Unspoken memory and vicarious trauma: the Battle of Okinawa in the second-generation survivor fiction of Medoruma Shun

Abstract

In “Unspoken Memory and Vicarious Trauma: The Battle of Okinawa in the Second-Generation Survivor Fiction of Medoruma Shun,” I analyze how memories of the Battle of Okinawa have been imagined and portrayed in the fiction of Okinawa’s premier contemporary writer, Medoruma Shun (b. 1960). Drawing from theory on literary narrative, studies on war memory, and research on second-generation trauma, I develop three major arguments concerning the ways in which Medoruma’s war fiction contributes to public knowledge of the Battle of Okinawa. First, I reveal how Medoruma’s early war-related stories, “Fuon” (The Crying Wind, 1985-6) and “Heiwa dori to nazukerareta machi o aruite” (Walking the Street Named Peace Boulevard, 1986), engage unspoken or inexpressible memories of the Battle of Okinawa that have been avoided or left out of survivor testimony. Medoruma’s knowledge of these untold and traumatic memories, I demonstrate, grows out of his experience as the child and grandchild of survivors of the Battle of Okinawa. Second, I analyze how Medoruma’s stories “Suiteki” (Droplets, 1997) and “Mabuigumi” (Spirit Stuffing, 1998) challenge the conventions of historical narrative and the tenets of realist representation through the portrayal of unverifiable and unexplained phenomena. Although Medoruma has been labeled a writer of “magical realism,” I argue that such categorization risks overlooking the challenge to mainstream Japanese and Western epistemology that the so-called “magical” aspects of his stories contain. Third, I show how “Guncho no ki” (Tree of Butterflies, 2000) embraces the subjective, emotional, and victim-oriented narratives of war survivors that conservative nationalists as well as progressive critics have dismissed as inaccurate or self-serving. In “Tree of Butterflies,” these emotional narratives also critically point to internal differences within Okinawan war experiences, such as Okinawan acts of aggression and discrimination against other Okinawans, and disrupt collective Okinawan modes of remembering built on the erasure of such memories. With his ongoing serialized novel Me no oku no mori (Forest at the Back of My Eye, 2004- ), Medoruma has moved toward a longer and more polyphonic narrative that still explores the inner-thoughts and unspoken memories of war survivors through the use and depiction of vicarious trauma.