What do you think?
Rate this book
In the Woods of Memory
“Generally regarded as Okinawa's most adventurous and promising writer of fiction today.”—Michael S. Molasky, University of Minnesota In the Woods of Memory is a powerful, thought-provoking novel that focuses on two incidents during the Battle of Okinawa, 1945: the sexual assault on Sayoko, 17, by four US soldiers and her friend Seiji’s attempt at revenge. Narrations through nine points of view, Japanese and American, from 1945 to the present day reveal the full complexity of events and how war trauma inevitably ripples through the generations. Akutagawa Prize–winner and activist Shun Medoruma was born in Okinawa. This is his first full-length work in English translation.
208 pages, Paperback
Published June 6, 2017
9 people are currently reading
408 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 11, 2017
Before I say anything else about this book, I want to preface my remarks by saying that this is majestic and profoundly moving writing at its very best. I honestly cannot recall the last piece work of fiction that shook me up as much as this one did.
This is the story of a 17 year old girl named Sayoko who lives in a remote fishing village on the Northern Okinawa coast during the waning days of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. While the fighting has ended in the North by this time, there remains a large American military presence left behind who radiate a creeping and sinister sense of dread amongst the villagers. One day, four of them take a short swim over to the shore where Sayoko, her sister, and some other girls are collecting shellfish. The Americans attack Sayoko, pull her into the woods, and rape her.
As the reader, we don't experience what happens through Sayoko's eyes (in this chapter and all subsequent ones she is given no voice) but rather through the eyes of her friends who hear the screams from the woods. It is a truly terrifying and brutal chapter to read.
What follows is how the ramifications of this event reverberate in both the present and distant futures across both gender and generational lines as well as how it even profoundly effects people who had no direct involvement. The author uses different narrative voices such as Sayoko's sisters in past and present, a boy who tried to avenge Sayoko's honour, the village headman who betrays that boy in order to protect himself, as well as a junior high school girl in 2005 who finds herself to be an intricate part of this web of memory.
At its heart this story is indeed about memory. Some choose to not remember, some wish they could forget, however they all are bound up in each other's story.
Finally, I need to say that on a personal level, reading this was like a punch in the stomach. The portrayal of the memories and raw wounds of these characters is so vivid that I found myself feeling almost physically ill at times reading about them. The author doesn't shy away from getting you as close to these people as possible and as hard as that was at times, he seems to be saying that much like with the characters in this story, true healing and understanding cannot begin if we succumb to the temptation to look away.
This is the story of a 17 year old girl named Sayoko who lives in a remote fishing village on the Northern Okinawa coast during the waning days of the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. While the fighting has ended in the North by this time, there remains a large American military presence left behind who radiate a creeping and sinister sense of dread amongst the villagers. One day, four of them take a short swim over to the shore where Sayoko, her sister, and some other girls are collecting shellfish. The Americans attack Sayoko, pull her into the woods, and rape her.
As the reader, we don't experience what happens through Sayoko's eyes (in this chapter and all subsequent ones she is given no voice) but rather through the eyes of her friends who hear the screams from the woods. It is a truly terrifying and brutal chapter to read.
What follows is how the ramifications of this event reverberate in both the present and distant futures across both gender and generational lines as well as how it even profoundly effects people who had no direct involvement. The author uses different narrative voices such as Sayoko's sisters in past and present, a boy who tried to avenge Sayoko's honour, the village headman who betrays that boy in order to protect himself, as well as a junior high school girl in 2005 who finds herself to be an intricate part of this web of memory.
At its heart this story is indeed about memory. Some choose to not remember, some wish they could forget, however they all are bound up in each other's story.
Finally, I need to say that on a personal level, reading this was like a punch in the stomach. The portrayal of the memories and raw wounds of these characters is so vivid that I found myself feeling almost physically ill at times reading about them. The author doesn't shy away from getting you as close to these people as possible and as hard as that was at times, he seems to be saying that much like with the characters in this story, true healing and understanding cannot begin if we succumb to the temptation to look away.
April 5, 2017
Reading Shun Medoruma’s masterwork, In The Woods Of Memory (2017) translated by Takuma Sminkey, was something of a revelation- like a shot from the dark as Stone Bridge Press continues to publish important and relevant Japanese titles that have been overlooked by other publishing houses. Medoruma’s masterwork is about the reverberations of two incidents that took place during the Battle of Okinawa and their ripples through time that affect people’s lives 60 years later. The first incident is the rape of a young Okinawan woman by four American soldiers and the subsequent act is a young man’s attempt to get revenge on the Americans for the rape. The powerful story that addresses the impact and legacy of WWII in Okinawa, which is still home to a large number of American military bases, is also notable for Medoruma’s experimental narrative style that sets it apart from most contemporary novels.
The story is told through a series of different points of view from eight different characters including two Americans. Two chapters are from characters points of view in 1945, the rest take place 60 years later in 2005. In Sminkey’s informative preface, he discusses the challenges that this novel presented for a translator in terms of the experimental use of narrative techniques such as mixing of voices, lack of pronouns, avoidance of using quotes to denote speech, and use of the Okinawan language. The later issue, use of an Okinawan language, was specifically a difficult issue. The dialect depicted in the novel is a spoken language that Medoruma has rendered in the original with a Japanese gloss so that readers can seemingly “hear” the language even though the average standard Japanese speaker would not understand the language. As a result, Sminkey has chosen to avoid this issue since it was impossible to recreate the complexity of these sections of the novel accurately. This is most notable in the section narrated by Seiji, the young man seeking revenge, which was from 1945. This section has a complex mixed narrative that begins in the present, and moves into the past seemingly along with hallucinations before returning to the present. There is also a section narrated from Seiji in 2005. Notably absent from the novel is a chapter narrated by Sayoko, the girl who was raped and suffered the most in the novel.
In the preface, Sminkey points out the several parallels of actual events in Okinawa that reverberate throughout the novel which itself is based on a true story. Medoruma has stated that the central incident of the rape was based on a story he heard from his mother that took place on a small island, Yagaji Island, in the north part of Okinawa Island as war raged on fiercely in the south. One significant parallel is the 1995 incident where three American servicemen raped an elementary student. In addition, there is also a parallel with the 1945 Katusyama incident where some villagers killed three US Marines in retaliation for the repeated rapes of women from their village.
The afterword by Kyle Ikeda discuses Medoruma’s literary career and output. It seems that several of his most well-known stories, including the Akutagawa Prize winning story “Droplets”-a short story that was acclaimed for the use of magic realism and literary sophistication, have been translated into English. However, Medoruma has not published a novel since The Woods of Memory, which was published as book in 2009. However, there are two unpublished critically acclaimed novels, Fuon: The Crying Wind (2004) and Niji no tori (Rainbow Bird, 2006) that will hopefully find translation and publication in English in the near future. Ikeda explains that the recent lack of production reflects Medoruma’s current role as a protester to the American presence in Okinawa. Most recently, in April of 2016, he was detained for paddling his canoe into a restricted area near a construction site.
The story is told through a series of different points of view from eight different characters including two Americans. Two chapters are from characters points of view in 1945, the rest take place 60 years later in 2005. In Sminkey’s informative preface, he discusses the challenges that this novel presented for a translator in terms of the experimental use of narrative techniques such as mixing of voices, lack of pronouns, avoidance of using quotes to denote speech, and use of the Okinawan language. The later issue, use of an Okinawan language, was specifically a difficult issue. The dialect depicted in the novel is a spoken language that Medoruma has rendered in the original with a Japanese gloss so that readers can seemingly “hear” the language even though the average standard Japanese speaker would not understand the language. As a result, Sminkey has chosen to avoid this issue since it was impossible to recreate the complexity of these sections of the novel accurately. This is most notable in the section narrated by Seiji, the young man seeking revenge, which was from 1945. This section has a complex mixed narrative that begins in the present, and moves into the past seemingly along with hallucinations before returning to the present. There is also a section narrated from Seiji in 2005. Notably absent from the novel is a chapter narrated by Sayoko, the girl who was raped and suffered the most in the novel.
In the preface, Sminkey points out the several parallels of actual events in Okinawa that reverberate throughout the novel which itself is based on a true story. Medoruma has stated that the central incident of the rape was based on a story he heard from his mother that took place on a small island, Yagaji Island, in the north part of Okinawa Island as war raged on fiercely in the south. One significant parallel is the 1995 incident where three American servicemen raped an elementary student. In addition, there is also a parallel with the 1945 Katusyama incident where some villagers killed three US Marines in retaliation for the repeated rapes of women from their village.
The afterword by Kyle Ikeda discuses Medoruma’s literary career and output. It seems that several of his most well-known stories, including the Akutagawa Prize winning story “Droplets”-a short story that was acclaimed for the use of magic realism and literary sophistication, have been translated into English. However, Medoruma has not published a novel since The Woods of Memory, which was published as book in 2009. However, there are two unpublished critically acclaimed novels, Fuon: The Crying Wind (2004) and Niji no tori (Rainbow Bird, 2006) that will hopefully find translation and publication in English in the near future. Ikeda explains that the recent lack of production reflects Medoruma’s current role as a protester to the American presence in Okinawa. Most recently, in April of 2016, he was detained for paddling his canoe into a restricted area near a construction site.
April 7, 2018
Wow
A really really, well written book.
There havent been many books recently which touched me as much as this book.
The Story is about a rape that happend during the second world war on Okinawa, and stretches about two timelines, one in 1945 and one in 2005. The story is written out of different perspectives and makes the whole situation feel even more real.
All in all an artfull masterwork, which is thought provoking and gets you on a emotional ride inside the heads of war victims.
A really really, well written book.
There havent been many books recently which touched me as much as this book.
The Story is about a rape that happend during the second world war on Okinawa, and stretches about two timelines, one in 1945 and one in 2005. The story is written out of different perspectives and makes the whole situation feel even more real.
All in all an artfull masterwork, which is thought provoking and gets you on a emotional ride inside the heads of war victims.
May 4, 2019
An extremely important piece of literature that uncovers the truth about the war from the viewpoint of Okinawan people. A very sad truth...
October 30, 2017
Yes, this book is an emotionally difficult read, but the effects of war and its aftermath are never pretty. History favors the victors, but here we get a look at the other side of the story, that of the enemy’s conquered people. Medoruma begins a series of perspectives with a little girl witnessing the vicious gang rape of a 17-year-old girl by American soldiers (based on a true story and also reminiscent of a little girl’s gang rape in 1995) in northern Okinawa, while southern Okinawa is still a WWII battleground. Each subsequent chapter is from the point of view of others involved with or affected by this attack, from that time to years later, because trauma affects many and is long lasting. He includes one of the soldiers' points of view and also a translator's, both of which I felt was a bit forced in story line, yet interesting.
I think this book can be read as commentary on any war’s effects. I thought the book was powerful, complex, and worth reading, and I’m glad someone has given voice to civilians when a foreign force resides in their country. Be sure to read the Preface and Afterword.
I think this book can be read as commentary on any war’s effects. I thought the book was powerful, complex, and worth reading, and I’m glad someone has given voice to civilians when a foreign force resides in their country. Be sure to read the Preface and Afterword.
November 30, 2020
Okinawa is still under occupation. A superb work by Medoruma with well-crafted plot and writing style, showing how war crimes create a ripple effect - a rape of a young Okinawan girl after the battle of Okinawa created an irrepairable dent in the lives of those around her, including the perpetrators themselves. A story told from different perspectives, except for the victim herself, is ripping up painful topics - how the rape victims still remain silent even after 60 years since the end of the war how complacent society allows the rapists to go unpunished, how people surrender into inaction. Medoruma's work is not only a retelling of a pivotal point of modern Okinawan history, he also makes his readers understand - American bases are still there. Rapes by American soldiers still happen. Okinawa is still haunted by the ghost of its past.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 12, 2020
THIS. Is a beautiful book. The language is simple in an authentic way, despite the translation. The sentences are exactly what they need to be, though from what I understand a lot is lost concerning the dynamics between Japanese/ English/ Ryukyuan language in the translation. This is important historically and I would argue essential for post-colonial literature. It is also disturbing (t/w sexual violence and war***). The symbols are interesting, creative, and untired. The characters break from the typical *caste* like characterization in a unique but also very unsatisfying way- though this un-resolve, the tension, the impossibility of it all, is really essential in this type of literature. A lot to think about here.
May 27, 2018
Grueling, powerful, and effective. Some chapters brought tears to my eyes.
June 4, 2019
Absolutely brilliant, although it's tragic that this book has to exist. Harrowing, heartbreaking novel, but it never becomes manipulative under Medoruma's masterful pen.
March 21, 2017
Full Review
Shun Medoruma's In the Woods of Memory is a powerful, thought-provoking exploration not just of the effects of war, but of how the aftermath of all tragedy ripples from the people it directly affects to the people around them. Even though it loses some things in translation, it remains an engaging story with each chapter having a distinctive voice. I highly recommend this novel and I hope it will bring Medomura to a wider English audience.
Shun Medoruma's In the Woods of Memory is a powerful, thought-provoking exploration not just of the effects of war, but of how the aftermath of all tragedy ripples from the people it directly affects to the people around them. Even though it loses some things in translation, it remains an engaging story with each chapter having a distinctive voice. I highly recommend this novel and I hope it will bring Medomura to a wider English audience.
Read
November 6, 2017"Decades pass by in the novel, but for readers, the century turns in a matter of pages, leaving the event as fresh and tender in their minds as it remains for the characters themselves." - Reid Bartholomew
This book was reviewed in the Nov/Dec 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
This book was reviewed in the Nov/Dec 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...
February 7, 2018
Speechless. Best book I’ve read in a long time.
December 30, 2024
3.5
I'm taken by how well Medoruma explored how sexual violence can impact people even if they remember, ignore, or heard about it by hearsay. Each chapter centered on a different character's perspective over the course of 70 years via different narrative styles, like a letter or stream of consciousness or describing a video confession. He definitely captured how retelling or remembering of violence, especially of an act of sexual violence that is later hidden, can just be kinda haunting--whether the character is just haunted by a single image unsure if it ever happened or is relieving it every second.
The weakest chapter is "Bullied Girl" although it does show how some younger generations view WW2 and the US military presence. The bullying that the character experienced came off as oddly trope-y. The bullying is suppose to mirror the sexual assault on one of the characters by showing the effects of hiding violence can have on people.
The weakest part of the whole novel was the translator's decision on how to display when characters were speaking Japanese, English, or one of the Northern Okinawan languages. In the Japanese publishing of the novel, there were annotations throughout it denoting Okinawan words, making the language more obviously spoken---that understanding an Okinawan language will require a lot of effort and it not a dialect of Japanese but rather its own language. However the English translation doesn't have any annotations throughout it. There's hardly any Japanese or Okinawan words written out in romaji. The translator does make it painfully obvious that another language is spoken through describing characters speaking to one another, but it comes off as very shallow since it's all written in English. Being told that another language is being spoken doesn't have the same impact as reading the actual languages and struggling through it, similar to how many of the characters struggled between English, Japanese, and Okinawan. While the translator does a beautiful job maintaining Medoruma's loose, stream of consciousness style, I wonder if the translation decisions to make the work more accessible to English readers hinder the work's overall impact.
I'm taken by how well Medoruma explored how sexual violence can impact people even if they remember, ignore, or heard about it by hearsay. Each chapter centered on a different character's perspective over the course of 70 years via different narrative styles, like a letter or stream of consciousness or describing a video confession. He definitely captured how retelling or remembering of violence, especially of an act of sexual violence that is later hidden, can just be kinda haunting--whether the character is just haunted by a single image unsure if it ever happened or is relieving it every second.
The weakest chapter is "Bullied Girl" although it does show how some younger generations view WW2 and the US military presence. The bullying that the character experienced came off as oddly trope-y. The bullying is suppose to mirror the sexual assault on one of the characters by showing the effects of hiding violence can have on people.
The weakest part of the whole novel was the translator's decision on how to display when characters were speaking Japanese, English, or one of the Northern Okinawan languages. In the Japanese publishing of the novel, there were annotations throughout it denoting Okinawan words, making the language more obviously spoken---that understanding an Okinawan language will require a lot of effort and it not a dialect of Japanese but rather its own language. However the English translation doesn't have any annotations throughout it. There's hardly any Japanese or Okinawan words written out in romaji. The translator does make it painfully obvious that another language is spoken through describing characters speaking to one another, but it comes off as very shallow since it's all written in English. Being told that another language is being spoken doesn't have the same impact as reading the actual languages and struggling through it, similar to how many of the characters struggled between English, Japanese, and Okinawan. While the translator does a beautiful job maintaining Medoruma's loose, stream of consciousness style, I wonder if the translation decisions to make the work more accessible to English readers hinder the work's overall impact.
April 14, 2022
"Hisako suddenly had the feeling that invisible beings had crawled out from deep inside and were listening on the rocks..."
"But the memories were like blurry black and white photographs, which she couldn't connect to the colorful bright scenery before her."
"When you get older, the one thing that never changes and that best helps you remember the past... is trees. People die, one after another, buildings and roads change; and there's hardly anything in town that stays the same. But trees like this stay rooted to the same spot for hundreds of years. Standing under this banyan tree has helped me to remember the past more than anything else."
This is a really incredible portrait of a village in Okinawa and how one act of violence can set off a chain of events that continues to reverberate decades later. After a young girl is raped, a childhood friend staps the rapist, a US soldier, with a harpoon. The boy hides in a cave but is eventually gassed out and taken in for torturous interrogation.
Each chapter here is from a different perspective--some are intimately close to the event, others only distantly connected. But it creates a narrative that is profound, that speaks to the effects and afterlives of trauma. The way trauma and memory are explored here is brilliant. Medoruma gets to the trauma of war, that war is beyond the battles and men killed. It's sexual violence, it's fear, it's communities and families torn apart.
"But the memories were like blurry black and white photographs, which she couldn't connect to the colorful bright scenery before her."
"When you get older, the one thing that never changes and that best helps you remember the past... is trees. People die, one after another, buildings and roads change; and there's hardly anything in town that stays the same. But trees like this stay rooted to the same spot for hundreds of years. Standing under this banyan tree has helped me to remember the past more than anything else."
This is a really incredible portrait of a village in Okinawa and how one act of violence can set off a chain of events that continues to reverberate decades later. After a young girl is raped, a childhood friend staps the rapist, a US soldier, with a harpoon. The boy hides in a cave but is eventually gassed out and taken in for torturous interrogation.
Each chapter here is from a different perspective--some are intimately close to the event, others only distantly connected. But it creates a narrative that is profound, that speaks to the effects and afterlives of trauma. The way trauma and memory are explored here is brilliant. Medoruma gets to the trauma of war, that war is beyond the battles and men killed. It's sexual violence, it's fear, it's communities and families torn apart.
February 18, 2023
Wow... I was really floored by this. It's an interesting psychological take on the fallout of an event of sexual war crimes by American soldiers on an Okinawan girl during WW2. Each chapter is a different character's perspective in either 2005 or 1945, with different styles of storytelling in each case, some quite beautiful (the stream of consciousness Seiji sections are great).
I can really feel a lot of research and drawing on personal talks with real people and their war experiences... the book paints a nice picture of the ways violence is sort of condoned and created by conditions in which otherwise normal people are forced to crack (e.g. soldiers being flung into war and committing atrocious acts, or even just schoolgirls put under parental/school pressure and committing bullying).
I can really feel a lot of research and drawing on personal talks with real people and their war experiences... the book paints a nice picture of the ways violence is sort of condoned and created by conditions in which otherwise normal people are forced to crack (e.g. soldiers being flung into war and committing atrocious acts, or even just schoolgirls put under parental/school pressure and committing bullying).
April 11, 2020
An excellent novel portraying a complex and nuanced Okinawa and post-war Japan, focused around violence, trauma, memory and recollection of the battle of Okinawa, and how it affected a small Japanese village, and in particular two of the young Okinawan's living there.
This book mixes academia-level discourse around violence and oppression with a cutting narrative with beautiful prose.
I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in Japanese history, particularly during World War II. It has an angle and level of nuance not seen in works written by Americans, or even Japanese authors.
This book mixes academia-level discourse around violence and oppression with a cutting narrative with beautiful prose.
I highly recommend this novel to anyone interested in Japanese history, particularly during World War II. It has an angle and level of nuance not seen in works written by Americans, or even Japanese authors.
January 1, 2019
This book was absolutely breathtaking. One of my favorites of 2018. While it does get gruesome and hard to read, Medoruma writes about the painful truth of American military occupation in Okinawa and the damaging effects of colonialism on Okinawans for generations to come.
December 31, 2021
4.5
A young teenage girl is brutally raped by 4 US soldiers and through multiple perspectives, we are shown the repercussions, character motivations, reactions and levels of traumatisation.
Heartbreaking but an important read. This is a book that should be studied in schools.
A young teenage girl is brutally raped by 4 US soldiers and through multiple perspectives, we are shown the repercussions, character motivations, reactions and levels of traumatisation.
Heartbreaking but an important read. This is a book that should be studied in schools.
April 15, 2020
I read it for a college class, but it was a beautiful novel, and the author is brilliant. I definitely recommend it.
April 2, 2024
— Can you hear my voice, Sayoko?
— I hear you, Seiji.
I’m speechless. I don’t even know what to say, what words can describe my feelings after i finished reading this novel. But one thing i know for sure - it’s one of the best books i’ve read in my life. It’s so powerful and so heartbreaking. Absolutely brilliant.
— I hear you, Seiji.
I’m speechless. I don’t even know what to say, what words can describe my feelings after i finished reading this novel. But one thing i know for sure - it’s one of the best books i’ve read in my life. It’s so powerful and so heartbreaking. Absolutely brilliant.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews