The Japan Society Review 64
Book, Stage, Film, Arts and Events Review

Issue 64 Volume 11 Number 4 (August 2016)

In this edition of the Japan Society Review we feature three
superstars of contemporary Japanese literature, Furukawa
Hideo, Tawara Machi and Wataya Risa, all of whom haveachieved both critical and popular acclaim.
Furukawa Hideo has been described as the new
Murakami, and while the comparison holds true in terms of
his popularity and prolific output, his breadth of style andgenre set him aside. Not only does he do Murakami-esquemagic realism, but his novels are also suffused with history,
classicism, autobiography and philosophy. In the case of
Horses, Horses, In the End the Light Remains Pure he juggles
all of these at once as he attempts to come to terms with 3.11.
Poet Tawara Machi’s Salad Anniversary was released in
1987 when she was only 26 and has sold nearly three million
copies in Japan and eight million worldwide, with Tawara
herself credited with reviving the tanka form. Here Chris

Beckett reviews Pushkin Press’s new pocket-sized edition
alongside poet Erica Facey’s dual-language collection Images.
Wataya Risa is another Japanese author to haveexperienced success at a young age. Her second novel I
Want to Kick You in the Back won her the Akutagawa Prizeat only nineteen in 2003 and has now made a long awaited
appearance in English. She offers a fresh perspective on
Japan’s fan culture.
Elsewhere in this issue, Chris Corker considers Murakami
Ryū’s Tokyo Decadence and asks whether the former enfant
terrible retains the ability to shock, Charlotte Goff unpicks
the many conflicts that characterise University of Hawaii
Press’s new collection of Okinawan literature, and Dominika
Mackiewicz reviews Michael Lucken’s reassessment ofJapanese artistic mimeticism.
William Upton

Contents
1)

Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure by
Furukawa Hideo

2)

I Want to Kick You in the Back by Wataya Risa

3)

Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts by Michael Lucken

4)

Salad Anniversary by Tawara Machi

5)

Images by Erica Facey

6)

Tokyo Decadence: 15 Stories by Murakami Ryū

7)Islands of Protest: Japanese Literature from Okinawa

EditorWilliam Upton
Reviewers
Chris Beckett, Chris Corker, Alice French, Charlotte Goff, Eluned Gramich
and Dominika Mackiewicz(Image: Kishida Ryūsei’s ‘Young Girl Standing’ from Portraits of Reiko)Horses, Horses, in the
End the Light Remains
Pureby Furukawa Hideo
Columbia University Press(2016)
ISBN-13: 978-0231178693
Review by
Alice French
In declaring Horses, Horses,
in the End the Light Remains Pure to be ‘a tale thatbegins with Fukushima’, Furukawa Hideo sets himself
a mammoth task. How to do such a defining event inmodern Japanese history justice in just 140 pages?
Furukawa certainly seems aware of the enormityof the challenge, and remains until the end torn
between tackling it with fact or with fiction. Whether
the responsibility is a privilege or a burden, the multiprize winning author does not take it lightly, putting,as he writes, his ‘integrity’ on the line in this attempt
to provide some sort of closure (‘definitive salvation’)
not only for himself (he was born in Fukushima) but
also for an entire nation in mourning and to keep thedisaster alive in people’s memories.
Horses, Horses was first published in the Shinchō
journal in July 2011, and therefore can be read as analmost immediate autobiographical response to the
3.11 tragedy. As a Fukushima native whose farming
family were in the Tōhoku region at the time of theearthquake and subsequent tsunami, the disaster hada personal as well as national significance for Furukawa.
He was on business in Tokyo at the time and so could
only watch events unfold from afar along with the restof the population, distancing him from the reality of thedestruction. This part-novel, part-essay follows his trip
to the disaster zone and provides a ‘real-time’ accountof his reaction to the devastation. In an attempt to
express the inexpressible, Furukawa defines this periodas ‘spirited away time’, conveying his struggle with theoverwhelming mixture of emotions through his jumps
between past and present, fact and fiction and first andthird person. There is no doubt that his writing style isdifficult to follow at first – in fact it remains perplexing
until the final line – however in time it reveals itself tobe nothing short of brilliant.
Furukawa is known for playing with genre in his
novels, however Horses, Horses does not read as though
it is deliberately experimental; rather it unfolds as anatural train of thought. Furukawa interrupts himself
2with memories and side notes and gets distracted fromthe main narrative by an apparent urge to put everything
into wider historical perspective. As a result, the novel isstudded with discerning and very quotable, if sweeping,lines such as ‘our history, the history of the Japanese,is nothing more than a history of killing people.’ At therisk of sounding clichéd, Furukawa truly does give hisreader a glimpse into the inner workings of his thoughts
as he attempts to come to terms with the obliterationof his hometown. With wonderful irony, the confusing
narrative makes the narrator’s cocktail of emotions(guilt, grief, disbelief) crystal clear. At times, Furukawa isreluctant to address the issue of 3.11 directly, focusing
on the effects it has had on the region’s wildlife rather
than discussing the human impact. He even resorts towriting about the writing of novels in order to avoid thetask of writing a novel about Fukushima. The text is fullof such riddles and nods to metafiction, the eleganceand eloquence of which must partly be attributed to
Doug Slaymaker’s translation.
Overall, Horses, Horses, in the end the Light
Remains Pure is an emotional, historical and, above all,literary triumph that really must be experienced firsthand. Although Furukawa himself recognises his inability
to provide any sense of closure for the victims of 3.11 (headmits in the last line that ‘at this point my essay ends, andbegins’), his prose should not be viewed as anything lessthan a masterpiece. In fact, it would not be hyperbolic tosay that, in these 140 pages, Furukawa is able to convey
comprehensibly the immediate emotional reaction ofJapan just weeks after it experienced the most powerfulearthquake in the nation’s history. Therefore, if you havethe patience for the rather jumbled narrative, this is anabsolute must-read.§

I Want to Kick You
in the Backby Wataya Risa
One Peace Books (2015)
ISBN-13: 978-1-935548-88-1
Review by Eluned Gramich‘We were leftovers,’ says
Hasegawa Hatsumi of her andher enigmatic friend, Ninagawa Satoshi. ‘Every time
our classmates laughed, we grew another year older.’Written by a nineteen year old student while she
was still at university, the bestselling I Want to Kick
You in the Back is a slim, deceptively simple tale about
Issue 64 Volume 11 Number 4 (August 2016)

teenage life and love. It won Wataya Risa the biannual
Akutagawa Prize in 2003, making her the youngest everrecipient of Japan’s most prestigious literary award.
Skilfully translated by Julianne Neville, this is the firsttime Wataya has been made available to an Englishspeaking readership, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
That the author was so young when she wrote thisnovel comes as no surprise. The story follows a young
girl, Hatsumi, as she moves into Middle School andstruggles to adjust to her new environment. She knows
nobody apart from her best friend, who has found a
new friendship group that Hatsumi doesn’t approveof. As a result, she spends her lunchtimes on her own,
avoiding other people and complaining about her
life. A boy in her science class, the quiet Satoshi, alsochooses to avoid socialising with his fellow classmates.
They become friends and Hatsumi finds out that heis a super fan of the teen idol, Oli-chan. Very soon,
Hatsumi gets sucked up into Satoshi’s fantasy world,
his lust and obsession for an unattainable celebrity girlwho pretends to be younger than she is. Hatsumi puts
it this way: ‘She (Oli-chan) was an intrinsically young
person, a person good at being young. And then there
was me, actually young but terrible at it.’ Hatsumi’s
tone is intimate, natural and entirely believable as
Wataya succeeds in capturing the mixture of insecurity,
defensiveness and put-on bluster of a thirteen year old.
The type of the ‘creepy’ super-fan is not new toJapan and perhaps partly explains why the novel did sowell with readers there. It taps into the contemporary“fandom” phenomenon, famously typified by the legionsof male fans who follow the teen pop group AKB48. In
Japan, unlike in the UK, this is the terrain of (usually single)
men. Wataya approaches this subculture, not by trying to
speak from a male standpoint, but by using Hatsumi tovoice the confusion and worries that readers might share.
Like many women, she fails to understand why Satoshi ismore interested in a distant celebrity model than in theliving, breathing girl sitting beside him.
The obsession for teen idols embodies so much ofwhat it means to be young: the desire for a role model,
the need for guidance and instruction. It’s a place where
you can put all your feelings: desire, love, loneliness, lust.
More than anything the novel is about sexual awakening.
This is somewhat hidden at first by the misleadingly
innocent and child-like language and setting. Far frombeing part of a teenage tantrum, Hatsumi’s desire tokick Satoshi in the back is bound up with the intensity of
his sexual fixation on Oli-chan. It unleashes her ‘violent
desires... inspired by a feeling stronger than mere love oraffection.’ At one point, Hatsumi discovers something
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shocking, stomach-churning, locked away in Satoshi’s‘fan’ box: this discovery hails the start of a new kind of
longing in her. Even her female friendships begin toglow with sexual tension, because for her, a girl on theverge of becoming a woman, everything is lit up with a
new energy she barely understands.
This short novel is the sort of book you can readin one sitting: the sort of book which sends you intoanother world, another person’s life, for however briefa time, and does not let you go afterwards. The first
person voice is seductive through its honesty andstrength. In the intersection of violence, obsession, andsex, Wataya has caught the whirring-headed confusionof two teenagers who have a lot yet to learn.§

Imitation andCreativity in JapaneseArts
by Michael Lucken
Columbia University Press(2016)
ISBN-10: 0231172923
Review by Dominika
Mackiewicz
In his book A Japanese
Mirror (1984), Ian Buruma,
Dutch historian and author of numerous volumes on
Japan, describes ‘continuities behind the façade of
constant change’ that epitomise so-called Japaneseness.
Japanese arts have long been considered as somewhat
schizophrenic in their constant attempts to reproduce theWest on one hand and their pursuit to portray a ‘national
identity’ on the other. Marked by human and natural
disasters, the history of Japan reveals a fascinating needto look into the past with zeal, to rebuild, to reimagine,
and to remember.
In his interdisciplinary study Imitation and Creativity in Japanese Arts: From Kishida Ryūsei to Miyazaki
Hayao, Michael Lucken attempts to both discern thepast in contemporary Japanese art, while also focusing
on its innovative characteristics, unpicking and complicating the idea of Japan as a nation of imitators. The
book is a survey of Japanese ‘creative imitation’ and theauthor emphasises throughout the elasticity of mimetism that makes Japanese art so hard to pin down. It
explores Kishida Ryūsei’s Portraits of Reiko (1917-1929),
Kurosawa Akira’s Ikiru (1952), Araki Nobuyoshi’s Sentimental Journey – Winter (1970-1990) and Miyazaki
3Hayao’s Spirited Away (2001), and the author’s method
is based on initial description, followed by careful historical and theoretical examination. In this way, Lucken
avoids fitting works into a predefined theoretical system, basing his analysis on what can actually be seen.
These works present an interesting and chronologicalarray that plays with the idea of art’s reflective qualities
and forms an enriching dialogue between the old andthe new.
The book starts with Kishida Ryūsei’s Portraits
of Reiko, a series of twelve depictions of the artist’s
daughter, executed one per year around her birthday.
The viewer witnesses the striking transformation in theartist’s style and technique, from realistic oil painting àla Holbein, to a chilling ink portrait of Reiko’s demonic
face, comprising simple colour on paper in traditional
Japanese style. Through borrowing different methods
from other artists but applying them in a highly personalised ‘distorted’ fashion, Kishida creates an uncanny
illustration of the passage of time and his own artistic
education.
Similarly Kurosawa Akira, famous for his film adaptations of Western literature, tends to direct attention to the nature of the medium. Watanabe, the dying protagonist of Ikiru, a depiction of the last days ofa minor Tokyo bureaucrat, wants to make a change,
to leave a trace by building a playground in post-war
Tokyo’s poorest neighbourhood. While the film bears
a resemblance to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich(1886), it is also a highly personal statement from Kurosawa, through which he asks, What is the need of recording? What is the nature of mirroring the world in
film? Lucken finds that Kurosawa’s answers are to seek
originality in collective creation and to juxtapose ‘thereal’ with the ‘aesthetical’; like Watanabe’s impending
death, discernible on an X-ray photograph and recorded through the cinematic medium. It is suggested that
art is at its best when meeting life.
Araki Nobuyoshi is known for his daily routine oftaking photos continuously, often of similar subjects
and objects. Repetition is a key part of his oeuvre andhe uses it in his Sentimental Journey, a series of photographs focusing on Araki’s relationship with his beloved
wife Yōko, from their honeymoon to her death in 1990.
Lucken focuses here on the significant and unexpected
image of Yōko’s hyoid bone being retrieved after cremation. The author’s insightful description highlights
how by placing this venerable, yet never photographed,object next to other common ones, such as a Buddhist
tablet and Yōko’s portrait, Araki confronts his own fears
and society’s dogmas.
4

In its excellent last chapter, the book takes the reader on a journey through Spirited Away and its recurring
visual geographies of verticals, horizontals and ‘adventures of the oblique’. The vertical scenes are echoed in
the design of the treacherous bathhouse and referencea city with its all-consuming aspirations and power relations. These are contrasted by horizontal, connective
passages filled with tranquillity and restorative powers.
Lucken notes the conflicting facets of the high-rise andlandscape perspectives, with their underlying social implications, subtly offered by Miyazaki. Out of both, thedirector distils his own diagonal way, which signifies
the unstable, but also the transitional and regenerative.
Again, as Lucken proposes, it’s when the art goes askew,
that it highlights the importance of mundane recurrence.
Maybe the subtlest of all of Lucken’s interpretations is encapsulated in the outer book sleeve, withthe reproduction of Untitled (1959) by Gutai member
Sadamasa Motonaga. By using familiar materials and inspired by tarashikomi (a traditional nihonga technique),the painter created a new artistic phenomena in the
shape of so-called ‘performance paintings’. Led by thewords of Gutai’s leader, Yoshihara Jirō, ‘transformation
is nothing other than renewal’, he understood that invention lies in the dissemination and reinterpretation of
the past – the repetition that comes from profound appreciation. Following Motonaga’s example, Lucken alsoharks back to the fathers of re-invention.§

Salad Anniversary
by Tawara Machi
Translated by
Juliet Winters Carpenter
Pushkin Press (2014)
ISBN-10: 1782271066

Imagesby Erica Facey
France-Do (2014)
ISBN-13: 978-4781408149
Review by Chris Beckett
I love the spareness of haiku
and tanka, that feeling ofa pebble sending ripples
through your head. So I find it
Issue 64 Volume 11 Number 4 (August 2016)

rather daunting to open a collection with over threehundred such poems! To me, it feels contradictory
to crowd haiku, which depend on the empty spacearound them on the page and in the reader’s brain tobreathe and work their magic.
But I need not have worried: Salad Anniversary,is a delightfully small-sized book, with a washed pinkcover, light but solid. And Tawara Machi’s poems
are short but lively and personal. I do not think theyneed a lot of space around them. They feel more likean album of small photos telling a story, so engaging
and contemporary that it becomes part of the reader’sown album, his or her own story.
The first sequence ‘August Morning’ charts thearc of a relationship, centred on Kujukuri Beach, fromIs there anything more?
More to believe, more to want?
Sprawled side by side on sandthrough tender details of the everyday
Your handsignalling for a draft beer
catches my eye and absorbs meto the break-up
Late afternoon –you and I gaze at the same thing
as between us something ends

Tawara delights in small almost trivial details, andfrequently inserts snippets of speech“Today the public bath was closed.”
I want to spend every day
talking of little things like thatand the details are always telling: her poems do notneed a lot of space precisely because they are rooted
in the urban rather than the eternal. Or perhaps I’d
say they are about the eternal as expressed throughthe ephemeral urban clutter; even the clutter of
ephemeral human relationships. She substitutes
falling leaves or blossoms with an old toothbrush, a
train ticket or, indeed, a salad (which must be wilting,at least by its anniversary). Her poems are set in thecontemporary whirl and for all of us city whirlers they
are easy to understand and to be moved by. Like sugar
they go straight into the blood. They occasionallybecome a little cute for my liking (kawai, ne!), but there
is a constant sense of the woman’s viewpoint which isclear-eyed and refreshing:Latest reviews: www.japansociety.org.uk/resources/reviews/“Call me again” “Wait for me”
Your love is always spoken
in commands

So I can easily appreciate the book’s huge bestseller
status in Japan, the so-called “Salad phenomenon” (over2.5 million copies sold!). What I find harder to grasp is
why Juliet Carpenter has chosen 3-line stanzas whentranslating 5-line tanka. In the ‘Afterword’ she points outthat the original Japanese poems are normally written
in a single vertical line, sometimes interrupted, but notnecessarily in accordance with the traditional 5-7-5-7-7syllable count. Even so, it is strange to see 3-line poems
which look like haiku but don’t sound like haiku andthen to find out that they are tanka! I would have tried
to keep the 5 line structure but varied the line lengths
with the sense: after all, Tawara apparently keeps to thesyllable total of tanka.
But in the end, this is just a cavil: I think lots ofEnglish language readers will love these poems, like themillions of Japanese , regardless of whether they likepoetry or care a fig about poetic forms.
Erica Facey’s delightful bilingual collection, Images, ismade up of one-vertical-line haiku in the Japanese,and 3-line haiku in English. The Japanese section starts
from the right and meets its English counterpart in the
middle coming the other way. There is no mention ofa translator, so I assume that Facey is a bilingual poet.
That is fascinating in itself and I would love to know
which language the poems started in; whether this wasdifferent for each poem or the same for all; even if someof the poems drifted between languages like the far
travelling daughter in the first poem of the book:
My far travelling daughter
falling cherry blossoms
in Japan

I do not read Japanese, but it seems to me thatthe poems in Japanese keep to the 5-7-5 haiku model,
whereas the English although 3 lines do not. I think thatis a good thing as it means Facey can concentrate onrhythm and meaning, on brevity and concentration. And
there is never any sense of padding to match the count.
So she summons up scenes of e.g. Japan in the West withan evocative and never cloying charm, for example
The young chef
learning ‘whiting’ as the English
name for the fish

So yes, there are cherry blossoms and wintercherries and other seasonal clichés (I mean traditions!)5

of haiku, but Facey effortlessly shows us how thetraditional fits into the everyday; how loved places
travel with us in our memories and imaginations, butalso in translated words, and of course in common
things like tea or clothes, even music, which make theirown journeys across the globe and down the centuries:
English summer evening
A woman in Chinese dress
listening to Bach

Facey invites us to meditate on contrasts andsimilarities, through space and time: how the gatheringof poets and plum blossoms which sounds like a scene

Tokyo Decadence:
15 Stories
by Murakami Ryū
Kurodahan Press (2016)
ISBN-10: 4902075784
Review by Chris Corker
There was a time when writing
about sex was a taboo, authors
treading the line with innuendo-laden prose about as
adept at concealment as Adam and Eve’s fig leaves.
Nowadays, everyone’s aunty has read Fifty Shades ofGrey and, to their younger relations’ horror, finds it a bit
dull. The boundaries have been well and truly pushed,
for better or worse, and what we are left with is a societythat is as desensitised to sex as it is to violence. In fact, therecent success of a certain book-come television series
goes to show that a little titillation and dismemberment
can be just what the sales doctor ordered.
Of course, it goes without saying that between
the period of suggestive whispers and the current‘it’s nothing I haven’t seen before’ generation, there
was a transitional phase. Even when the envelope
seems to be pushing itself, on closer scrutiny there
are a group of disgruntled, disenfranchised individuals
urging it forward with all their might, if only to see
what might happen. We tend to call these individuals
pioneers, and there is no doubt that Murakami Ryū
was one such man. In a conservative 1970s Japanesesociety that didn’t always see much merit in deviatingfrom the norm, it was inevitable that characters like
Murakami and indeed director Miike Takeshi, who
filmed Murakami’s novel Audition, would spring up
like weeds through Japan’s finely-raked rock garden,
6

in Basho’s Japan is actually happening today, at Keat’s
House, Hampstead.
Sometimes I yearn for a little more colour or detail,for example that the wind at Matsushima be more fully
evoked than simply ‘fragrant’; or that we meet a glass ofdraft beer perhaps, or a can of green peas, like in a Tawara
Machi poem, rather than another cup of tea!
However, there is a natural, unforced quality inFacey’s writing which I really admire. And she is a masterof repetition, that all-important poetic technique which
is a close sister to rhyme: winter cherries, a daffodil
village, the wonderfully moving autumn butterfly, evena summer evening, all grow more lovely and significant
every time she evokes them.§

bringing with them an extreme approach poised tochallenge preconceptions and cause disharmony.
A rebellious youth, Murakami was placed undera three-month house arrest for barricading the roof ofhis high-school, before later dropping out of college tofocus on his rock band and 8-millimeter film making.
Many of his books are heavily-autobiographical, dealing
with drug-use, a rejection of the establishment and thecultural abrasions caused by US military bases. His firstnovel, Almost Transparent Blue, an account of a vicious
cycle of sex, drugs and rock, was first published in 1972,
when Murakami was still at university. It went on to thewin the Akutagawa Award, Japan’s most prestigious
literary prize. It is telling that while critics accused theauthor of decadence and condemned his work, others
hailed the book as a stylistic revelation. Murakami had
been moulded by the times, and was supported by astrong counter-culture current. Being a man of the times,
however, can be a double-edged sword. The questionthat formed in my mind as I began reading Tokyo
Decadence’s collection of short stories was whether
Murakami Ryū was still relevant in an age for which theoriginal revolution is a distant speck on the horizon.
After reading the first stories of this collection,connected by topics of prostitution and unusual sexualproclivities, my initial conclusion was that their intention
was simply to shock. From a trucker that enjoys selfemasculation and dressing up as a woman to the lurid
details of a prostitute’s clients, Murakami seems at pains
to lay everything out, warts and all. In fact, given his crossoeuvre penchant especially for sex and the sex trade, someof the stories can feel a little familiar. There’s something
to be said for linking stories through a theme, but whensynergy becomes repetition, it’s clearly a detractor.
Throughout the book there are moments when it
Issue 64 Volume 11 Number 4 (August 2016)

feels as if the author has gone out of his way to be extreme,
only to then lose a little bit of the gritty realism that is
his domain. (‘In eighteen months Kimiko had aborted
three pregnancies, slashed her wrists twice, had sex withcountless black GIs, and got herself arrested twice andrushed to hospital with heart failure once.’). You feel thatthe desire to shock is always at the forefront of the author’s
mind. There is sexual mutilation reminiscent of American
Psycho; one character tries to recall a quip about a deadbaby, while another opines that ‘people who suffer all
the time shouldn’t be allowed to live.’ But the question
here must be whether or not a sustained current of
the extreme doesn’t lessen the impact. Often the mostshocking elements of story-telling are nestled between
soft, fluffy pillows of serenity or cool understatement.
Comparisons with his namesake, Murakami
Haruki, are unavoidable given their joint prominence inJapanese literature. Beyond this, there are also further
similarities of topic. Both authors deal frankly with sex,
write extensively about jazz and seem equally obsessedwith baseball. Even their favoured backdrops have a habitof overlapping, most conversations taking place in either
run-down or swanky bars in Shinjuku, and other central
Tokyo locations. And while Murakami Haruki’s forte is, toborrow the title of Jay Rubin’s book, ‘the music of words’,
where the humdrum is elevated to something beautiful,
Murakami Ryū is more of a pragmatist, preferring to slap
you around the face with the soiled condom of truth thanromanticise. Whether admirably truthful or tactless, that’s
just the way he writes. Although, it is hard not to cringe atlines like: ‘...penetrated my frazzled brain and body like avibrator.’ And cringe I did at other lines suitable for a man
who at times thinks he is far more hip and daring than he
now appears.
The second half is stronger. Yes, it deals with sex

Islands of Protest: Japanese
Literature from Okinawa
by Davinder L. Bhowmik andSteve Rabson (eds.)
University of Hawaii Press (2016)
ISBN-10: 0824839803
Review by Charlotte Goff
The image of Okinawa presented
in the Japanese media isoverwhelmingly that of sun-soaked islands where
things move at a leisurely pace and action takes place
under the shade of the kuwadiisaa or the yuuna tree:a land of traditional festivals, of drinking Orion beer
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but also with human relationships beyond the bedroom.
Written later in Murakami’s career, these stories feature
the autobiographical elements of working in the film
industry and the author’s passion for Cuban music.
Three stories in particular, each featuring the recurringcharacter of Meiko Akagawa, stand out from the rest with
their tragically flawed characters searching fruitlessly for
their dreams. Also evident here is the unique ennui bornof living in one of the most technologically advanced
and comfortable countries in the world.
‘In this country it’s taboo even to think about looking
for something more in life [...] something significant ismissing, and that’s something Japan never had.’This extract is from the strongest piece, ‘Historia
de un Amor’, a story about the fluxing vividnessof life, and one that considers whether being firstworld necessarily means being first-rate. Murakami’s
descriptions of Cuban music are also most prevalenthere, and his love for the genre radiates from the page.
So my question from earlier still stands: Is Murakami
still relevant for readers in our desensitised age? Is an
author, whose modus operandi is to shock, but no longer
has the power to do so, still serving a purpose? Like apolitician I will answer these with a few questions of myown. Are you a fan of what is often termed ‘Asia Extreme’?
Are you keen to see the – sometimes exaggerated –darker side of Japanese life, hidden beneath Hokusai
postcards and pictures of monkeys in hot springs? Are
you willing to forego some pretty shameless attempts
to shock in order to discover the finer points of a clearlytalented author? If you answered yes to these questions,
you will find plenty to like in this collection, and perhaps
we can allow the revolutionary to reign for a little longer,
before he too is dethroned by another.§

and awamori and of dancing to the notes of the threestringed sanshin. This new collection of Okinawan
literature refutes the image of a peaceful land where
danger comes at the fangs of the habu snake or the box
jellyfish rather than the tensions between its inhabitants.
It shows how life on the Okinawan diaspora is dictatedby the relationships between outsiders and locals:by the efforts of mainland Japanese and US military
to assert their presence on islands which try in turnto reassert their own identities. These are undeniably,
Bhowmik and Rabson show us, Islands of Protest.
Okinawa comprises just 0.6% of Japan’s landarea and yet hosts 62% of US military bases in Japan, adisproportionate burden and a cause of tension which7is, unsurprisingly, a central theme in this collection. The
literature in this collection spans life on the islands bothduring and after war, and the line between being in a stateof conflict and one of peace blurs as tensions continue,
heedless of diplomatic status. It is so much a part of thenarrative of the Okinawan islands that one is left wondering
what the islands’ identity had been before the onset of
war and the arrival of American and Japanese soldiers thatcame with it; had they then been purely, uncomplicatedly,the ‘Islands of the sanshin guitar/ Islands of awamori liquor/
Islands of verse/ Islands of dance...’ that Yamanokuchi Baku
remembers in the bittersweet ‘Okinawa, Where Will You
Go Now?’ The identity of the Ryukyu Islands as describedin this collection is something which has developed in andbeen defined against battles and their aftermath.
Nowhere is the anger towards the US military
clearer and more visceral than in ‘Hope’, the short story
by Akutagawa prize-winning author Medoruma Shunwhich opens the anthology. Medoruma, who was himself
arrested this year for trespassing onto an American naval
base in Okinawa as part of a protest, paints a picture of a
local man so filled with the need to take action against
the soldiers, and equally sure that mere protests cannot
effect this, that he abducts and murders a child with ‘strawcoloured’ hair: for him, the killing of this one American
child more effective a protest against the rape of a young
Okinawan woman than 80,000 demonstrators could
ever be. But relations between the Okinawan islands’
inhabitants and the US military are characterised by morethan simple, unilateral hostility; the refusal to oversimplify,
reducing Okinawan society to that of a schism between‘us’ and ‘them’ make both Medoruma’s stories and theanthology as a whole all the richer. Three of Medoruma’s
short stories are included in this collection, and in ‘Tree of
Butterflies’, written just a year after ‘Hope’, village women
live in anticipation of ‘catching’ an American soldier andbecoming his “Honey.”
Just as the relationships between US servicemen
and Okinawan people can be peaceful, it is also clear thattensions exist which are just as strong, at times stronger,
between Okinawans and mainland Japanese people. It is
the Japanese who dictate assimilation to mainland Japanand have in the past punished the use of the Okinawan
language – by referring to it as the ‘Okinawan Dialect’ andforcing its users in schools to wear the ‘Dialect Placard’ theyrefused even to admit that it is its own language, distinct
from Japanese – and at the same time perpetuated theidea that, try as they might, Okinawans would never betruly Japanese. In Sakiyama Tami’s ‘Island Confinement’,
we see some assimilation in the opposite direction, as awoman from Nagasaki who moves to a remote Okinawan
island loses her Nagasaki dialect over the course of decades,
but does not slip into the island’s dialect: ‘Her smooth andflat use of standard Japanese made clear that, although
she blended in with the island atmosphere, she hadsurrendered nothing of her independent spirit.’ We see
it, too, in Mabuni Chōshin’s ‘White Ryukyuan Tombs’, theprotagonist lamenting how ‘With feet used to walking thebeach/ how painful it is to pass down/ Ginza’s boulevards.’
Tensions exist, then, between the US military andthe Okinawans, between the Japanese and Okinawans,
and at times between Okinawan people of the various
islands themselves. One constant is the Okinawan
characters’ conviction that Okinawan is still superior
to ‘foreign’: in Medoruma’s ‘Tree of Butterflies’, village
woman Gozei is forced into prostitution but remains
separate from the brothel in Naha, which houses ‘Korean
comfort women who served the lower-ranking soldiers.’
Faultlines exist between dialect and skin colour, but also
between the different genders, and across age-gaps.
Time and again, we see the determination of elderly
inhabitants to keep the islands’ traditions and festivals
alive in the face of youthful indifference. Much of thetexts’ action takes place on the small, often unnamed
islands, places which are home to the elderly population
but for young people have become somewhere to visit.
This brings with it, inevitably, change in the islands’
demographics: in Sakiyama Tami’s ‘Swaying, Swinging’,
the oldest man on the island laments that the 133 years
he has lived now outnumber the island’s population.
Chinen Seishin’s ‘The Human Pavilion’ is for me thehighlight of this anthology. Based on the 1903 national
exhibition held in Osaka which offered audiences an
exhibition of peoples including Koreans, Jews, Ainu andOkinawans, Chinen’s play centres on the relationshipbetween two Ryukyu ‘specimens’ and their trainer. The
trainer, who brandishes a whip and tries to Japanize hischarges, ridiculing their Okinawan customs and language
and comparing them to the sweet potatoes that they eat,later reveals that he too has been discriminated against
and passed over for promotion because he was suspected
to be Okinawan.
Chinen asks: when does a war end? For him, thewar ends not with the last gunshot, but with the endof the mental turmoil experienced by people who
lived through the war, the passing of the ‘storm of war
that rages in their brains.’ The play, which has been
performed in Okinawa regularly since its publication in
1978, ends back at its beginning, and can be performed
again and again on a loop. The message, which seems
appropriate for the collection as a whole (the play comesat the end of the collection) is that the war will not be
over until the divisions which it engendered have been
removed in the minds of the people, and if that does
not happen history risks repeating itself.§