Medoruma Shun

In 1997, the Japanese writer of Okinawan descent Medoruma Shun was awarded the Akutagawa prize for his story Droplets (Suiteki). In this tale, Tokushô, a veteran of the Battle of Okinawa, wakes up one day to find his leg turned into a gourd melon. His toe bursts, and water slowly comes out of it. Every night Tokushô is visited by the ghosts of his war comrades, who take turns and sit down to drink from his appendage. Tokushô is now forced to revisit those memories of the war he had been repressing for over forty years. This paper studies how Droplets functions as a work on personal trauma and on collective memory. Trauma and collective memory are addressed from two parallel perspectives: the narrative and the metanarrative. On the one hand, the story of Tokushô involves traumatic experiences and war memories in postwar Japan. On the other hand, this paper argues that Medoruma constructs his short story using particular devices to engage with the problematic issue of representing traumatic experiences and discussing war memories in postwar Japan. Specifically, these devices include fantastic elements to represent trauma and the use of culturally symbolic and referential to discuss war memory narratives in Japan.

This paper examines magical realism in Okinawa bungaku (Okinawan literature) with a special focus on the literary works of Medoruma Shun. The central research questions are what kind of Okinawan realities these magical-realistic texts point towards and which real problems thus become obvious. Against the theoretical background regarding the discussions on magical realism in literary science, qualitative analyses of the two short stories 'Akai yashi no ha' (1992) and 'Umukaji tō chiritei' (1999) are conducted. The findings of these analyses show that the narrative mode of magical realism is used to point towards post-colonial power relations and to express a political critique of contemporary relationships with mainland Japan and the United States from an Okinawan point of view.

This paper examines Medoruma Shun’s (b. 1960) fiction and non-fiction writing for examples of how sites of the war have significance and meanings for Okinawan war survivors and their offspring.  After analyzing the depiction of first-generation war survivors in Medoruma’s fiction, I investigate how transgenerational war memory manifests in his writing. I contend that the experience of being raised in sites of the war past generates what I call geographically-proximate postmemory, a kind of postmemory that is more inclined to vicarious narration and imaginings than the geographically-displaced postmemory of second-generation Holocaust survivors. I argue that Medoruma’s fiction vicariously narrates and imagines war survivor recollections of the war due to an intimate understanding of the concrete sites and contexts within which the war unfolded.  Before beginning my examination, I first discuss the difference between the notion of the postwar generation within Japan and the idea of second-generation survivorship and situate Medoruma’s fiction within the context of second-generation survivor postmemory and literary expressions.  I close by reflecting on the significance of the multiple and intertwined war-related meanings that animate the Okinawan landscape in relation to post-war and contemporary attempts to recast Okinawa as a tourists cape.

Works discussed: "Droplets" (Suiteki), "Mabuigumi" / "Spirit Stuffing" (Mabuigumi), "Crying Wind" (Fūon), "Army Messenger" (Denreihei), _Forest at the Back of my Eye_ (Me no oku no mori) / _In the Woods of Memory_

In recent years narratives by Japanese writers born after 1945 about Japan’s war experience have been receiving attention and acclaim for their significant and meaningful engagements with Japan’s war past.  Analysis of Murakami Haruki’s (b. 1949) The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Okuizumi Hikaru’s (b. 1956) “The Stones Cry Out” and Medoruma Shun’s (b. 1960) “Tree of Butterflies” have focused on each story’s attempt to imagine Japan’s traumatic past and help the nation come to terms with the unacknowledged and repressed. While such scholarship constitutes an important beginning for opening up discussions about the war writing of the postwar generation of writers, it overlooks the second-generation war memory elements and aesthetics of these authors’ works.  The above mentioned stories, I argue, do not merely represent the difficult aspects of war and unmentionable atrocities of war violence, but also utilize narrative strategies, symbolic relationships, and metaphors that underscore the transgenerational and subliminal aspects of war memory transmission and reception.  Characteristic of second-generation trauma fiction, these stories revolve around unexplained events, hidden war memories, incomplete comprehension, and generational relationships.  As second-generation war narratives, these stories are shaped by and reveal the nature of transgenerational war memory in postwar Japan as felt within personal relationships of the family and during the course of daily life.

The article examines how literature about the Battle of Okinawa has been shaped by the identity and experiences of the author as well as the social and historical context in which the works were created. First I briefly discuss the relationship between writing about the Battle of Okinawa and war memory, and provide an overview of existing scholarship. I then review the major characteristics of the Battle of Okinawa, and controversies, over representation and remembrance, that have occurred over the past several decades. The main section of this chapter examines non-fiction writing about the battle, before discussing select works of fiction. I conclude by analyzing a second-generation war narrative, ‘Tree of Butterflies’ (Gunchō no ki, 2000) by Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun (b. 1960).

Unarticulated Memories of the Battle of Okinawa: The Early Fiction of Second-Generation War Survivor Medoruma Shun
Kyle Ikeda
Abstract

This article examines two early pieces of literary war fiction by Okinawa's leading contemporary writer, Medoruma Shun, that deal with two kinds of unarticulated memories of the Battle of Okinawa: memory constrained by social consequence and the inexpressible memory of trauma. Both stories constitute explorations of war memory that are not found in survivor testimony and, as such, simultaneously reveal and critique the limitations of survivor-authored narratives of the war. I first explicate how the war-survivor characters in “Fûon” (“The Crying Wind,” 1985 – 86) lived their lives since the war without telling anyone about their most haunting war experiences, in large part, I argue, because of the possible social consequences of disclosure. Drawing from Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart's, as well as Oka Mari's, scholarship on the nature of traumatic memory, I demonstrate how the traumatic war experiences of an elderly war-survivor character in “Heiwa dôri to nazukerareta machi or aruite” (“Walking the Street Named Peace Boulevard,” 1986) remain beyond her ability to narrate them.

The article argues that Medoruma's war fiction needs to be interpreted within the frame of second-generation survivorship in order to better reveal the ways in which his narratives contribute to understandings of the Battle of Okinawa and its ongoing effects on survivors. It is Medoruma's experience as the child, grandchild, and relative of numerous survivors of the Battle of Okinawa that has provided him with an intimate look at the nature of war trauma and made him aware of the gap between war stories that survivors recount in public and the inarticulate expressions of war trauma that haunt many of them in private. At the same time, because he has not directly experienced the war, Medoruma is removed enough from the traumatic event to be able to address that which survivors have avoided or have been unable to articulate.