Writing Okinawa: Narrative Acts of Identity and Resistance (review)

Organized chronologically by author, this study is the first critical overview in English of modern prose fiction by Okinawan writers from pioneering stories in the 1900s to works that have attracted a steadily growing readership in the 1990s and 2000s. Critic and translator Davinder L. Bhowmik analyzes selected works, providing translations of key passages. Her book usefully complements previously published English translations, including the anthology Southern Exposure: Modern Japanese Literature from Okinawa (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000) from which she draws stories for analysis. Bhowmik makes judicious use of theory to locate works in a wider literary context and of biographical information to supply historical and cultural context. She explores issues of language, culture, identity, war, occupation, and military bases as they are represented in Okinawan literature.

The first authors of modern Okinawan fiction were educated early in a campaign to promote the use of “standard” (i.e., Tokyo) Japanese in the nation’s newest prefecture where the local language was mostly incomprehensible elsewhere in Japan. Okinawan writers launched their careers with the support of prominent writers in Tokyo and wrote in standard Japanese out of necessity. “Yamagusuku Seichū, who produced fiction late in the Meiji period, and Ikemiyagi Seihō, prolific during the Taisho era, created works in which there existed a dual structure of language,” Bhowmik explains. “This language consisted of standard Japanese and, for traditional sentiment and conceptions, Ryukyuan dialect” (p. 67). In the 1910s and 1920s, writers infused their stories with occasional Ryukyuan expressions, often to evoke local color, which were usually close enough to standard Japanese to be understood by mainland readers. “The mixture of language in Okinawan fiction attests both to its authors’ creativity and to their complicity with market forces” (p. 12). In the 1930s and early 1940s, however, they abandoned even these modest efforts. “With increasingly strict national and local enforcement of standard Japanese, . . . the use of dialect, even to provide realistic dialogue, remained absent” (p. 63). During this period, writers such as Kushi Fusako, Yogi Seishō, and Miyagi Sō turned to natural description for conveying Okinawan perspectives. “In places where standard Japanese will not fully express an emotion, . . . glimpses of local landscape appear” (p. 68).

Ōshiro Tatsuhiro appended the subtitle “Jikken hōgen o motsu aru fūdoki” (A gazetteer with practical dialect) to his 1966 story “Kame no kō baka” (1966; “Turtleback Tombs,” 2000). This work depicts the efforts of a family to survive the Battle of Okinawa by taking refuge in their large ancestral tomb, a locus of Okinawa’s indigenous religious practice based on ancestor worship. As Bhowmik notes, Ōshiro uses standard Japanese for descriptive passages but “creates an artificial language [for dialogue passages] that has local flavor but is still comprehensible to readers of standard Japanese” (p. 99). She and other critics have praised Higashi Mineo’s “more natural use of dialect” (p. 99) in his 1971 story “Okinawa no shōnen” (1971; “Child of Okinawa,” 1989), which portrays the confused sexual awakening of a teenage boy growing up in the family’s home where his parents run a bar/brothel for American G.I.s. “Higashi treads further in his use of dialect by employing it more fluidly than did Ōshiro” (p. 126). The local language he uses is mostly understandable by readers elsewhere in Japan, and expressions unfamiliar to them are accompanied by kanji glosses.

Many of the characters in Medoruma Shun’s fiction, published in the 1990s and 2000s, also speak in Ryukyuan, but he includes glosses more often in his later works. Bhowmik attributes this change to the growth of Medoruma’s readership on the mainland after his story “Suiteki” (1997; “Droplets,” 2000) won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize, in 1997. She writes that the “fiercely radical prose” (p. 158) Sakiyama Tami has published from the late 1980s to the present seeks “to tear her writing away from the grips of Japanese” (p. 173). “[She] extends her use of dialect...