The Alien Within: Representations of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature

7. History/Fiction/Identity: Ōshiro Tatsuhiro and the Uncanny

C H A P T E R 7 H I S T O R Y / F I C T I O N / I D E N T I T Y Òshiro Tatsuhiro and the Uncanny To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits, To report the behavior of the sea monster, Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry, Observe disease in signatures, evoke Biography from the wrinkles of the palm And tragedy from fingers; release omens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Men’s curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension. —T.S. Eliot, from “The Dry Salvages” It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. —Elizabeth Bishop, from “At the Fishhouses” C hapter 6 explored Öshiro Tatsuhiro’s vision of yuta, the female shamans of Okinawa, but this chapter is concerned with noro, women who in some respects have played similar roles to yuta, but whose significance for Okinawan history was much more momentous. There is no mainland equivalent in medieval or modern Japanese history to noro, although some similarities may be found to a female seer named Himiko, a possibly mythical figure dating from Japan’s distant past, the third century CE. Öshiro’s writing on noro attempts to stake out the very real differences between mainland and Okinawan culture and 156 • Chapter 7 to dramatize the clash between them. But his literature also raises many other important questions: what is the connection between literature and history, between religion and myth expressed as literary art? Does the specific history of Okinawa influence its literature in theme or style in a way that is different from other literatures, including Japanese literature itself ?1 This chapter attempts to answer these questions and several related issues by examining Öshiro’s novel Noro. The exact meaning of the word noro will be investigated later, but we will translate it here as “mantic woman” or “seer.” Noro was first published as a single volume in 1985 and republished in a corrected form in 2002. Okinawa and Its Literature The interpretation of modern Okinawan literature has often focused on political readings that seek ultimate justification for the work in its links to society , in the way in which the work creates or contributes to a dialogue on the many political issues that confront contemporary Okinawa. I take it for granted that we can speak of “Okinawan literature” in a way that we cannot, perhaps, speak of the literature of Shiga prefecture or Kanagawa prefecture, that is, we can consider it to possess a certain inherent coherence in theme or language, a kind of literary “self-consciousness.” To put it more bluntly, it is a literature that presumes an identity distinct from (but not necessarily utterly separated from) Japanese literature. Today such a statement is not necessarily controversial even on the Japanese mainland, let alone in Okinawa. The fact that the Ryükyü islands once existed as an independent kingdom until their forcible incorporation in 1609 into the Satsuma domain is not questioned by any historian. The invasion had been sanctioned by the ruler of Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and thus the Satsuma conquest of the Ryükyüs foreshadows the absorption into Japan proper as the prefecture of Okinawa in March 1879. Modern Okinawan literature has had to deal with the consequences of the deliberate destruction of the once independent kingdom of the Ryükyüs. Donald Keene has summarized the complex history of Okinawa thus: “The status of [Okinawa] had long been ambiguous. In 1186 the shogunate had given the founder of the house of Satsuma the title of ‘jitö’ (manor lord) of Okinawa. . . . [W]arfare among the three kingdoms of Okinawa . . . led one of the kings to send a mission to the Ming Court in 1372, asking Chinese help in unifying the country; he also asked to become a feudatory . The Chinese agreed and gave the country the new name of Ryükyü. This Öshiro Tatsuhiro and the Uncanny • 157 change in relations with China did not end the long-standing tributary relationship with Japan.”2 And as Keene concludes: “The Ryükyü kingdom had for centuries served two masters, China and Satsuma, paying tribute to both. This was the only way a small country with few resources and no military strength...