during the day, but at night, his condition conjures up the ghosts of wounded, dying soldiers desperately seeking water and reminds him once again of memories he had tried to forget. His dead friend Ishimine shows up on the third night of his illness. Unlike the initial licking by other phantom soldiers, the very first time Ishimine engulfs his toe, Tokushō feels great physical pleasure and ejaculates in spite of his elderly body. However, Tokushō and Ishimine’s war experiences complicate this homoerotic scene and their relationship. During the Battle of Okinawa, Tokushō abandoned Ishimine to die after stealing and drinking his water. Tokushō is eventually “healed” when the dripping stops and the “miracle water” effect wears off as he regains consciousness; as a result, Seiyū gets beaten up by angry customers. In the end, despite promising to visit the cave where he left Ishimine to pay his respects, Tokushō fails to keep his promise and returns instead to drinking and gambling. Going out to cut the grass the next day, Tokushō finds an enormous wax gourd lying at his feet. The gourd’s flower is so bright it makes Tokushō’s eyes brim with tears. Throughout his story, Medoruma does not give a definitive explanation of why Tokushō fell sick with such a swollen, dripping foot or the meaning behind his encounter with Ishimine and the other phantom soldiers.54 It is my argument that this narrative ambiguity is a deliberate strategy by Medoruma to encourage readers to recognize themselves in the text with Tokushō or, more precisely, to experience the story with him. Through what I call embodied narrative approach, Medoruma creates an intimate connection that makes Tokushō’s suffering 54 Many scholars have utilized the concept of magical realism to examine this depiction of the unverifiable and inexplicable war experiences of Tokushō; examples include Davinder Bhowmik (previously cited) and Susan Bouterey, who describes his narrative technique as “unrealistic” (higenjitsuteki). See Susan Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa: rekishi, kioku, monogatari 目取真俊の世界（オキナワ）：歴史·記憶·物語 (Kage Shobō 影書房, 2011), 35&163. In contrast, Kyle Ikeda has used the term “vicarious imagination” to describe Tokushō’s memories of war, arguing that the term magical realism “not only denies the reality of his fiction, but also discredits the spiritual beliefs and modes of understanding that inform it.” See Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 92-93. 24 perceivable.55 This narrative technique manifests most powerfully in passages where readers follow Tokushō’s mounting physical distress: the feverish sensations, the upsetting itch he cannot scratch, and the swelling that renders him immobile. Just as Tokushō finds himself trapped in his transforming body, readers are confined within his perspective, experiencing his physical and psychological torment in real time. This approach not only allows readers to experience Tokushō’s suffering directly but also creates a site for an ongoing struggle about the representation of war experiences and aftermath by describing memories that refuse to evaporate. Medoruma’s portrayal of Tokushō’s bodily experiences serves as a powerful counter-narrative to the sanitized public accounts of the war, exposing the gulf between individual trauma and collective memory. A close reading of the text can help better illustrate my argument above. Beginning with the first sentence, Medoruma introduces the protagonist Tokushō, an elderly survivor of the Battle of Okinawa, from a third-person perspective. On this day when Tokushō suddenly wakes up, he realizes that he is unable to move or speak, and that his right foot is swollen like a wax gourd: It was in the middle of June, during a dry spell in the rainy season, when Tokushō’s right foot suddenly began to swell as he was taking a nap on a simple bed in the back room, avoiding the hot sunlight. Past five o’clock, it had become a bit more bearable, and was sleeping comfortably, but woke up feeling feverishness in the right foot. Looking, saw that from the knee down had swollen cylindrically, thicker than the thigh. Tried to get up in a panic, but couldn’t control the body, couldn’t even make a sound. A clammy sweat trickled down the nape. Wondered if it might be a cerebral hemorrhage, but there was no discomfort in the head, and consciousness was clear. While 55 In this thesis, I use the term “embodied narrative approach" to analyze how Medoruma’s literary techniques immerse readers in visceral, physical sensations through detailed descriptions of bodily experiences. While other scholarship employs the same terminology, my usage specifically focuses on how narrative perspective collapses the distance between narrator and protagonist, creating an intimate connection that makes characters’ suffering directly perceivable to readers. For other works that employ this same term, see Rae Johnson, “Body Stories: Researching and Performing the Embodied Experience of Oppression” in The Art and Science of Embodied Research Design, ed. Jennifer Frank Tantia (Routledge, 2021), 189-199. Johnson uses this term to define her “body stories” approach as “a form of embodied inquiry” that combines narrative inquiry, performed ethnography, and embodied phenomenology. 25 staring at the ceiling pondering, the foot kept swelling more and more, and an ant-crawling-like itchiness ran across the smooth, taut skin. Wanted to scratch but couldn’t move even a fingertip, and was cursing inwardly when, after about half an hour, wife Ushi came for a wake up call. She had come to call as the sun had begun to soften, intending to go out to work in the fields. (Medoruma 191) I have translated this opening paragraph in a more literal style to show the reader how the original text utilizes the vagueness of Japanese.56 Here, Medoruma employs free indirect speech to swiftly transition the narrative into a more intimate style. The author’s narrative perspective roams from what seems at first to be a third person omniscient perspective to one more narrowly limited to the protagonist, Tokushō, one in which the narrator seems to be one with him. The lack of direct mention of Tokushō after the opening line creates an ambiguity in the narrative voice. Simply put, while the first sentence establishes a clear third-person perspective with “Tokushō’s right foot,” subsequent sentences omit any subject, making it increasingly unclear whether readers are reading Tokushō’s direct experience or the narrator’s account of it. This strategic ambiguity disrupts conventional reading expectations as readers must navigate between seemingly opposing possibilities: are we witnessing events through an external narrator’s lens, or are we experiencing them directly through Tokushō’s consciousness? This narrative tension creates an intimate connection to Tokushō’s situation, allowing the reader to follow the narrator deeper into Tokushō’s consciousness and experience the sudden transformation of his body. Just as Tokushō finds himself unable to make a sound or move, the reader is also trapped within Tokushō’s perspective and unable to move outside it at this moment. Furthermore, this passage is rich with sensory details, vividly describing the swelling of Tokushō’s foot, the feverish sensation he experiences, and the maddening itch that he cannot scratch. These tactile and visual 56 Michael Molasky’s masterful translation makes Tokushō the subject of most sentences in this paragraph. My in-text citation here is of the original Japanese text, referred to in parentheses. When drawing upon Molansky’s translation, I include both the translation page number and the original Japanese text number in parentheses. 26 descriptions nested within the free indirect speech further immerse the reader in Tokushō’s experience, making his distress perceivable. The narrative also conveys Tokushō’s perception of time passing, from the time he realizes he cannot move his body to the entrance of his wife, Ushi, reinforcing the sense that the reader is experiencing events in real time through his perspective. As the story progresses, Tokushō’s right foot becomes swollen like a wax gourd, “toes fanned out like the heads of a family of tiny snakes” (Medoruma 255, 191). The tip of the big toe cracks open, spilling out a watery liquid. From here, the story’s theme of war becomes fairly obvious. For one, Tokushō’s foot swells up like a wax gourd in the middle of June, not long before the arrival of June 23, “Okinawa Memorial Day” (Okinawa senbotsusha irei no hi). The description of Tokushō’s foot also brings to mind how, during the immediate postwar period, unusually large gourds grew in abundance in Okinawa, possibly due to soil enriched by the remains of those who died in the war.57 This subtle link between nature and warfare is further reinforced in the story when Ōshiro, the town’s doctor, analyzes the fluid from Tokushō’s swollen foot. He finds it to be mostly water with a small amount of lime. This seemingly mundane detail carries great historical significance. Davinder Bhowmik points out that the presence of lime recalls the limestone caves of Okinawa, which played a crucial role during the Battle of Okinawa.58 These caves served as shelters for local Okinawans fleeing the conflict and as strategic hiding places for Japanese soldiers. The presence of lime in the dripping water thus serves as more than a medical curiosity: it physically links Tokushō’s afflicted body to the limestone caves where the memories of war remain buried, suggesting that his mysterious condition is inseparable from his wartime past. As night falls, this connection between body and 57 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 144. 58 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 144. 27 memory becomes even more pronounced, manifesting in ways that transcend physical experience. While Tokushō remains physically immobilized during daylight hours, his nighttime encounters with the phantom soldiers reveal how past trauma can emerge through bodily sensation even when movement is impossible. Yet, I argue that the structural gaps between these parallel narratives reflect not just shifts in time and perspective but also the inability of characters to fully comprehend each other’s experiences, reinforcing the personal and private nature of Tokushō’s war experiences. The storyline occasionally shifts to the narrative perspective of Tokushō’s wife, Ushi, particularly when she seeks out the physician Ōshiro. Neither find themselves able to do anything about the situation. These narrative shifts are marked by Medoruma’s use of extended white space between paragraphs, creating visual breaks that signal transitions between different temporal and experiential realms—from daytime to nighttime, from present to memory, and between different character perspectives. The story’s fragmented structure is further emphasized through its dual temporal progression: when focused on Tokushō’s nighttime encounters or memories, time slows dramatically, allowing for detailed exploration of his spectral experiences and suppressed trauma. In contrast, sections focusing on Ushi’s perspective move at an accelerated pace through ordinary time, as evidenced when the narrative notes that “two weeks had passed since Tokushō’s leg had swelled up” (Medoruma 275, 215) and her various attempts at finding a cure. This temporal contrast underscores how differently these characters experience and understand the situation. While Tokushō remains trapped in the intense time of memory and ghostly visitation, Ushi moves forward through linear time, pursuing practical solutions like consulting doctors, trying folk remedies, and even reluctantly visiting a yuta (Okinawan local shaman) who only “scolded Ushi for neglecting her ancestral spirits” (263, 201). Even as Ushi tends devotedly 28 to her husband’s illness, she remains completely unaware of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of his condition that readers witness during his nighttime encounters. Though immobilized during the day, Tokushō retains his consciousness and physical senses. As darkness falls, he is awakened by “an itchy and vaguely painful sensation in the big toe of his right foot” (260, 197), and the souls of soldiers who had died in the Battle of Okinawa begin to appear to Tokushō. They were eager to drink water dripping from Tokushō’s toe, and then they vanished one by one. In the beginning, the swelling subsided after soldiers finished drinking in the dawn. But Tokushō soon felt “a searing pain” (262, 200) and lost consciousness again with the swelling returned. Readers later can observe that Tokushō’s condition repeats, which is triggered by his initial “itchy” sensation and ends in intense physical pain: “Now the pain returned to Tokushō’s right leg” (265, 203). Why did Tokushō’s symptoms improve after the phantom soldier drank the water, but then he still felt severe pain again after the soldiers disappeared in the morning? One reason is that to Tokushō, the past comes back with the soldiers’ appearance. For the first couple of days, Tokushō did not realize who were these phantom soldiers. He only had “a vague recollection” (261, 199) of the soldiers but couldn’t remember and was only “moved to pity by their miserable condition” (262, 199). This condition continues until the third night when Tokushō’s former comrade, Ishimine, appears to drink the dripping water. Both Tokushō and Ishimine had been recruited into the Blood and Iron Imperial Service Corps and had stayed together throughout the battle. Ishimine’s presence triggers Tokushō’s suppressed memories of “that night” (ano hi; Medoruma 265, 203), with the narrator explicitly stating, “The soldiers were those who had been left behind in the cave that night” (265, 203). Tokushō had feared that if he began to reflect on it, all the memories he had suppressed 29 deep within himself for the past five decades would suddenly “burst out like floodwaters” (270, 210). To put it differently, the appearance of souls stimulates Tokushō’s senses, reviving long-buried war memories. This forces Tokushō to confront the harsh reality of his war experiences, which cannot be romanticized as we will read it later. Simultaneously, he becomes acutely aware of his current connection to these spectral figures from his past. A relevant example is the following description: A soldier stared at Tokushō. The man’s frightened eyes seemed vaguely familiar. (….) Tokushō had encountered this particular soldier while carrying a trough of urine and feces out of the cave. As he passed the wounded in their beds lined up against the wall, Tokushō did his best to knock away their arms that stretched toward him, but one hand managed to grab the edge of the trough, causing the contents to spill onto the face of a wounded soldier. Tokushō cringed, expecting a harangue from the man. The soldier was near the entrance to the cave, and a dim light revealed his face, drenched in urine and excrement. He stuck out his tongue and licked the foul water that surrounded his lips. The bandage wrapped around his chest moved ceaselessly. His head rotated slowly, and Tokushō saw the man staring at him from the very depths of his eyes. Surely this man won’t last until tomorrow, thought Tokushō. “I’ll bring you water right away,” he said, stepping forward, but Tokushō never carried out his promise. (Medoruma 272-273, 212) What I want to point out first is that this description shows that the phantom soldiers drinking the water dripping from Tokushō’s foot were the soldiers who were with Tokushō during the war. Initially, he doesn’t recognize these severely wounded soldiers; he only notices that “roughly 80 percent seemed to be from mainland Japan” (264, 201) and that “the Okinawans drafted into the island’s Defense Force were men so old their hair had turned gray” (264, 201). Tokushō’s gradual recognition of these familiar faces forces him to confront specific memories rather than abstract wartime experiences, as is revealed in the quoted passage. The soldier’s “frightened eyes seemed vaguely familiar,” and through the detailed description of the cave incident—with its visceral imagery of spilled excrement, desperate thirst, and haunting eye 30 contact—we see how these spectral visitations trigger precise, traumatic memories. This direct confrontation with specific memories becomes crucial as the narrative progresses, as these are not anonymous ghosts but rather individuals whose deaths are intimately connected to Tokushō’s own actions and inactions during the war. Among these haunting memories, one particularly significant incident emerges involving his fellow soldier Ishimine, which would forever shape Tokushō’s conscience. That fateful night, Ishimine’s belly was split open by shrapnel, and only Tokushō could still move. After roughly bandaging the dying Ishimine, Tokushō dragged him back to a cave formed by Ryukyu limestone, which was located midway up a small, forested mountain. The cave was crowded with wounded soldiers suffering from unbearable thirst. Moreover, they had received orders to redeploy and head to the southern part of Okinawa Island. Just before their departure, Miyagi, a female student from the Student Nurse Corps who had learned that the three of them had been born in the same village, came to visit them. She entrusted bread and water to Tokushō, who was beside the severely wounded and immobile Ishimine, asking him to pass them on to Ishimine. However, while Tokushō was giving water to Ishimine, he saw “the water overflow and drip down Ishimine’s cheek” (Medoruma 278, 219); he could no longer suppress his thirst and inadvertently drank all the remaining water. Not only that, but he abandoned Ishimine and escaped alone. He was then taken prisoner by the U.S. military and survived. Tokushō’s response to being reminded of these memories is described again through water, as in the line “The dripping seemed to have slowed” (273, 212); and his physical pain, like “Now this man’s teeth rubbed against Tokushō’s toe as he sucked, and it hurt” (273, 212), which he feels when he regains consciousness. As the souls of Ishimine and other war comrades appear, his sense of guilt towards them is revived, and he can no longer avoid confronting his past (war) 31 memories. Finally, as if his regretful feelings have healed, Ishimine’s ghost disappears, saying, “Thank you. At last the thirst is gone” (281, 223). At that day’s dawn, Tokushō’s illness was cured as his “wail echoed throughout the village” (282, 223). Literary scholar Murakami Yōko points out that the minute depiction of physical sensations is crucial, as the interactions between Tokushō and the soldiers occur primarily through the body; the body becomes a device for Medoruma to represent different war memories.59 For Murakami, the skin is the boundary between the body’s interior and exterior. When Tokushō’s big toe becomes damaged, it is impossible to continue defining the interior as the interior.60 In other words, when Ishimine gently brushes his tongue across the wound on Tokushō’s toe, it creates an unsettling moment where physical boundaries seem to dissolve. One plausible example is from an intimate and homoerotic moment, Tokushō feels a different sense when Ishimine sucks his toes. Unlike when he feels the “tickling sensation” (Medoruma 262, 200) initially when other phantom soldiers suck his toe, he feels “a tingling shot up from his foot through his thigh to the root that had hardened in his groin. A small moan escaped from Tokushō’s mouth, and his aging body emitted the scent of young grass” (265, 203). Notably, Medoruma does not render this scene or Tokushō’s sensation as a flashback to past experiences but rather emphasizes his “aging body” to make the narrative time and space here remain in the present. He was still relying on his aging body to feel the physical sensations caused by the phantom soldier. This intimate yet disturbing contact reinforces Tokushō’s awareness of the gulf between his aging, living body and the soldiers’ wounded specters. With this realization, Tokushō recalls how he has suppressed his memories over the past fifty years. The body at this 59 See MURAKAMI Yōko 村上陽子, Dekigoto no zankyō: genbaku bungaku to Okinawa bungaku 出来事の残響: 原爆文学と沖縄文学 (Inpakuto shuppankai インパクト出版会, 2015), 249-253. 60 Murakami, Dekigoto no zankyō, 254. 32 moment becomes a bridge connecting the present and the past, the living and the dead, and memory and trauma. Tokushō’s body is no longer controlled by his will. He can only passively accept the deformation of his body and watch as the phantom soldiers continue to appear before him, coming to suck the lime water that is flowing out of his body. Just as Tokushō had feared at the beginning, the memories that he had suppressed finally caused his body to swell and deform after fifty years, and eventually droplets began to leak out. As Susan Bouterey points out, whether Tokushō is truly healed remains questionable. While he tries to save his body from the dead associated with his war experiences and he retrieves his own autonomy, the trauma from such experiences can never be stripped away.61 This unresolved tension further emphasizes the lasting impact of war memories and the individual’s struggle in the face of collective memory. In this regard, I argue that “Droplets,” by focusing on Tokushō’s bodily experiences, effectively constructs a site for an ongoing struggle about representation of war survivors through the exploration of war memories. In this section, I have illustrated how Tokushō’s physical sensations serve as manifestations of suppressed memories and how Medoruma’s embodied narrative approach allows readers to experience the story viscerally. Building on this analysis, in the next section, I will focus on the intersection of the “body” and language in “Droplets”: how it further disturbs Japanese national war narratives, which underpinned many public memories regarding the Battle of Okinawa. Disturbing the Alignment of the Body and Nation As we saw in the previous section, Medoruma connects Tokushō’s current mysterious condition to his long-buried war memories through the lime-infused water that emerges from 61 Bouterey, Medoruma no Okinawa, 52-53. Here the word “autonomy” is my translation to Bouterey’s Japanese-language word shutaisei. 33 Tokushō’s gourd-shaped swollen foot. In doing so, Medoruma reveals a direct relationship between Tokushō’s physical symptoms and his psychological avoidance of wartime experiences. This suppression is contrasted with the sanitized but heroic versions of his war stories that he shares with schoolchildren during annual war memorial events. In this vein, to fully grasp the significance of Tokushō’s ghostly encounters, which represent the reckoning of his repressed memories, it is also crucial to examine his daytime life before the onset of his condition. Through an omniscient narrative perspective, readers gain insight into Tokushō’s personal, diverse war memories that have been excluded from public discourse. Prior to his “coma,” Tokushō would routinely lecture about his war experiences at local schools on “Okinawa Memorial Day.” This contrast between his public persona and private torment underscores the complexity of war memory and its lasting impact on survivors. The following description illustrates this point: The first time Tokushō stood in their sixth-grade classroom, he read from a paper he had prepared, not once looking up. Unaccustomed to speaking in standard Japanese [common language (kyōtsūgo)], he raced through the paper, finishing what was scheduled to be a half-hour talk in just over fifteen minutes. After concluding, Tokushō timidly looked up at the students. A brief moment passed, then the classroom burst into applause. Tears still streaming down their faces, the students were clapping with all their might. Tokushō was bewildered; he couldn’t understand what had so affected the children. Then he started receiving requests to speak at the village’s other elementary and junior high schools, and he was even asked to speak at the high school in the next town. At about the same time, the village’s board of education had begun compiling oral histories of the war, and this brought Tokushō to the attention of newspaper reporters and university research teams, who soon began showing up at his door. Tokushō was even interviewed several times by television stations and was asked to speak to school groups visiting Okinawa from the Japanese mainland. At first he spoke with blind intensity, but eventually he began to grasp what his audience wanted to hear and learned not to appear too glib. At those times when he did forget himself, he would suddenly look up at the intent faces of the children and feel ashamed or even frightened. (Medoruma 271, 210-211)62 62 Emphasis mine. Here, I use Molasky’s published translation in 2000. However, in the Japanese-language text, Medoruma uses the word common language (kyōtsūgo) instead of standard language (hyōjungo). Molasky chooses to translate the words kyōtsūgo and hyōjungo as standard languages, so I marked this difference in the quote. 34 However, what Tokushō recounts each year is not his actual experience, but rather a generalized account lacking individual details. Not only is there a problem with the “content” of Tokushō’s war stories to students, but the “form” is also unfamiliar to him. Tokushō not only translates his memories into mere written words, but as it states, “unaccustomed to speaking in standard Japanese [common language (kyōtsūgo)],” he also had to convert from the language he was accustomed (mother tongue; Okinawan dialect/Ryukyuan language) to another language (standard language/common language; Japanese). Likewise, when he later talked to people from mainland Japan, he learned to grasp what they wanted to hear and know despite the fact that he would still feel ashamed or even frightened. Tokushō’s war experiences that he tries to narrate are absorbed into the system, ideology, and values lurking within the “common language (standard Japanese),” another linguistic system, and are transformed into the romanticized myth of a patriotic “victim” who fought bravely on the battlefield. Therefore, Tokushō’s war memories, narrated in “common language,” are easily understood by his listeners, but what exists there is something qualitatively different from his personal anecdotes. Komori Yōichi argues that our understanding of historical events, such as war or defeat, is fundamentally shaped by the ideological frameworks embedded in the language we use to describe them.63 In the context of the story, Tokushō, in his attempt to narrate his war experiences, strips away the raw, personal aspects of his memories. By translating these experiences into the “common language,” he unwittingly aligns himself with the dominant narrative as discussed earlier that portrays Okinawan civilians as patriotic victims who willingly sacrificed themselves for the Japanese nation-state. Ironically, the “common language” Tokushō struggles to use does not convey his actual, shareable, or indeed “common” war experiences. 63 See KOMORI Yōichi 小森陽一, Shōsetsu to hihyō 小説と批評 (Seori Shobō 世織書房, 1999), 62. 35 Instead, it transmits pre-existing national narratives already embedded within the “common language” itself. As Tokushō attempts to communicate his personal experiences to others, particularly mainland Japanese, using the “common language,” what becomes “common” or shared is an incomplete, sanitized version of war memories. Without realizing it, he becomes complicit in perpetuating a sanitized version of history constructed by the multi-layered ideologies inherent in the standardized language system that romanticizes Okinawan civilians’ wartime roles. It transforms complex individual experiences of being both victim and victimizer into a unified narrative of noble sacrifice for the empire, much like the mythologized accounts of the Himeyuri Student Corps that emerged in postwar Japan. The “common language” that Tokushō struggles to use becomes a tool for aligning personal experiences with the nation. Consequently, this linguistic transformation paradoxically obscures his actual experiences. By adopting an unfamiliar language, Tokushō unwittingly participates in erasing his own Okinawan perspective. The linguistic contrast in the story is also instructive, training the reader to ponder the complexity of the experiences of Okinawan civilians as both “victimizers” and “victims.” For instance, there is a stark contrast between Ishimine’s clean “standard Japanese” and the heavy Okinawan dialect/Ryukyuan language used by other characters, including Tokushō. Interestingly, Medoruma almost always refers to the Japanese used by Tokushō as “common language” (kyōtsūgo). The narrative voice claims Tokushō’s Japanese as a “common language” rather than explicitly stating it as “Japanese” already implies the existence of something that is “not common.” Readers who are familiar with the Tokushō and narrator’s “common language” or Japanese but not fluent in the Okinawan dialect may become self-reflective regarding this difference. Put differently, Medoruma chooses to use the term “common language” to refer to the 36 Japanese language but never mentions that Tokushō and other characters use “dialect” or use the Japanese language vis-à-vis Ryukyuan language, drawing more attention to the function rather than the identity behind the language itself. Conversely, there is only one instance in which Medoruma uses the word “standard language” (hyōjungo) to describe such Japanese: when Ishimine expresses his gratitude to Tokushō, he says it in his “well-accented, standard Japanese” (Medoruma 281, 223). Ishimine’s “standard language” can be directly linked to the wartime reality of Okinawa, where the prewar “dialect tag education” (hōgen fuda kyōiku) continued to be enforced during the war, and those who did not speak so-called standard Japanese faced the danger of being accused of being American spies and killed.64 That is to say, linguistic contrast is not merely a personal choice but is deeply intertwined with broader historical and political movements which underscores the tension between colonial assimilation and Okinawan identity. According to Onishi Yasumitsu, Tokushō’s use of unfamiliar common language in the classroom is thought to be the result of Okinawa’s postwar assimilation language education. To realize the “return to the motherland,” Okinawans had to have a strong awareness as Japanese citizens.65 Okinawa’s postwar language education became the vehicle to unify civilians. As Nakazato Isao points out, what resulted was an aporia in which “while escaping from being an American colony, the act of invoking ‘Japan’ could potentially internalize colonialism even more deeply.”66 This linguistic divide highlights the complexity and often contradictory nature of the construction of Okinawan/Japanese identity. By emphasizing the language differences—from the pre-war “standard Japanese” to the postwar “common language” and the Okinawan 64 Onishi, Okinawa: kioku to kokuhatsu no bungaku, 103. 65 See Onishi, Okinawa: kioku to kokuhatsu no bungaku, 106-107. 66 Translation mine. NAKAZATO Isao 仲里効, “Honyakuteki shintai to kyōkai no yu’utsu 翻訳的身体と境界の憂鬱,” in Hōgen fuda: kotoba to shintai 方言札：ことばと身体 (Hyōronsha 評論社, 2008), 142. 37 dialect/Ryukyuan language without a clear signifier—Medoruma reveals the multifaceted nature of the identity behind languages, just like Okinawan civilians’ experiences, which resist easy categorization within national narratives. Yet, the disruption of this linguistic and cultural assimilation also manifests in Tokushō’s day-night dichotomous body. Regarding the transformed body in the work, we can see that it serves different functions and roles during the day and night. During the day, Tokushō’s body is docile, playing the role of a patriotic war “victim” in the Japanese national narrative. For example, the protagonist never told anyone about his actions towards Ishimine. After Okinawa’s reversion to Japan, he would use the unfamiliar common language to tell false war experiences at elementary schools before the annual “Okinawa Memorial Day” and receive an honorarium. When speaking to students on school trips from mainland Japan, he would adjust his tone to match what the listeners wanted to hear. During his nighttime episodes, Tokushō’s body returns to a war “victimizer” that no one knows about and could only wait passively for phantom soldiers as well as atone for his sins by relieving their thirst. Tokushō uses the Okinawan dialect to seek forgiveness from Ishimine instead of the common language. When Tokushō sees Ishimine’s ghost finish his drinking right before it disappears, Tokushō intuitively blurts out to Ishimine, “Forgive me” (yurushite torase; Medoruma 281, 222). This line is also, in fact, the last words Tokushō said to Ishimine after he drank all the water and left Ishimine to die alone (279, 219). As Onishi asserts, the line “forgive me” conveys the sense of conversation between Okinawans and the true meaning of Tokushō.67 In a telling shift of linguistic registers, Tokushō moved between positions: while he chose the common language when positioned as “victim,” he deliberately employed the Okinawan dialect for his apologies when cast as “victimizer,” his 67 See Onishi, Okinawa: kioku to kokuhatsu no bungaku, 103. 38 language choice itself becoming an act of resistance against wartime linguistic repression. This contrast continues to the present when he sees Ishimine again. Even after Okinawa’s reversion, Tokushō was influenced by the assimilation of language and culture and had to speak “Japanese/common language” in public. But when he recalled his wartime experiences, he couldn’t help but choose Okinawan. In the story, Tokushō’s attempts to suppress his past as a victimizer manifest through the discipline of language and body. While he adopts the “common language” to present sanitized war narratives in public, his body harbors memories that resist such neat categorization. I argue that his bursting into Okinawan dialect when seeking forgiveness represent a kind of corporeal rebellion against this language assimilation. As discussed previously, Tokushō’s body literally overflows with suppressed memories that cannot be contained within the common language he uses in his public testimonies. This physical manifestation creates a striking contrast with the content he carefully narrated through the common language during daytime presentations. Instead of noble warriors sacrificing themselves for their country, we see soldiers dying in squalor, covered in “excrement and urine,” while a powerless Tokushō can only watch. Tokushō and those phantom soldiers are far removed from the generalized image of the Blood and Iron Imperial Service Corps who fought bravely against the enemy and sacrificed themselves for the country. In this light, Tokushō’s sudden bodily transformation and the Okinawan dialect/Ryukyuan language he chose to use during wartime and when he met Ishimine in the present can be interpreted as a rebellion against the forced alignment with national narratives. By showing how Tokushō’s linguistic choices conflict with his body’s involuntary reactions, Medoruma reveals how both language and the body become sites of tension between official 39 narratives and suppressed memories and the seemingly natural alignment of body and nation is actually constructed and maintained through language itself. To sum up, through these various elements—the rebellion of bodily memory, the day-night contrast in Tokushō’s experiences, and the complexities of language and identity—Medoruma effectively disturbs the alignment of body and nation that underpins Japanese national war narratives. “Droplets” presents a body intersected with language contrast, a body that refuses to be neatly categorized and holds memories contradict official narratives. By doing so, Medoruma challenges simplified accounts of the Battle of Okinawa and questions the notion of a unified nationality. The disturbance of body-nation alignment in “Droplets” serves as a powerful critique of the ways in which national narratives attempt to subsume individual experiences, particularly unheard experiences from Okinawan war survivors. Conclusion: A Melancholy Ending As established earlier, “Droplets” emerged at a critical moment when Japanese society was grappling with how to preserve and transmit war memories. Through its exploration of bodily transformation and linguistic tension, I argue that the story provides a powerful counter-narrative to the sanitized accounts that dominated public discourse in the 1990s. The story’s thematic focus on the relationship between body and language provides, I contend, a crucial framework for demonstrating resistance through both form and content. At the formal level, Medoruma’s embodied narrative approach immerses readers in Tokushō’s visceral experiences, creating an intimate connection that makes his suffering, and by extension, the suffering of other Okinawan civilians, immediately perceivable. This narrative technique itself becomes an act of resistance against the distancing effect of official war accounts 40 prioritizing abstract heroism over concrete individual experience. My analysis of Tokushō’s disciplined use of “common language” revealed how his public testimonies represent the linguistic mechanism through which national narratives subsume individual experiences. In my analysis, his body also rebels against this absorption in two significant ways: first, through its mysterious transformation—the swollen foot that exudes lime water—and second, through his instinctive shift to the Okinawan dialect in moments of crisis. This day-night dichotomy of language and body becomes even more significant when we consider how these dual forms of resistance demonstrate the ways in which body and language become sites of contestation against the epistemic violence of Japanese colonialism. While the ending appears to bring closure with Tokushō’s healing and return to his old drinking and gambling habits, Medoruma deliberately leaves us with an ambiguous image—a massive wax gourd whose bright yellow flower brings tears to Tokushō’s eyes. This ending suggests that despite Tokushō’s physical recovery, his confrontation with the ghosts of war remains unresolved. This end seems to indicate that the process of reconciling with one’s past is neither linear nor complete. The mysterious gourd, nourished by the lime water that dripped from Tokushō’s swollen foot—the same water that allowed the phantom soldiers to quench their thirst—serves as a powerful metaphor that the past continues to manifest in the present. Just as the gourd grows unnaturally large from soil enriched by war dead, memories of war resist being neatly contained within sanitized national narratives. The bright yellow flower that brings tears to Tokushō’s eyes suggests both hope and ongoing trauma: while healing is possible, it requires continuous confrontation with uncomfortable truths rather than convenient forgetting. In this regard, I argue that the significance of this resistance extends beyond mere personal level. By portraying Tokushō’s experiences as both victim and victimizer, Medoruma 41 challenges the simplified victim narrative that dominates public memory of the Battle of Okinawa. My reading suggests that reconciling memories of the past requires acknowledging the complex and often contradictory nature of individual war experiences—experiences that cannot be contained within the binary categories of heroic sacrifice or innocent victimhood that characterize official accounts. The tension between body and nation, and between personal memory and public testimony, serves as a crucial counterpoint to the simplifying force of national narratives. This tension reminds us that the understanding of historical events requires attention to the ways in which bodies and memories resist neat categorization—a resistance that, as “Droplets” reveals, manifests through both physical transformation and linguistic rebellion. 42 Chapter Three: Challenging the “Healing Islands” Narrative through Community Division and War Memory in “Spirit Stuffing” (1998) Introduction As I showed in the previous chapter, Medoruma’s “Droplets” provides a powerful counter-narrative to the sanitized accounts of the Battle of Okinawa that dominated public discourse in the 1990s. After emerging as an important writer and social critic with the publication of “Droplets,” Medoruma wrote a follow-up short story entitled “Spirit Stuffing” (“Mabuigumi,” 1998).68 This short story was originally published in the summer edition of the literary magazine Shōsetsu torippā (Novel Tripper) in 1998. “Spirit Stuffing” was included in a collection titled Mabuigumi in 1999, and in 2000, it received the Fourth Kiyama Shōhei Literary Prize and the 26th Kawabata Yasunari Literary Prize. It was reprinted in the June 2000 edition of Shinchō and in 2002, the collection of stories titled Mabuigumi was released in paperback. In 2013, this story was again included in the Selected Short Stories of Medoruma Shun (Medoruma Shun tanpen shōsetsu senshū).69 “Spirit Stuffing” is similar to “Droplets” in that it is set in a rural village on Okinawa Island fifty years after the Battle of Okinawa. Both grapple with lingering memories of wartime experiences, with each narrative differing in the setting of their protagonists. In “Droplets,” the protagonist Tokushō had served as a student soldier in southern Okinawa during the Battle of Okinawa. His memories are filled with encounters with wounded, dying soldiers desperately 68 The Japanese citations in this paper draw upon the version in MEDORUMA Shun 目取真俊, “Mabuigumi 魂込め（まぶいぐみ）” in Akai yashi no ha: Medoruma Shun tanpen shōsetsu senshū 2 赤い椰子の葉 目取真俊短篇小説選集２(Kage Shobō 影書房, 2011), 255-293; I also refer to the English translation by Kyle Ikeda in MĀNOA: Living Spirit: Literature and Resurgence in Okinawa 23, no. 1 (2011), 112-134. My in-text citations use Medoruma in parentheses to refer to this text. I list the English translation page number first, followed by the corresponding page number in the Japanese version. 69 Ikeda, Okinawan War Memory, 78. According to Ikeda, slight changes in word choice and phrasing have appeared with each re-printing of “Spirit Stuffing,” such as the changing of “hermit crab” (yadokari) to “land hermit crab” (oka yadokari) between the first and second printings and the changing of the Japanese word “military cave” (gō) to the Okinawan word “natural cave” (gama) in the paperback printing. This chapter’s analysis of “Spirit Stuffing” is based on the 2013 version from the “Short Stories Selections,” which is the same as the 2002 paperback version because it appears to have corrected mistakes from earlier versions. 43 seeking water. Conversely, “Spirit Stuffing” centers on Uta, a priestess who survived the war by hiding in the cave near her village. Her recollections align more closely with the residents who were struggling to find food and avoid starvation, as well as the constant fear of Japanese soldiers who were known to execute Okinawans on suspicion of being enemy spies. This contrast in war experiences between the two stories reflects the diverse ways in which Okinawans experienced the war, depending on their roles during the conflict. Medoruma uses these differing perspectives to explore the multifaceted nature of war trauma and its lasting impact on survivors. Davinder Bhowmik has argued that “Spirit Stuffing” can be read as a sequel to “Droplets.”70 However, I focus on “Spirit Stuffing” not as a literal sequel but as a continuation of Medoruma’s critical intervention in hegemonic narratives about Okinawa. Namely, “Spirit Stuffing” emerged in the 1990s when the exotic and stereotypical images of Okinawa began to be disseminated on a wide scale. In this chapter, I follow Ina Hein’s use of the term Okinawa boom, which took hold of mainland Japanese popular culture and mass media in the 1990s. Okinawa was constructed as a peaceful island paradise where the idealized Okinawan nature ultimately leads to “healing” (iyashi) on the part of the Japanese characters in those media productions.71 In his examination of the “neo-imperial gaze” and sociocultural reasons for the “Okinawa boom” (2001-2009), Oliver E. Kühne argues that the mainland Japanese “healing boom” (iyashi būmu) in the 1990s serve as the strongest force that engendered the multimedia 70 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 148. 71 Hein, “Constructing Difference in Japan,” 180-183. Here, I italicized Ina Hein’s Okinawa boom to distinguish it from the “Okinawa boom” used by Oliver E. Kühne. The term “Okinawa boom” used by Kühne is not the same as that used by Hein. Most other scholars define the Okinawa boom as a situation where a large number of advertisements, TV dramas and films that use symbols to represent Okinawa have been produced and consumed since the end of the 20th century. However, Kühne uses it as a phenomenon that occurred at the same time as the “Emigrating to Okinawa boom” (Okinawa ijū būmu) of 2001-2009. I interpret his references for “Okinawa boom” as a phenomenon of tourist media promoting the exotic and stereotypical images of Okinawa, and “Emigrating to Okinawa boom” as a phenomenon fostered through the commercialization of construction companies and the tourist industry. While Kühne acknowledges that the “Okinawa boom” was still promoted in the media when the article was published in 2012, the migration boom had already passed its peak. 44 “Okinawa boom.”72 As Victoria Young further comments, since the inception of this tourism-led Okinawa boom, Okinawa’s troubling past and present have been scrubbed by images of “healing islands” (iyashi no shima) bathed in a “blue sea and sky” (aoi umi aoi sora), which reinforces Okinawa’s subjugated status as a colonial other within the nation.73 In this light, I examine how “Spirit Stuffing” presents a powerful challenge to the “healing islands” narrative since 1990s through three key aspects: first, through its sophisticated narrative strategy that aligns closely with the protagonist’s perspective; second, through its treatment of community tensions vis-à-vis landscapes, which reveals the gender dynamics and colonial attitudes which have been internalized within Okinawan rural communities; finally, through its portrayal of gendered bodies situated within landscapes, which demonstrates how supposedly healing natural environments actually function as repositories of unresolved trauma for local residents. Through these interrelated analyses, I argue that rather than proposing solutions to “heal” or suggesting possibilities for reconciling with war memories, Medoruma exposes the fundamental contradictions between the “healing islands” narrative and the wounds experienced by war survivors. Narrative Strategy/Perspective and Language Medoruma’s “Spirit Stuffing” is told from the third-person perspective and centers on Uta, an elderly village priestess (yuta), as she attempts to perform a mabuigumi ritual74 for 72 See Kühne, “Research Report,” 214-237. Kühne talks in more detail about how the “healing boom” arose from mainland Japanese society’s growing anxiety over economic uncertainties and social disparities, particularly affecting the “lost generation” (rosu jene) who sought healing and escape from what they viewed as “hopeless Japan” (Nihon wa mō dame) after the collapse of the bubble economy. 73 Young, “Inciting the Past,” 579. 74 “Mabuigumi” comes from Uchināguchi (Okinawa dialect/Ryukyuan language) and is glossed as tamashī kome in standard Japanese, meaning the title of the story: spirit stuffing. Throughout the text, Medoruma uses kanji for “spirit/soul” and “stuffing,” which can be read as “tamashī 魂” and “kome 込め” in standard Japanese. Medoruma also puts the furigana, “mabui まぶい” for “tamashī” and “gumi ぐみ” for “kome” above the kanji to indicate that the word should be read as “mabuigumi” rather than “tamashī kome.” 45 Kōtarō, who is in his fifties and Uta loves like her son. Kōtarō accidentally loses his mabui, or spirit, and passes out. The mabuigumi is not very complicated and has long been passed down in the village. Conventionally, the priestess performs the ritual at the place where the spirit (mabui) fell out. After the ritual, the “lost” mabui is supposed to return to its original body, and the exhausted and dazed person regains their vitality. Unlike previous instances where Kōtarō lost his mabui, this time a large hermit crab (āman)75 has taken up residence in his mouth while he lies unconscious. The story reveals that Kōtarō lost his parents in the Battle of Okinawa when he was still an infant. He was then raised by his paternal grandmother, Kamadā, with Uta’s help. Uta tries to recall Kōtarō’s spirit from the beach, where he sits unresponsively and solemnly gazing at the ocean. Unlike in Medoruma’s “Droplets,” where the spirit eventually responds, Kōtarō’s mabui never acknowledges Uta. As the story progresses, it flashes back to the events during the Battle of Okinawa, where Uta and Kōtarō’s mother, Omito, ventured out from the relative safety of their cave to search for food. During this dangerous excursion, they encountered a sea turtle that had come ashore to lay its eggs. Desperate to secure food, Omito began gathering the turtle eggs, despite the dangers surrounding them. Tragically, Omito was killed by artillery fire while she was focused on collecting the eggs. Frozen in terror, Uta witnessed the turtle retreat into the ocean as Omito perished. After the war, Uta tried to find Omito’s remains, but she failed, and she does not know whether Omito was shot by Japanese or American troops. Years later, when she follows Kōtarō’s spirit to the ocean shore, she once again sees a sea turtle, its presence reviving the tragic memory of Omito’s death, and so Uta realizes that this is what Kōtarō’s spirit was waiting for. 75 This is also another word written in katakana to express Uchināguchi, which means yadokari ヤドカリ(hermit crab). 46 During the course of the ritual, conflict arises between Uta and local officials, who are more concerned about keeping Kōtarō’s condition secret to avoid harming plans for a mainland Japanese hotel development. Despite this, the village leaders choose to assist her with the ritual while keeping it hidden from the village doctor and the attention of hotel developers from mainland Japan. This tension comes to a climax when two cameramen come to this village to take photographs of Kōtarō; they have likely been tipped off about Kōtarō’s condition. At first, they come to the beach where Uta holds her rituals at twilight but are turned away by Uta. Then they sneak into Kōtarō’s house and start taking pictures. The āman, startled by the camera flashes, panics and dives deeper into Kōtarō’s mouth, choking him to death. The story concludes with Uta and Kinjō, the president of the Young Adults’ Association, violently killing the āman. At that moment, Uta briefly wonders if it might be Omito reborn. In the end, Uta stands at the beach and prays as she waits for the baby sea turtles there to hatch 49 days after Kōtarō’s death, but her final prayer never reaches its destination. Although “Spirit Stuffing” is narrated from a third-person perspective, we can find that throughout the story, the narrating voice consistently presents and interprets all other characters through Uta’s perspective, while deliberately refraining from describing or interpreting Uta from any external viewpoint. For instance, after Kōtarō’s wife, Fumi, asks Uta to see Kōtarō, Uta inquiries about what happened to Kōtarō, but Fumi doesn’t reply: The music for the calisthenics radio program was just changing to the second set when Uta’s neighbor, Fumi, came rushing through the entrance in the stone fence surrounding Uta’s home…. “Grandma!” In front of the closed door to the back room, Kentarō and Tomoko sat looking anxiously [fuansō] at Uta. The brother and sister were in elementary school, in third and first grade, and Uta loved them as if they were her own grandchildren. When she saw the looks on their faces, Uta became serious [magao ni natta]. Fumi let go then and slowly opened the door…. “Did he have a stroke?” 47 Fumi silently shook her head. Uta sat down next to Kōtarō’s head and placed her hand on his forehead. Temperature and pulse were normal. Although there was a little sweat on his brow, the expression on his sleeping face was peaceful [yasuraka], and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. “What is it? What’s wrong?” Fumi sat silently, her eyes filling with tears. Uta was becoming annoyed [iradatta]. (Medoruma 113, 258-260; parenthesis emphases are mine) The above scene describes the moment when Uta enters Kōtarō and Fumi’s house and checks his condition. Here, all the descriptions presented to the reader are clearly narrated from a third-person perspective. But what is worth paying attention to is the description of the expressions of the characters. The initial description of the two children as “looking anxiously” (fuansō) is told by the narrator but observed through Uta’s perspective. We do not yet know the specific relationships between Uta and Fumi, Kōtarō, Kentarō, and Tomoko at this point. We only know that Fumi is Uta’s neighbor, and we see Uta enters the house with Kentarō and Tomoko addressing her as “grandma.” Uta does not respond to their greeting verbally. Instead, the narrator immediately contextualizes this emotional observation with a comment on Uta’s deep affection for them, whom she loves as her own grandchildren. Even if this comment is not directly uttered by Uta, it is clearly made from Uta’s perspective. Then, the narrative shows how this observation of their anxiety directly influences Uta’s emotional state, causing her to “become serious” (magao ni natta). The passage concludes with Uta’s annoyance (iradatta), which brings us most explicitly into her emotional perspective. This final emotional state seems to emerge from the tension between her assessment of finding nothing wrong with Kōtarō and Fumi’s silent weeping. The progression of emotional expressions throughout the passage, from the children’s anxiety to Uta’s seriousness, to her observation of Kōtarō’s peacefulness, and finally to her own annoyance, is presented in a third-person narration deeply colored by the protagonist’s consciousness. In other words, while maintaining its third-person stance, the 48 narrating voice becomes inseparable from Uta’s subjective experience and evaluation of the unfolding events. Yet we are not new to this technique. Similar to the opening passage in “Droplets,” Medoruma intentionally shortens the distance between the perspective of its narrator and the focal character, so that the reader perceives other characters and events through Uta’s point of view. When Uta explains Kōtarō’s condition to the ward chief Shinzato who comes to check on Kōtarō after her first unsuccessful attempt, the narrative reveals their relationship: “How’s the mabuigumi going?” Fumi asked uneasily [fuansō]…. “It’s not going well, is it?” “No need to get alarmed [shiwasu na]. Kōtarō’s mabui seems to have strayed from his body, but it’ll come back soon,” Uta responded, irritated [iradachi] with Fumi. She then looked at Ward Chief Shinzato. Shinzato was in his second term in office. Three years ago, he had become the chief of the ward, right after retiring from his position at town hall. When he had gotten into mischief as a child, Uta had often given him a licking. To this day, he had a hard time looking her in the eye. (Medoruma 118, 266; emphases are mine) This paragraph offers a compelling example of how the narrative voice consistently filters the reader’s comprehension of other characters through Uta’s perspective while maintaining a careful distance from any external interpretation of Uta herself. Consider how the passage presents both Fumi and Ward Chief Shinzato: Fumi is interpreted through Uta’s irritation, and Shinzato is characterized through Uta’s knowledge and personal assessment of him. The narrative provides multiple layers of information about Shinzato, such as his current position, his career history, his childhood behavior, and his present demeanor. All are mediated through Uta’s point of view. When we learn that “he had become the chief of the ward, right after retiring from his position at town hall,” this ostensibly neutral information is immediately contextualized by Uta’s memory of disciplining him as a child, showing how even objective facts are filtered through her perspective. 49 Particularly telling is the final observation about Shinzato’s inability to meet Uta’s gaze. While this detail may imply that Shinzato is still afraid of Uta or at least Uta has traumatized him to some extent, it’s carefully presented from Uta’s point of view. We see how he responds to her, but we never see how she appears to him. The narrative tells us about his discomfort but refrains from describing Uta’s appearance or demeanor from his perspective. Even Uta’s action of having “given him a licking” in the past is presented matter-of-factly, without any external judgment or interpretation of her behavior. This consistent narrative strategy, namely, presenting other characters through Uta’s lens while avoiding external perspectives on Uta herself, reinforces the text’s commitment to maintaining Uta’s point of view as the primary filter through which the story is told. When Uta is described, it’s through her own actions and speech (“Uta responded, irritated with Fumi,” “She then looked at Ward Chief Shinzato”), never through another character’s perception or judgment of her. While this alignment of narrative perspective with Uta’s consciousness establishes the story’s point of view, it is further complicated by an interplay of languages that paradoxically brings the narrator and Uta closer together through their very distinction. Since this story is obviously a contemporary Japanese-language short story, Medoruma renders the narrating voice in standard modern Japanese. Conversely, as both a village priestess who leads religious ceremonies and a member of the prewar generation, Uta maintains a deeper connection to local linguistic and cultural traditions than other villagers. This is reflected in her dialogue, or Uta’s spoken words, which is in a great amount of Uchināguchi, the Okinawan/Ryukyuan language. For instance, as I emphasize in the quoted passage above, when Uta tries to calm Fumi and Shinzato, she says “shiwa” (Medoruma 118, 266) with the furigana above the kanji, which is read in standard Japanese as “shinpai,” which means to be worried or alarmed. By embedding 50 Uta’s spoken words with rich Uchināguchi features, Medoruma presents the narrative voice as distinct enough from her speech words.76 This linguistic differentiation, rather than creating distance, allows the narrator to act as a cultural mediator. The narrative voice incorporates Uchināguchi terms for local plants, trees, and everyday Okinawan concepts, suggesting an intimate understanding of Uta’s world while making it accessible to Japanese readers. As Kyle Ikeda points out, through this careful adaptation of Uta’s idiolect into the narrating voice, “Spirit Stuffing” subordinates the narrator’s perspective to that of Uta’s,77 creating a narrative that bridges rather than reinforces the gap between standard Japanese and Uchināguchi. To summarize, borrowing Ikeda’s words, “the narrator’s stance and attitude toward Uta is one of consonance,” which makes the narrative voice in agreement with the focal character’s point of view.78 Just like what we saw in “Droplets,” this alignment is intended to make the reader believe the reality from Uta’s perspective and accept her opinion as well and forms a crucial aspect to Medoruma’s criticism of hegemonic Okinawan narratives, as I will detail in relation to the interplay of human bodies and landscapes in the latter part of this chapter. In a sense, the reader’s perception and understanding of war memories do not actually come from Uta’s own words. Uta doesn’t speak to anyone about her wartime experiences in the story. In the next section, I will examine the text’s critique of the community’s internalized colonialism as well as the “healing islands” narrative of Okinawa through a close reading of two key passages. 76 As Ikeda writes, “Through the rendering of Uta’s spoken discourse in Uchināguchi, Medoruma creates a distinct voice for this character that marks it as different from the narrating voice of the text, which is primarily presented in Japanese.” See Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 89. 77 Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 90-91. 78 Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 92. 51 The Tensions of Community vis-à-vis Landscape Previous scholarship has recognized how “Spirit Stuffing” challenges and breaks down idealized portrayals of Okinawan community relationships. Davinder Bhowmik’s reading of “Spirit Stuffing” suggests that “rather than depict a clash between public and private memory, Medoruma pits the indomitable weight of tradition against those mechanized forces that have come to erode long-held communal values.”79 Kyle Ikeda further notes that Medoruma’s literary works go beyond simply offering an alternative portrayal to the ideal representation of Okinawan communal ties but instead reveal the complex contradictions embedded within these stereotypes.80 While drawing upon these interpretations of Medoruma’s critical approach, I would argue that one aspect of the contradictions underlying the stereotypes is the tensions of community vis-à-vis both natural and human-constructed landscapes. Before diving into my exploration of this issue, it is worth some time to examine briefly how landscape became a vital element in representing Okinawa as “healing islands” (iyashi no shima) and how Medoruma problematizes it. As I outlined earlier in this chapter, “Spirit Stuffing” emerged during a period of Japan’s broader “healing boom” (iyashi būmu) of the 1990s, which deeply intertwined with Okinawa’s cultural representation known as the Okinawa boom. Oliver E. Kühne asserts that during this period, Okinawa’s image was transformed into a tropical island paradise comparable to Hawaii or Bali. This commercial narrative generated stereotypical “Okinawa-isms” including traditional cultural elements like awamori (millet liquor), sanshin music, local cuisine, white beaches, coral reefs, and folk beliefs.81 Meanwhile, Okinawa was also been featured as an exotic place in an 79 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 149. 80 See Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 79. 81 Kühne, “Research Report,” 216; 219-220. 52 increasing variety of films, literary works from the 1990s onwards, and television shows since 2000.82 This boom reached its peak in 2001 with the airing of the NHK drama Churasan (2001), which unleashed an avalanche of similar media representations.83 The female protagonist of Churasan came to embody stereotypical Okinawan traits of kindness and gentleness. According to Kühne, the series also features scenes of her family back in Okinawa, particularly highlighting her grandmother, who represents traditional Okinawan culture, beliefs, and language in the drama. Through these elements, the show creates a sense of nostalgia by contrasting traditional Okinawan values with mainland Japanese society.84 In this vein, the commercialization of Okinawan culture became so widespread that the people of Okinawa started to view themselves from a tourist’s perspective, often creating and reenacting these tourist-friendly representations.85 It is in this context that Medoruma critiques Okinawa’s “healing-type” (iyashi-kei) ideology. He has argued in his non-fiction writing that “since Okinawa is also seeking to break away from its dependence on military bases through tourism, there is a mutual overlap of desires with mainland Japan, which seeks a place like Okinawa where people can enjoy the subtropical nature and exotic atmosphere, the Japanese language is spoken, and the crime rate is not high.”86 At the same time, “Okinawa’s dark reality disturbs the image of Okinawa as a ‘healing space,’ which is exactly the reality people living in Okinawa cannot escape from.”87 That is to say, while 82 Hein, “Constructing Difference in Japan” 182. 83 Churasan is a television drama series that began in 2001 and spawned three sequels, running until 2007. The original series consisted of 156 fifteen-minute episodes broadcast on weekday mornings on NHK, primarily targeting housewives, seniors, and children. The story follows Eri, a young Okinawan woman who was born on May 15, 1975 (the day of Okinawa’s reversion to Japan). The narrative focuses on her journey as she moves to Tokyo to pursue her dream of becoming a nurse. Around episode 30, she moves into a traditional apartment building where she interacts with various residents. Eri’s character serves as a “healing” (iyashi) presence throughout the series, with her pure and optimistic nature helping those around her reconnect with their own lost innocence. 84 See more from Kühne, “Research Report,” 216; 226-227. 85 Kühne, “Research Report,” 235. For more information about how the “healing islands” narrative of Okinawa was constructed, see Kühne’s article. 86 MEDORUMA Shun 目取真俊, Okinawa sengo “zero” nen 沖縄戦後「セロ」年 (Nippon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai 日本放送出版協会, 2005), 160. Translation mine. 87 Medoruma, Okinawa sengo “zero” nen, 161. 53 Okinawa Prefecture may be “healing islands” for people from mainland Japan, it is not a space for Okinawa residents to be “healed”—where problems such as a high unemployment rate, unrepresented wartime experiences, and natural destruction caused by the military bases remain unsolved. Medoruma’s non-fiction writing helps us understand his critical orientation in “Spirit Stuffing.” One of the primary tensions in the community vis-à-vis natural as well as human-constructed landscapes in “Spirit Stuffing” is articulated around the issue of gender discrimination. It is noteworthy that this issue is established in the story’s opening scene, where children and seniors gather in front of the community center (the ultimate symbol of a human-constructed landscape), performing radio calisthenics in unison to the music from a loudspeaker on its roof. In the following example, we see this tension play out in more detail: Uta was sitting in the open veranda, gazing at the brilliance of her dew-drenched garden, growing brighter in the morning sun, when the calisthenics music from the radio in the community center nearby began to play. She sneered humph and sipped her tea through a chunk of raw sugar in her mouth. For generations the elderly had started the day with a cup of tea before getting to work. But in early April the Senior Citizens’ and the Children’s Associations had begun encouraging morning calisthenics in front of the community center…. Naturally, they urged Uta to join them. No matter how hard they tried, however, she curtly responded, “I won’t go,” and continued with her morning tea. At the beginning, the music for calisthenics was blasted through a large loudspeaker on the roof of the community center. Uta had stormed into the center’s office to complain about the excessive noise. Kawakami, the chubby, middle-aged president of the Children’s Association, had just smiled at her from under his baseball cap and paid no attention to her complaint…. In a panic, Kawakami jumped up quickly and turned the speaker off. Thereafter, the music played from a radio, not through a loudspeaker. Although the noise continued to disrupt Uta’s peace in the morning, she compromised out of regard for the children and left the matter at that. (Medoruma 112, 257-258) 54 Here, the narrative immediately demonstrates the deconstruction of the notion of a stereotypical Okinawan community (kyōdōtai).88 Uta, the female protagonist, refuses to join group calisthenics and insists on drinking tea in the morning instead—a practice, much like mabuigumi, that has been gradually abandoned. When Uta storms into the center’s office to complain about the noise, Kawakami, the male “chubby, middle-aged president of the Children’s Association,” pays no attention to her complaint. This tension between female figures and male communal authorities continues throughout the story, particularly in Uta’s role as a priestess or kaminchu (125, 277). In Okinawa, the term kaminchu generally refers to women who possessed “absolute religious power” and whose privileged position within the power structure of society was made most visible through their performing of public religious ceremonies and other spiritual practices during the Ryukyu Kingdom era.89 Also part of this power structure were yuta (“Yuta priestesses”), who would perform prayers and divinations for individuals in the private sphere.90 Uta’s role as kaminchu is more like yuta in the story. Yet, Medoruma’s choice of setting Uta as kaminchu rather than yuta can be seen as a signifier of how the role of the kaminchu underwent a dramatic transformation in Okinawa long before the events of the story. This transformation was directly tied to the “Ryukyu Disposition,” when the Meiji government (1868-1912) implemented aggressive assimilation policies that included the enforcement of “Japanese language as standard language” (hyōjungo kyōiku) as well as the labelling of many indigenous Okinawan customs as “bad habits” (akushū). Beliefs and practices associated with 88 Here, I have attached the Japanese word kyōdōtai to distinguish the word “community” from what appears in the English translation of the story. The English phrase “community center” corresponds with the Japanese word kōminkan. However, the literal translation of the word kōminkan can be rendered as “the citizen’s public hall.” To illustrate my argument in this chapter, I also draw upon the usage of Japanese scholars. For example, Shinjō Ikuo uses the term kyōdōtai in his article on “Spirit Stuffing.” Shinjō argues that “Uta’s mabuigumi ritual is an attempt to stitch up the rift in the community—Kōtarō’s āman-habited body.” See SHINJŌ Ikuo 新城郁夫, Okinawa o kiku 沖縄を聞く (Misuzu Shobō みすず書房, 2010), 159. Translation mine. 89 Bouterey, Medoruma no Okinawa, 180. 90 See Bouterey, Medoruma no Okinawa, 180 and also KOJIMA Yōsuke 小嶋洋輔, “Medoruma Shun mabuigumi: iyasarenu yamai 目取真俊「魂込め（まぶいぐみ）」——癒されぬ「病」,” Chiba daigaku daigakuin jinbun shakai kagaku kenkyūka kenkyū purojekuto hōkokusho千葉大学大学院人文社会科学研究科研究プロジェクト報告書, vol. 184 (2009): 88. 55 kaminchu and yuta likewise faced severe suppression. Especially, kaminchu’s ability to act in public capacities was drastically curtailed, limited to only performing official ceremonies rather than the wide range of spiritual practices they had traditionally conducted, including rituals like mabuigumi.91 While the systemic oppression of Okinawan customs certainly impacted the kaminchu and yuta’s status, it is particularly significant that this suppression was perpetuated and justified from within Okinawan society itself. Tze M. Loo has argued that while Japanese colonialism significantly shaped Okinawa’s history, examining only state-level colonial relationships risks overlooking crucial social dynamics that emerged independently within Okinawan communities. Notably, local critiques of yuta, particularly during the 1913 anti-yuta campaign, “functioned as a channel for male anger and anxiety at women who saw themselves as political actors,” while becoming “a way to attack Okinawan women in general.”92 According to Loo’s findings, women who engaged in yuta practices faced significant criticism and pressure from within their own communities, particularly from men who sought to control their religious and social activities. The effects of this internally generated suppression and gender-based discrimination persisted well into the postwar period when “Spirit Stuffing” takes place. This historical context helps explain the contemporary dynamics we see in the story, particularly during the quarrel at the community center. There are many interesting details regarding this quarrel that are worth close examination, but I’ll only touch upon part of them here to elaborate on my analysis of the gender dynamics in the opening scene. In that scene, when Uta hears the disrespectful words from Kinjō, the president of the Young Adults’ 91 Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 183-191. 92 Tze M. Loo, “Trapped in Text: The Changing Place of Female Ritualists in Taisho Okinawa,” in The Journal of Asian Studies 82, no. 2 (2023): 194. 56 Association, and tries to leap over the table to get him, other male authorities hurry to calm Uta and prevent the situation from rising further. It is at this precise moment that Genpachi, the president of the Senior Citizens’ Association, makes the following comment: “What is this? Giving in to the women like that. How pathetic!” (Medoruma 121, 272) This brief but loaded statement is particularly significant coming from Genpachi, who, being of similar age to Uta, represents the generation that lived through the prewar and wartime periods. His attitude reflects the deeply rooted gender discrimination that Loo identifies as emerging during the Taisho period, when internal Okinawan society began systematically undermining yuta authority. That Genpachi, who would have witnessed the traditional respect once accorded to yuta in prewar Okinawa, expresses such explicit contempt for female authority suggests how thoroughly internalized these discriminatory attitudes have become. By characterizing the men’s apologies as “giving in to the women,” Genpachi frames the apologies and any acknowledgment of Kinjō’s inappropriate words as a form of male weakness rather than legitimate respect for Uta. The use of the phrase “giving in” particularly suggests that from Genpachi’s perspective, male-female relations are inherently adversarial, where male authority should naturally dominate. Moreover, his exclamation “How pathetic” explicitly marks respect for female figures as something shameful or unmanly, revealing the internalized resistance to female leadership remains deeply in matters of yuta-related affairs. The text then juxtaposes Genpachi’s outburst with Uta’s immediate response: she roars at Genpachi to ask him to keep quiet. This interaction parallels the story’s opening confrontation over the radio calisthenics, but with a crucial difference. While the earlier scene ended in compromise “out of regard for the children,” here Uta issues an unequivocal command that brooks no negotiation. 57 Consequently, the music is no longer played through the loudspeakers but through the radio. Medoruma does not simply present Uta as a counter-representation but instead makes her eventually come to a compromise. I suggest that Uta’s partial acceptance, “out of regard for the children,” suggests that Uta is not a passive recipient of disciplining but an active agent capable of resisting and negotiating its place within the community. By focusing on Uta’s resistance and compromise, Medoruma offers a view of how individuals can resist and negotiate with the authority of the community. In other words, while Ikeda interprets this to mean that Uta is deeply embedded in the network of relationships and social obligations that define her role in the village,93 I would add that the story’s beginning shows us the fractures within the idealized community (kyōdōtai) in rural Okinawa, which embedded a long history of gender discrimination behind it. Certainly, Uta refuses to be included in such a community. Another key conflict that takes place later in the community center underscores the story’s challenge to internalized colonialism. In that conflict, the human-constructed landscape is not only the place where the arguments take place but also one of the issues they argue about. After Uta’s first ritual fails, Ward Chief Shinzato calls a meeting about Kōtarō’s condition at the community center with other prominent members of the community. During the meeting, a quarrel emerges between Uta and other male authorities, where Ward Chief Shinzato expresses concern about how Kōtarō might affect plans for hotel construction by investors from mainland Japan. Notably, rather than addressing Kōtarō’s crisis or supporting Uta’s efforts to perform the mabuigumi ritual, Shinzato immediately reframes the situation as an economic threat to the community, worrying that “if they [Yamato people, from mainland Japan] hear rumors about an āman entering someone’s body—why, this would really alarm them! It might even spook them 93 See Ikeda, Okinawa War Memory, 79. 58 into canceling the plans for the hotel” (Medoruma 120, 270). Uta is shocked at his words, which are clearly different from what he said earlier to her. When Shinzato privately approached Uta about Kōtarō’s condition, he presented himself as a caring community leader, promising to take responsibility for Fumi and the children while emphasizing communal solidarity. He had even said, “When things get rough, we stand together” (119, 268). However, the community meeting reveals Shinzato’s true priorities: while he performs concern for community welfare in private conversations with Uta and Fumi, his actual interest lies in economic development and maintaining relationships with mainland Japanese investors. Significantly, when speaking privately to Uta, Shinzato had positioned himself as supporting her efforts with the mabuigumi ritual, but in the public meeting, he completely ignores Kōtarō’s well-being and Uta’s ritual work, reducing it to a potential economic liability. The tension escalates when Kinjō, the Young Adults’ Association president, insensitively suggests exploiting Kōtarō’s condition as a tourist attraction. Uta’s fierce response to this suggestion—calling Kinjō a “rotten little brat” (ya na kusari warabi ya; 121, 271)—leads to a moment of other male authority figures having to apologize. To Kinjō, Kōtarō’s body might “generate publicity if word gets out there’s a person here with an āman stuck in his mouth?” (121, 271) Kinjō thinks people would be curious to see something so unusual. If it gets reported in the newspapers and on TV, many people will start coming to the village in large numbers. Interestingly, both Shinzato and Kinjō are concerned with how to attract more people to the village for tourism. Shinzato is concerned with how to better shape or (human-)make the local natural landscapes more appealing for Yamato people.94 His priority is to ensure that the 94 The term “Yamato” is a Japanese word but has different connotations depending on whether it’s used by people in Okinawa or mainland Japan. Okinawans specifically use it to distinguish and refer to mainland Japan. For example, throughout the text, Medoruma writes it as yamatu ヤマトゥ rather than yamato ヤマト. 59 potential well-built hotel nestled in the natural landscape meets the expectations of Yamato people. Yet, Kinjō thinks Kōtarō’s body, whose mouth is inhabited by an āman, can be objectified and gazed upon as a “landscape.” Their attitude can be viewed as reflecting the “homogenization towards ‘Japanese-ness’ (Nihonteki naru mono)” under the influence of the Okinawa boom contemporaneous with the story, as Kojima Yōsuke has asserted.95 That is, when Japan is looking for something different from itself, such active pandering from Okinawans does not really highlight the “uniqueness” of Okinawa but rather conforms to Japan’s expectations of the strange/Okinawan. Their eagerness to commodify both the landscape and Kōtarō’s afflicted body reveals how they have internalized the colonial gaze, viewing their own community through the lens of mainland Japanese desires and expectations. One telling example is from their slightly different references of “people.” Shinzato refers to people from mainland Japan as “Yamato people” (yamatu), but Kinjo does not explicitly make such distinction. Then, in order to further emphasize his point and convince Uta, he says, “Yamato people [naichā] get nervous about things like this, not to mention that most of them are prejudiced against Okinawa” (Medoruma 120, 370). Naichā is an Okinawan word corresponding to Japanese “people from mainland (naichi).” In his research on imperial subjects in prewar Okinawa, Alan Christy writes that even in the administrative structure where Okinawa was technically included within the naichi (mainland Japan), in both Japanese and Okinawan social imaginaries it was persistently viewed as outside the naichi—a distinction that remained deeply entrenched despite decades of Japanese rule.96 This term is inextricably linked to the history of discrimination and forced assimilation during the prewar period, where Okinawans were compelled to transform their “speech, dress, 95 See Kojima, “Medoruma mabuigumi,” 90-91. 96 Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” 631-632. 60 work, and leisure activities from those labeled ‘Okinawan’ to those designated ‘Japanese’” while simultaneously being denied full acceptance by mainland Japanese society.97 Considering that this story happens in postwar Okinawa, Shinzato’s continued use of naichi/naichā reveals this internalized naichi-centered framework has lasted in the postwar Okinawan’s mindset. From yamatu to naichā, the shift of Shinzato’s words can be seen as a linguistic marker that reinforced the distinction between mainland Japanese and Okinawans, highlighting their separate and unequal status within Japan’s colonial hierarchy. The arrival of the two journalists further emphasizes this dynamic. Firstly, the presence of a Naha journalist alongside his mainland counterpart suggests that the transformation of Okinawa into a “healing space” for mainland consumption is complicit with outside desire. Secondly, such transformation also relies upon active participation from within, particularly from more urbanized areas that have already been shaped by mainland Japanese economic and cultural influence. This point is supported by the fact that “one of them was a Yamato mainlander, while the other was supposedly from Naha” (Medoruma 123, 275), and they attempt to photograph Kōtarō to turn his body into a spectacle for outside consumption. The pairing of the two journalists introduces a dynamic that reflects the complex relationships between mainland Japan, urban Okinawa, and rural Okinawan communities. While the mainland journalist represents direct outside observation, the Naha journalist’s participation reveals how urban Okinawans have potentially become complicit in the commodification of rural Okinawan experiences. This urban-rural divide within Okinawa itself parallels what Medoruma critiques in his non-fiction writing about the commercialization of Okinawan culture. Just as some Okinawans actively participate in transforming their culture into tourist attractions, the Naha journalist’s presence suggests how 97 Christy, “The Making of Imperial Subjects in Okinawa,” 610. 61 urban Okinawans may serve as intermediaries in the process of cultural commodification, helping to package rural experiences for mainland consumption. Moreover, this triangulation between mainland Japan, urban Okinawa, and rural communities becomes particularly significant when considered alongside the hotel development conflict. In short, the community authorities attempt to profit from their own commodification while maintaining control over which aspects of their community become visible. Although the community leaders want to control this process by hiding elements that might disturb the image of Okinawa as “healing islands,” the journalists—including the one from Naha—seek to expose precisely these hidden aspects. The male community authorities’ support for hotel construction represents precisely this internalization of colonial desires, though their concern for the journalists’ gaze also reveals the limits of this acceptance. Conversely, Uta’s response to both situations—her opposition at the meeting and her destruction of the cameras—presents a markedly different relationship with the outside gaze. Her initial fierce response to Kinjō’s suggestion of exploiting Kōtarō’s condition as a tourist attraction shows her fundamental rejection of commodifying people’s suffering. When she later “smashed their cameras to pieces” (Medoruma 132, 289), this act represents not just the protection of Kōtarō but a violent rejection of the entire system of observation and commodification that the cameras represent. Unlike the community leaders who seek to manage and profit from outside attention while hiding “uncomfortable” elements, Uta refuses to participate in any version of this spectacle-making. This resistance is reinforced by the narrative strategy discussed earlier, where the narrator consistently aligns with Uta’s perspective while refusing to present her through external viewpoints. Just as Uta rejects being observed and commodified by outsiders, the narrative itself refuses to make her an object of outside 62 observation, instead privileging her own perspective and interpretation of events. In this light, these conflicting responses to outside observation and commodification illustrate the complex tensions that fracture the seemingly unified surface of the Okinawan rural community. Through both Uta’s uncompromising stance and the narrative’s consistent alignment with her perspective, Medoruma suggests that beneath the stereotype of Okinawan gentleness lies a fierce resistance—one that refuses to participate in its own exotic packaging for mainland consumption. In this section, I examined how these layered conflicts over morning routines and community decision-making in “Spirit Stuffing” serve to expose the deep contradictions within Okinawan rural community relationships and the internalized colonialism in the context of the “healing islands” narrative. Through the community center scenes, Medoruma reveals that the human-constructed landscape is both the site and the issue per se where the tension of community intersects and conflicts. The story portrays how male community leaders, from their positions of institutional authority, actively participate in both gender-based oppression and the commodification of Okinawan culture. Ultimately, I argue that through Uta’s fierce resistance—from her refusal to participate in radio calisthenics to her destruction of the journalists’ cameras—the story effectively challenges this idealized Okinawan kyōdōtai and internalized colonial attitudes, particularly the patriarchal power structures that have become deeply embedded in community institutions. Her actions represent resistance against both colonial and gender-based oppression, revealing how these forms of power often work in tandem within Okinawan rural communities. 63 Gendered Bodies and Bodies Are Situated Within Landscapes In the previous section, I illustrated Medoruma’s critique of the tensions within Okinawan rural community vis-à-vis landscapes. Now, I turn my attention to the interplay of bodies and landscapes in “Spirit Stuffing.” Through the interplay of human bodies and non-human entities, Medoruma reveals how the very natural landscape meant to provide “healing” for mainland tourists triggers traumatic wartime memories for some local residents. I argue this juxtaposition manifests through the characters’ embodied relationship with the landscapes, serving as a critique of the commodification of Okinawa into a “healing space.” Inspired by Kurosawa Masato, I draw upon the notion of non-human entities to refer to various imageries that are explicitly depicted as components of the landscapes in the narrative, including animals, plants, and environmental elements. Kurosawa defines Kōtarō’s mabui, sea turtles, and āman as nonhuman (ningen igai no sōnzai) and the “environmental things” (kankyō teki na mono) in the story as the spatial representation that surrounds characters without appearing as an object of conscious orientation.98 For me, Kurosawa’s categorization of environmental imageries, like the seashore, waves, and adan thickets, as “environmental things” distinct from other non-human entities still risks objectifying them. Therefore, I use the term “non-human entities” in this chapter to demonstrate an attitude that regards them as equal to the humans in the story rather than as tourist resources to be exploited. “Spirit Stuffing” flips the gender binary of the active male and the passive female and serves as a crucial element in the story’s critique of the “healing islands” narrative. I argue that the story presents two distinct expressions of gendered human bodies and their relationships with 98 KUROSAWA Masato 黒沢祐人, “War Memories and the <On-Site-ness> In Shun Medoruma’s ‘Mabuigumi’ 目取真俊「魂込め」における戦争記憶と〈現場〉,” Quadrante No.22 (2020): 181-186. Kurosawa’s article also includes the corresponding English-language version of the title and abstract, which I follow here. 64 non-human entities: Uta’s active, mobile female body and Kōtarō’s passive, deteriorating male body. I will first pay attention to Uta’s body within landscapes, which are depicted immediately at the beginning of the narrative. It is worth mentioning that what I refer to as “landscapes” in this chapter are not limited to the natural landscape but also include human-constructed landscapes. I will further elaborate upon my argument through a close reading. Let’s revisit the conflict regarding the radio calisthenics: At the beginning, the music for calisthenics was blasted through a large loudspeaker on the roof of the community center. Uta had stormed into the center’s office to complain about the excessive noise. Kawakami, the chubby, middle-aged president of the Children’s Association, had just smiled at her from under his baseball cap and paid no attention to her complaint. So Uta had gone home, retrieved a reaping sickle from under the eaves of her house, and returned to the community center. She then barged through the children exercising in the public square, and started climbing the telephone pole to cut the wire to the loudspeaker. In a panic, Kawakami jumped up quickly and turned the speaker off. Thereafter, the music played from a radio, not through a loudspeaker. Although the noise continued to disrupt Uta’s peace in the morning, she compromised out of regard for the children and left the matter at that. (Medoruma 112, 257-258) Although Medoruma does not provide the details of children and the seniors doing calisthenics in front of the community center, it does not prevent readers from imagining the scene. As Susan Bouterey has argued, during the Meiji period, modern calisthenics—which eventually became popular as radio calisthenics among the general public—had a strong military influence and aimed to discipline and train groups of people. It also served as a means of subjecting individual bodies to state control.99 Radio calisthenics was promoted throughout imperial Japan’s territories as a mechanism of colonial control, operating on multiple levels: physically, by creating “obedient bodies” through standardized movement; culturally, by supplanting local practices like Uta’s morning tea tradition; and socially, by imposing a unified 99 See Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 193. 65 national rhythm onto local temporal patterns.100 Onishi further highlights how radio calisthenics not only promoted physical activity but also contributed to the “nationalization” (kokuminka) and “imperialization” (kōminka) of the population, facilitating the total mobilization of both body and mind.101 The tension between Uta’s insistence on maintaining her morning tea tradition and the community’s adoption of radio calisthenics thus represents a broader conflict between Okinawan cultural autonomy and Japanese colonial standardization. Likewise, Medoruma’s focus on the sensory aspect of this conflict—Uta’s complaint about “excessive noise” and her desire for “peace in the morning”—highlights how nationalization efforts can invade even individuals’ personal sensory experiences. Uta’s insistence on her right to quiet morning tea represents a claim to bodily and sensory autonomy in the face of national standardization represented by radio calisthenics. However, the contrast at the beginning of the story certainly not only sheds light on what Bhowmik argues is the subtle reflection on the decline of morning tea amid cultural destruction and the absence of faith in contemporary times,102 but also shows Uta’s characteristics and her refusal to put her body under the mechanism of radio calisthenics. In fact, we can observe Uta’s stubborn character as she has refused multiple times. Her deliberate choice to drink tea rather than participate in radio calisthenics introduces her as a figure who expresses resistance through intimate, everyday physical actions. In this scene, we can see that Uta is not passive. At first, the music for calisthenics is transmitted loudly through the loudspeaker airwaves and in public places. To Uta and other people in this rural community, it is impossible to avoid. She rejects the invitation to join the calisthenics and sticks to her habits. But the noise is unbearable; Uta is 100 See Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 193-196. 101 Onishi, Okinawa: kioku to kokuhatsu no bungaku, 127-129. In this chapter, Onishi provides a comprehensive analysis of the mechanism of how the radio exercise served to mobilize civilians in the prewar colonies of imperial Japan and postwar Okinawa. 102 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 150. 66 subjected to this noise every morning, symbolizing the pervasive reach of nationalization efforts into the daily lives of Okinawans.103 This portrayal starkly contrasts with the disciplined, synchronized movements of calisthenics; whereas calisthenics seek to create uniformity of motion and purpose, Uta’s body moves in opposition, asserting its individuality and autonomy. Medoruma uses Uta’s body as a powerful instrument of defiance. Her physical actions— “storming into the community center, retrieving a sickle, and climbing a telephone pole”—constitute a direct, embodied form of resistance. Medoruma’s choice to arm Uta with a “reaping sickle,” a traditional agricultural tool juxtaposed against the modern loudspeaker, emphasizes the conflict between locally situated Okinawan traditions and imposed modernization.104 The sickle becomes an extension of Uta’s body, a symbol of her connection to daily life, just like her morning tea-drinking, which the narrator states that “for generations, the elderly had started the day with a cup of tea before getting to work” (Medoruma 112, 257). These are Okinawan practices that she refuses to relinquish. Medoruma further disrupts the image of a unified community through Uta’s physical interruption of the exercise routine. By “barg[ing] through the children exercising in the public square (112, 257),” Uta breaks the choreographed movements meant to instill a sense of national unity. While Uta’s body remains actively engaged with the landscape and moves as a deconstructive force toward the mechanism to unify the community, another gendered body in the story, Kōtarō’s āman-habited male body, is in a passive state. Uta’s active female body represents local resistance to cultural commodification, and Medoruma’s limited description of 103 See Kojima, “Medoruma mabuigumi,” 89-91. Kojima’s paper provides a detailed analysis of radio calisthenics as a symbol of seeking homogenization toward “Japanese-ness” (Nihonteki naru mono). 104 Bhowmik, Writing Okinawa, 132-139. Although Bhowmik doesn’t explicitly address the loudspeaker as a representation of Okinawa’s imposed modernization, I believe her analysis of Medoruma’s other works that Okinawa’s late modernization and attendant change of values marginalized and rendered powerless traditional segments of society also warrants mentioning here. 67 Kōtarō’s passive male body subverts the notion of Okinawa as a space of uncomplicated healing. Indeed, Medoruma rarely describes Kōtarō’s male body directly; one of the few instances appears in the earlier discussion of narrative strategies. There, Kōtarō’s body, inhabited by the āman, is no different in appearance from that of a sleeping person. Even the expression on his sleeping face was “peaceful (yasuraka), and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary” (Medoruma 113, 259). Interestingly, instead of providing detailed description of Kōtarō’s body, which lacks detailed description, Medoruma focuses more on another element that now can be seen as part of his body, the āman. As the narrative progresses, Kōtarō’s body stays in the passive status and becomes listless. What’s worse, “his body was withering away because the āman was intercepting and consuming the food and the liquids meant for him. While Kōtarō withered, the āman grew larger day by day” (122, 273). At first, the āman’s eyestalks are just in “the shape of matchstick” (114, 261). After five days of fruitless mabuigumi rituals, these “periscope-like eyestalks” (125, 277) grow into “about the size of pencils” (125, 277). In other words, Kōtarō’s body and Uta’s body are extended into different symbolic realms through their associated objects. Uta’s physical agency extends through her use of traditional farming tools, particularly the “reaping sickle” and “flat-bladed hoe” (131, 288), which represents her connection to daily and traditional agricultural practices. The sickle and hoe become the extension of her active resistance: with the former, she challenges the community center’s authority; with the latter, she uses fighting the āman. Insofar as her body merges with these human-made tools of daily labor, Kōtarō’s passive body is symbiotically attached to the āman, a non-human entity representing Okinawa’s natural world. 68 As with the deformed body in “Droplets,” many critics have conducted compelling analyses of the metaphor and plot of Kōtarō’s body being occupied/inhabited by the āman in “Spirit Stuffing.” For instance, Shinjō Ikuo’s 2010 analysis suggests that the story uses Kōtarō’s mouth as a symbolic cave, mirroring how Kōtarō and his mother, Omito, hid in actual caves during the war, which brings the traumatic violence of the war into a new context within Kōtarō’s body.105 To Shinjō, Medoruma transforms Kōtarō’s body into a space that recreates the experience of the Battle of Okinawa and explores themes of war trauma, memory, and familial relationships. Echoing Shinjō, Susan Bouterey argues that the image of āman entering Kōtarō’s body like an invasive alien object, blocking his airways and slowly moving towards his stomach, powerfully illustrates how traumatic memories can feel violent and intrusive.106 Bouterey focuses on how the narrative describes the āman’s movements in and around Kōtarō’s mouth. This includes detailed sensory descriptions, such as the āman extending its pincers while making a “Chon-Chon” sound and searching around his cheeks and chin. Bouterey suggests that these intense tactile experiences symbolize Kōtarō’s deep-seated trauma from losing his parents as a “suckling baby” (chinomigo; Medoruma 260).107 Given that Kōtarō was less than a year old when his parents died, his memories of them would be primarily sensory rather than visual. This approach highlights how early trauma can persist in the body as vague but powerful sensory impressions, even without clear visual memories. To put it differently, Kōtarō’s mouth serves as a symbolic space where the āman, having usurped the organ of speech, appears to channel the silenced voice of the dead through its 105 See Shinjō, Okinawa o kiku, 152-161. 106 Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 172-173. 107 Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 174; while Ikeda translates this word as “infant,” I only cite the page in Japanese text here, with the literal translation of chinomigo as “suckling baby.” 69 possible reincarnation as Omito.108 As Bouterey notes, Kōtarō has been deprived of memories of his parents.109 During the war, Kōtarō’s father, along with other men, was taken by Japanese soldiers and never returned. There were “stories that they had been executed, and the location of their bodies remained a mystery” (Medoruma 128, 283) under the suspicion of spying. His mother’s fate is equally ambiguous. She was shot by someone while gathering food with Uta. Even Uta, the sole witness, couldn’t identify the shooter or locate the body. This lack of witnesses and remains means that the memory of Kōtarō’s parents is shrouded in a void. Kōtarō, having no personal memories, cannot speak about his parents. When he tries to remember, there’s only their absence. To put it differently, Kōtarō has been deprived not only of his parents by the incredibly violent event of war but also of all memories of them. This dual deprivation of both his parents and any concrete memory of them makes his life particularly difficult. With that said, the āman’s presence in the narrative transcends its role as a mere bodily invader, insofar as it emerges as an integral element of Okinawa’s natural environment. This dual role proves crucial in mediating between corporeal experience and war memories. Whereas the āman physically inhabits Kōtarō’s passive body, it simultaneously persists as part of the non-human entities that house and trigger traumatic memories. This connection is exemplified in the story’s ending, where after the forty-nineth day of Kōtarō’s death, “the sound of āman crawling through a nearby adan thicket” (134, 292) merges with Uta’s sensory experience of the environment, suggesting that the boundaries between body, memory, and landscape have become permeable. Such permeability challenges conventional interpretations that view the āman solely as a metaphor for trauma or occupation, instead positioning it as part of a web of environmental 108 Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 178. Bouterey argues that the story’s mention of Uta thinking the āman is a reincarnation of Omito tells the reader about these personal war memories that no evidence can verify, similar to those in “Droplets.” 109 See Bouterey, Medoruma Shun no Okinawa, 172-173. 70 imagery through which memory and bodily experience are mediated. This broader environmental context provides a framework for understanding non-human entities’ function as a conduit for memory recall within the narrative. Next, I will articulate my argument further about how non-human entities, namely environmental imageries, serve as the trigger for Uta’s war memories. In the story, Kōtarō’s lost mabui does not wander far, but instead comes alone to the seashore covered with white sand. There grows a lone hamasūki tree and the shade beneath this tree is perfect for afternoon naps; it is also a place where Kōtarō frequently played his sanshin. The seemingly idyllic seashore where Kōtarō’s spirit sits is in the same location where his mother, Omito, was killed during the war. However, Medoruma clearly is not satisfied with merely creating a stage setting for his characters. In subsequent scenes where Uta performs the mabuigumi ritual or comes alone to the beach to converse with Kōtarō’s mabui, he delicately describes the details of this natural landscape each time. Notably, in almost every instance, Medoruma depicts bright moonlight sometimes together with the trees and grove. I argue that through these environmental imageries, Medoruma demonstrates how non-human entities function as a conduit for memory recall. For example, consider the description of when Uta returns to the beach to check on Kōtarō’s mabui after concluding her meeting with the male authority figures in the community: While the men continued to drink and party at the community center, Uta left and walked Fumi home. Then she went back to the seashore alone. By the light of the white, budlike moon, she had no trouble seeing her way without a flashlight. She listened to the sound of the waves breaking on shore, and felt the velvety sand give way beneath her feet as she walked to the hamasūki tree. In the faint blue shadows, Kōtarō’s mabui was staring at the sea. Uta sat down next to it and looked out at the ocean, watching the moonlight flicker on the surface of the water. (Medoruma 121-122, 272) In this nighttime scene, Medoruma constructs environmental imageries with multiple sensory details. The passage centers on the prominent motif of moonlight, described as “white” 71 and “budlike,” which not only illuminates Uta’s path but also becomes a trigger for Uta to recall her youth. This natural illumination is complemented by tactile sensations of “velvety sand” beneath Uta’s feet and the auditory element of waves breaking on the shore. Readers’ attention to these sensory details follows Uta as she finally sits down and concludes with the image of her watching the moonlight flickering on the water’s surface. Immediately after this scene, the narrator starts to inform the reader about Uta’s past, when “she and the other young people used to gather on the beach in the evenings and stay out late moon-gazing, drinking liquor, and singing to the accompaniment of the sanshin” (122, 272). We learn that it is in this fashion that Uta and her now-dead husband, Seiei, got to know each other, and Kōtarō’s parents, Omito and Yūkichi, fell in love with each other. Similarly, careful descriptions of the moonlight beach appear many times later and continue to serve as a powerful catalyst for accessing the past, including on the sixth day, when Uta makes her final attempt at the mabuigumi ritual: […] Telling Fumi she was going home to bed, Uta left. Worrying about her, Tsuru accompanied her to her house. After Tsuru left, Uta turned and went straight to the beach. The brightness of the moon was all but drowning out the light of the stars, and the seashore looked as if it were shrouded in a blue haze. Uta removed her rubber slippers, and carrying one in each hand she slowly made her way to the hamasūki, treading on sand as soft and warm as the body of a living creature. (Medoruma 125, 278) Here, after indicating that Uta went again to the beach, the narrator in the next paragraph doesn’t choose to keep narrating Kōtarō or describing Uta’s actions. Instead, the narrative shifts to depict the moonlight and other environmental imageries. After just one sentence of environmental description, the narrative focus returns to Uta’s movements and actions. While this brief interlude might seem incidental, it marks a crucial moment when Uta witnesses the newly hatched sea turtles. It prompts the narrator to reveal Uta’s wartime experiences to readers, particularly a memory of how a similar moonlight illuminated the scene when Uta and Omito 72 ventured out together in search of food during the war and “there in the moonlight was a sea turtle, digging a hole and tossing sand in the air” (127, 280). The text then emphasizes a sense of temporal rupture where “Uta had the strange sensation that she was back in the village before the war had started” (127, 280) as she observes the turtles nesting and listens to “the sound of sand being scattered on hamahirugao leaves” (127, 280). In addition to the recurring motif of moonlight, Medoruma introduces the tactile sensation of sand in the repetition of these scenes. From describing it as “soft and warm as the body of a living creature” to the careful attention of “the sound of sand being scattered,” the multiple corporeal sensations gain additional significance when juxtaposed with the sea turtles, which, oblivious to human conflicts, continue their biological imperative to come ashore and lay eggs. The sand beneath Uta’s feet serves as a profound implication for life, as it conceals unhatched turtle eggs. It also underscores the significance of non-human entities, highlighting their vitality to the reader. Meanwhile, the narrator explicitly demonstrates that non-human entities such as moonlight have been deeply intertwined with Uta’s perception between reality and memories. Near the end of the story, after an extended break between paragraphs indicating the passage of time, Uta recalls that her father used to tell her when she was a child that it takes forty-nine days for “a person’s spirit to make the journey to the afterworld and for baby turtles to hatch and enter the sea” (132, 290). After this, the depiction of non-human entities repeats, as “the rainy season was ending, and once again the light of the moon shone on the seashore” (132, 290). However, the narrator does not explain this sentence, instead starting a new paragraph to describe the scene on the forty-nineth day after Kōtarō left. This seemingly incidental reference to moonlight serves a deeper function to the whole narrative. The recurring presence of moonlight in Uta’s memories suggests its role as a symbolic bridge between past and present 73 moments of significance in Uta’s life. In the evening on the forty-nineth day after Kōtarō’s death. Uta felt that it was still too early, but she just couldn’t stay at home anymore. She went to the shore, “sat under the hamasūki waiting, gazing at the sea. As she listened to the sound of the waves and gazed at the sea in the moonlight, she felt as if she had died and become mabui, unable to distinguish between memory and reality anymore” (Medoruma 291; translation mine). Here, these non-human entities reappear in the narrator’s account of Uta’s memories. In this flashback, the narrating voice provides a detailed account of Uta’s memories of the seashore. There, she has many fond memories of growing up with her parents, her lover, and Omito. Even after being released from the American internment camp, Uta rushes to the shore, where she sees many newly hatched baby turtles “broke into a vigorous rush towards the ocean” (134, 292). The connection between non-human entities and bodily experience extends beyond wartime memories and persists throughout Uta’s postwar life. During the war, witnessing the turtles laying eggs made Uta feel trancelike as if the war was not happening; in the present time, they become the trigger for Uta’s recollections. In sum, through this layered depiction of environmental elements—the moonlight, the tactile qualities of sand, and the presence of sea turtles—the natural landscape simultaneously embodies both continuity and rupture, connecting pre-war, wartime, and postwar experiences in Uta’s consciousness. As I cited from Kurosawa’s argument previously, these environmental elements in “Spirit Stuffing” transcend mere symbolic representations of Okinawa’s distinctive landscape. Through this narrative technique, Medoruma illustrates that the human body’s capacity for memory recall is spatially dependent on and inseparable from its counterpart of non-human entities rather than functioning as an autonomous entity. His depiction positions non-human entities not as a passive backdrop but as active agents in mediating memories and lived experiences in the postwar 74 period. Nevertheless, I’d like to add that the reason readers can experience this is also closely related to Medoruma’s technique of shortening the distance between the narrative voice and the protagonist’s perspective. As the narrative reveals Uta’s wartime experiences to the reader through a third-person perspective, the narrating voice once again comments on the significance of Kōtarō to Uta after the loss of Omito, Yūkichi, and her husband Seiei: “More than anything, for the widowed Uta, watching Kōtarō grow into a man had given meaning to her life” (Medoruma 128, 283). Although the narrating voice briefly distances itself from Uta’s perspective, Medoruma once again fuses the two perspectives in the following paragraph. [One/I/Uta] thinks/think the moonlight hasn’t changed for decades, even centuries [tsuki no hikari wa nanjūnen mo nanbyakunen mo kawaranai to omou]. The sea turtle that digs in the sand and returns to the sea appears to be the same turtle [that one/I/she] saw during the war, and at the same time, appears like one that hatched and grew from the eggs that had remained in the sand at that time. The waves wash away the sand from its shell. The sea turtle, which entered the sea as if sliding, turned its neck back and looked toward the shore. Kōtarō starts walking slowly toward the sea. (283; Translation mine) Notably, the moonlight reappears in this passage. Just as the moonlight during wartime made Uta feel as if she had returned to the village before the war, here the moonlight becomes the guide for the change of time and space, and the narrative naturally returns from Uta’s wartime experiences to the present time and space. In addition, in the original Japanese text, each sentence in this passage lacks a clear subject, which is Medoruma’s deliberate intention. Since there is a comparison between the sea turtle in front of the narrator/Uta and the one they saw during the war, and the verb in each sentence is in the non-past tense, it seems that this passage can also be identified as Uta’s monologue. After all, in the present narrative time and space, apart from the omniscient narrator, the only other characters in the scene are Uta and Kōtarō, and Kōtarō never speaks. To repeat what I have briefly touched upon in the first section of this chapter: the reader’s perception and understanding of war memories do not actually come from 75 Uta’s own words. Uta doesn’t speak to anyone about her wartime experiences in the story. What the reader encounters are Uta’s memories or explanations presented by the narrator on her behalf. Therefore, I argue this ambiguous transition paragraph shows us how Medoruma renders the interaction between Uta and non-human entities by narrowing the gap between the narrating voice and Uta’s perspective and aligning the narrator with Uta’s perspective. To sum up, through the interweaving of non-human entities and human bodies, Medoruma crafts a powerful critique on how Okinawa’s landscape, which has been commodified as a “healing space,” is serving as a repository of traumatic memories for local residents. The beach where Kōtarō’s spirit lingers becomes a contested site where multiple temporal and experiential layers converge. Significantly, non-human entities, here the environmental imagery, serve a more complex function: they create a multisensory framework where past and present coexist through bodily encounters with the landscape. This is particularly evident in how moonlight’s presence bridges the corporeal and environmental realms, demonstrating how trauma and memory persist not just in individual bodies but in the shared space of Okinawa’s natural environment. These environmental imageries function not as backdrops but as active agents in memory transmission, creating what Kurosawa calls a spatially dependent relationship between landscape and remembrance. I argue that “Spirit Stuffing” suggests that understanding postwar memory requires attention not only to human experiences but also to the ways in which landscape itself becomes a repository and transmitter of historical trauma. Conclusion: Unhealed Wounds beneath the “Healing Islands” Narrative In the end, Medoruma leaves readers in ambiguity where the boundary between reality and Uta’s memory becomes deliberately unclear. Uta comes to the beach alone and puts her 76 hands together in prayer. At this moment, the narrative voice notably shifts away from its previous alignment with her perspective, adopting a more distanced stance to observe that “her prayer (inori) never reached its destination” (Medoruma 134, 293). Medoruma’s precise linguistic choices here are significant: rather than employing a construction that would imply the existence of an intended recipient for Uta’s prayer, he frames the prayer itself in purely spatial terms. This aligns with the story’s emphasis on the connection between the protagonists and the landscapes as well as other non-human entities. The original Japanese text further reinforces this spatial emphasis by omitting personal pronouns, allowing “prayer” (inori) to stand alone as the sentence’s subject/theme. As Shinjō says at the end of his analysis of “Spirit Stuffing,” this final gesture suggests not the futility of Uta’s prayer but rather its potential liberation from her possession (ryōyū), creating the possibility for both the prayer and Uta herself to find new forms of freedom.110 In other words, this prayer’s apparent failure to reach its destination paradoxically generates what Shinjō describes as a deferred temporality—a suspended moment in which the prayer might eventually find its audience.111 Confined to the shore in the literary space, this undelivered prayer exists in a state of perpetual repetition, creating an infinite loop of potential reception. In this way, we as readers become the implicit audiences for this supposedly unreceived prayer, transforming its apparent failure into a different kind of success: while the prayer within the narrative framework may never reach its intended destination, it achieves a form of completion through our act of reading/witnessing it. Through its multi-layered narrative strategy and sophisticated treatment of human bodies, community dynamics, and environmental imagery, “Spirit Stuffing” presents a powerful critique of Okinawa’s commodification as “healing islands,” revealing the tensions between tourist- 110 Shinjō, Okinawa o kiku, 174. 111 Shinjō, Okinawa o kiku, 174. 77 oriented representations and local lived experiences. This chapter has demonstrated how Medoruma reveals the fundamental contradictions between Okinawa’s marketing as a therapeutic space for mainland Japanese consumption and the unresolved traumas experienced by its residents. The story suggests that true “healing” cannot occur through superficial tourism narratives or forced community cohesion, as these very attempts to market Okinawa as a healing space may actually perpetuate the unresolved traumas of war survivors. Instead, it requires acknowledging both external impositions and internal divisions. Through its interweaving of narrative perspective, bodily experience, and environmental imagery, I argue that “Spirit Stuffing” reveals how the very attempt to market Okinawa as a “healing space” may actually perpetuate the wounds of war survivors. By positioning non-human entities as active agents in memory transmission rather than passive tourist attractions, Medoruma challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between landscape, memory, and trauma in postwar Okinawa. Just as Uta’s prayer exists in a state of perpetual deferral, the possibility of genuine healing remains suspended, awaiting a reader willing to witness Okinawa’s unresolved past without attempting to constrain it within simplistic narratives of recovery. 78 Chapter Four: Conclusion In October 2023, I visited Okinawa for the first time. As I strolled Chatan Park next to the Futenma base with my friend from the University of the Ryukyus, U.S. military aircraft whizzed by overhead from time to time. In these moments, my friend did not stop talking, and I did not stop listening, but the noise of military aircrafts that continued to roar drowned out our voices even when we sat next to each other. This sensory disruption crystallized what Medoruma’s fiction articulates through literary form: the material and discursive mechanisms through which Okinawan experiences are simultaneously witnessed yet rendered inaudible within Japan’s national narratives. Being in these landscapes and having these embodied experiences, I couldn’t help but ponder the meaning of this scene—can Okinawa/ns speak? Is anyone listening to their experiences? When corporeally present voices become inaudible in physical space, what possibilities remain for metaphorical and literal “voices” operating within and against colonial frameworks? Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang remind us in their seminal 2012 article that “decolonization is not a metaphor.”112 Their admonition is relevant to consider when reading Medoruma’s fiction, which invites readers to interrogate the intricate entanglements between war memory and Okinawa’s persistent colonial status quo. While decolonization itself resists metaphorization, its expression may nevertheless operate through metaphorical literary strategies that unsettle dominant narratives. In this light, I wonder how Medoruma’s literary works help us understand the (post)coloniality of Okinawa/ns experiences. How might literature function toward decolonization within specific regional contexts? 112 Tuck Eve and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 3. 79 In Medoruma’s fiction, war memories persist beneath the surface of contemporary Okinawan life, refusing to be buried by tourist narratives or historical revisionism. Just as there are countless human remains and unexploded ordnance from the Battle beneath the earth of Okinawa, the landscapes celebrated in “healing islands” narratives conceal layers of unresolved trauma. In an attempt to provide some answers to the above questions, I examined how Medoruma’s literary works employ bodily transformation and environmental imagery to challenge hegemonic narratives about Okinawa. I contended that Medoruma’s works constitute powerful acts of decolonial resistance specific to the Okinawan context, exposing the contradictions between mainland Japan’s portrayal of Okinawa and the persistent wounds experienced by war survivors. These hegemonic and colonial narratives tend to ask Okinawa to forget its past and embrace its role as a “healing space” for tourists. As I outlined in the introduction, in doing so they produce a colonial unknowing that obscures oppressive relationships between mainland Japan and Okinawa. This collective ignorance buries specific Okinawan experiences, particularly Japanese military violence against civilians while packaging the islands’ cultural distinctiveness as exotic entertainment. In Chapter Two, I explored how “Droplets” transforms the physical body into a site of contested memories through Tokushō’s mysterious affliction. By closely examining the text’s historical and literary contexts, I revealed how Tokushō’s swollen, water-oozing foot functions as more than a metaphorical device. Tokushō’s day-night dichotomy—docile victim in daylight, guilty perpetrator by night—illuminates the complex position of Okinawan civilians who cannot be neatly categorized within Japanese national narratives of heroic sacrifice. In Chapter Three, I demonstrated how “Spirit Stuffing” confronts the commercially fabricated image of Okinawa as “healing islands” by revealing the trauma embedded in its seemingly idyllic landscapes. By 80 examining how gendered bodies interact within different social and linguistic communities as well as how they are positioned vis-à-vis environmental elements like moonlight and shorelines, I uncovered the way landscapes function not as healing spaces but as repositories of unresolved grief that resist national containment. Taking the two chapters together, I argued in this thesis that Medoruma’s two works under discussion serve as counter-narratives that challenge hegemonic and colonial claims. Similar to how Tuck and Yang foreground the ethics of incommensurability and recognize how it unsettles settlers’ innocence, I would argue that “Droplets” and “Spirit Stuffing” also manifest incommensurability and a refusal to reconcile war memories to a certain degree.113 While Tuck and Yang’s arguments emerged specifically from North American settler colonialism contexts, the principles they established regarding decolonization remain instructive for understanding different (de)colonial contexts worldwide. Simply put, what emerges from both texts is a profound challenge to simplistic notions of healing. Rather than offering paths to resolution, Medoruma highlights the fundamental contradiction between mainland Japan’s packaging of Okinawa as an exotic paradise and the lived reality of residents whose relationships to their environment remain haunted by unaddressed historical traumas. Finally, Medoruma’s works suggest that coming to terms with war memories and trauma that underpin Okinawa’s contemporary realities cannot be accommodated through economic development or tourist narratives but requires confronting the uncomfortable tensions between assigned national identities and embodied local experiences. The texts’ ambiguous endings, Tokushō’s tears at the sight of a flower-blossoming-gourd and Uta’s undelivered prayer, suggest that reconciling memories remains suspended in a state of perpetual deferral and is never 113 See Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 35-36. 81 complete while colonial structures persist. The power of such writing is that it allows the ghosts of the past to intervene, while magical elements do not replace the realistic but merge with it to create a new reality—thus creating a new space of expression that offers a third perspective of neither the colonized nor the colonizer. This, in turn, offers the diligent reader—fan or academic, whose task is to listen to those other voices—an opportunity to enter that space as an active participant, transcending the (post)colonial in favor of decolonization. In this vein, promoting decolonial knowledge also means acknowledging one’s own positionality. In my thesis, I wish to acknowledge the privileges I have inherited. The fact is that I am Chinese but not Okinawan or Japanese; I have no relatives who died in the Battle of Okinawa. I also acknowledge that I am a temporary settler-immigrant and an uninvited guest on the unceded territory of the xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) and that I write in English at a post-secondary education institution in Canada. My positionality may always entail a risk of (re)producing colonial knowledge. I do not pretend to represent or speak on behalf of Okinawans. As an outsider, my reading is only one of many possibilities; I hope my stance of reading as an outsider will become a reference for other outsiders. Literary Interventions as a Form of Decolonial Ethics While this thesis focused on how Medoruma’s writing could be read as a decolonial effort, I acknowledge that there are multiple avenues left to explore in future research. One potential idea would be a more comprehensive analysis of gender and sexuality in Medoruma’s depictions of war memory. In “Droplets,” for instance, the complex interplay of masculinity/femininity/queerness emerges in several striking ways. For instance, the water from Tokushō’s swollen toe is marketed as a cure for baldness and impotence, conditions culturally 82 associated with diminished masculinity. Though Seiyū’s selling of this “miracle water” is portrayed as opportunistic fraud, the specific ailments he claims it will cure reveal deeper anxieties about postwar male identity and physical vitality. Femininity also figures prominently, though often in complex and contradictory ways. Take a look at the nurturing yet self-sacrificing role of Miyagi, the female Student Nurse Corps member who entrusts bread and water to Tokushō for the dying Ishimine. The text subtly critiques how women’s wartime experiences are frequently marginalized with female characters like Miyagi appearing primarily through men’s memories rather than as subjects of their own stories. Yet the intimate scenes where dead soldiers drink water from Tokushō’s toe also carry distinctly homoerotic undertones, as the text explicitly describes him experiencing physical pleasure that culminates in ejaculation. This provocative rendering of bodily contact between men challenges heteronormative frameworks typically applied to war narratives and suggests complex connections between trauma, memory, and desire. Exploring how different gendered positions, whether as soldiers, survivors, or storytellers, shape and are shaped by competing narratives of the war could provide valuable insights into the complex intersection of gender, trauma, and memory in Medoruma’s fiction. Secondly, I acknowledge that the so-called neo-colonialism Okinawa is experiencing is not limited to the Japanese side. My thesis only focused on the hegemonic narratives from mainland Japan since the 1990s; however, the ongoing U.S. military-imperial presence also acted as a means of shaping Okinawa/ns’ landscapes and everyday lives. Following “Spirit Stuffing,” Medoruma published fiction that more directly confronts the American military occupation, such as “Hope” (“Kibō,” 1999) and “Army Messenger” (“Denreihei,” 2004). In “Hope,” Medoruma presents the disturbing narrative of an Okinawan man who murders an American child before committing suicide. It can be read as a provocative exploration of powerlessness that subverts 83 the media-constructed image of Okinawa’s “gentleness.” The story’s power lies in how it blurs the line between victim and aggressor while maintaining a sharp critique of Okinawa’s continued military burden. Similarly, “Army Messenger” employs the ghost of a headless soldier from the Battle of Okinawa to demonstrate how wartime trauma persists across generations. Kyle Ikeda has contributed some pioneering analysis of this work, revealing how Medoruma uses haunted landscapes to illustrate both the visible U.S. military occupation and the concealed sites of wartime atrocities.114 These later works deepen and extend the decolonial critique that I have identified in “Droplets” and “Spirit Stuffing,” suggesting that a more comprehensive study of Medoruma’s oeuvre could provide valuable insights into how his literary project has evolved to address Okinawa’s complex neocolonial relationship with mainland Japan and the United States. Lastly, expanding this research to consider Medoruma’s work within a broader framework of literary interventions as forms of decolonial ethics would be particularly valuable. By focusing on how Medoruma’s fiction portrays human-ghost relationships and land-based connections, future research could further illuminate how his work reveals alternative ways of knowing and being that foreground reciprocity and relationality. This approach would be helpful to show how literary imagination helps us recognize forms of knowledge that colonial frameworks render invisible. Examining other writers concerned with Okinawa’s decolonization—both Okinawan and non-Okinawan—could reveal how literature creates complex webs of solidarity where inside and outside perspectives become mutually constitutive sites for imagining decolonial possibilities. 114 Kyle Ikeda, “Transgenerational Hauntings in the Landscape of Okinawa, Japan: Medoruma Shun’s “Army Messenger,” in Memory, Trauma, Asia: Recall, Affect and Orientalism in Contemporary Narratives, ed. Sharanya Jayawickrama and Rahul K. Gairola (Routledge, 2021), 158-174. 84 As I conclude this thesis, I find myself reflecting on the responsibility that comes with engaging with Okinawan literary texts as an outside reader. When I visited Okinawa and experienced firsthand how military aircraft could physically silence conversation, I gained a visceral understanding of what Medoruma’s fiction accomplishes through literary form—creating spaces where silenced voices might be heard despite powerful forces working to render them inaudible. While my position as a non-Okinawan, non-Japanese means I cannot claim to fully comprehend the lived experiences embedded in these narratives, it also offers a vantage point from which to amplify these literary interventions within global academic conversations about decolonization. I hope this thesis serves as one small contribution to a growing body of scholarship that approaches Okinawan literature not merely as a regional curiosity within Japanese national literary frameworks, but as sophisticated articulations of resistance with relevance to decolonial movements worldwide. Medoruma’s fiction reminds us that decolonization requires more than policy changes or historical acknowledgments. I would say it demands a fundamental reconfiguring of how we listen to voices emerging from colonial margins, and a willingness to engage with uncomfortable truths that unsettle dominant narratives. Perhaps the most valuable lesson I take from this research is that responsible engagement with such texts begins not with speaking, but with learning to listen differently to stories told from positions that challenge our own perspective and privilege. 85 Bibliography Aniya, Masaaki. “Compulsory Mass Suicide, the Battle of Okinawa, and Japan’s Textbook Controversy.” Translated by Kyoko Selden. The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, January 6, 2008. https://apjjf.org/aniya-masaaki/2629/article. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Asian Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Yi, Christina
Beneath the healing islands : corporeal memory and decolonial writing in Medoruma Shun’s war fiction
Text