In Writing Okinawa, Davinder Bhowmik presents the first English-language monograph on Okinawan fiction featuring astute analyses of literary works spanning the early 1900s through the 21st century. As current geopolitical realities reinforce Okinawa's complex historical positionality, Bhowmik provides a timely treatment of how Okinawan authors have continually grappled with politicized questions of identity, language, history, and culture. Since the book's publication in 2008, the “Okinawa problem” (p. 4) has remained a lynchpin in regional contestations for power including the 2009 de-seating of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party and tensions in U.S.-Japan relations over the Futenma base relocation. During Okinawa's November 2010 gubernatorial elections, international media coverage re-emphasized the “historical discrimination” of Okinawans as “second-class citizens.” The book thus proves particularly salient in developing a critical view of Okinawa's identity politics, past and present, by positioning Okinawan literature as beyond beautiful “local color” (p. 2) stories to a genre based on “narrative acts of identity and resistance” (p. vii).
Bhowmik situates Okinawan fiction within and between the categories of regional, minority, and minor literature. The author introduces Okinawan prose as “nothing if not ambiguous” (p. 11) linked to Okinawan identity as “in constant flux” (p. 6). She organizes the six content chapters by historicizing interpretations of specific texts to explore how Okinawan fiction “continues to mean” (p. 16). Chapter 1 traces historical narratives from the 1800s to explain Okinawa's “tumultuous history” and “liminal status” (p. 19) vis-à-vis modern Japan. Focusing on assimilation practices that suppressed local dialects as “non-normative language” (p. 23), Bhowmik shows how modern Okinawan literature embodied in the works of Yamagusuku Seichū (1884–1949) emerged with “seeds of resistance” (p. 18) and “antimainland sentiment” (p. 32). Chapter 2 employs postcolonial critiques to cast Okinawan writings as subaltern within Taishō Japan (1912–1926). The works of Hirotsu Kazuo (1891–1968) and Ikemiyagi Sekihō (1893-1951) portray characters with fractured identities that Bhowmik reads through a national allegorical lens as contesting “the notion of a seamless nation” (p. 54). She characterizes immediate prewar literature in Chapter 3 as expressing a “longing for lost culture” (p. 63). Within the context of 1940s dialect debates, Bhowmik concludes that Okinawan authors reacted to “colonial modernity” by utilizing “nostalgia as a pointed political tool” (p. 87).
The second half of the book addresses literary works from the post-WWII era. Bhowmik demonstrates how under the U.S. occupation Oshiro Tatsuhiro (1925-) departs from prewar fiction by mythologizing Okinawan culture to emphasize lived experiences suppressed in previous eras (p. 114). Chapter 5 features “postreversion” writers Matayoshi Eiki (1947–) and Medoruma Shun (1960-) publishing after the return of Okinawa to Japan in 1972. Bhowmik argues that these authors create “flesh and blood characters” (p. 126) imbued with interiority, contrasting with the stock characters of the 1960s. She ends the chapter with an analysis of Medoruma's work as offering “fresh twists on the representation of war” (p. 141). In Chapter 6, Bhowmik analyzes the writings of Sakiyama Tami (1954- ), a female author often overshadowed who “most severely tests the genre of Okinawan fiction” (p. 158). Working through “minor literature” defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, she shows how Sakiyama “defamiliarize[s]” (p. 173) language, territory, and collectivity. Bhowmik concludes her ambitious project by proclaiming that Okinawan prose represents a “conspicuous body of social protest” (p. 180) through which generations of authors address the meta-theme of identity, while exploring different approaches to language, history, and culture.
Writing Okinawa represents a commendable work, notable for rich critical readings along with a remarkable scope. However, the one tension that resonates throughout the book is a question that challenges all of us who work on Okinawa, namely how to address the issue of Japan as empire and the colonization of Okinawa. The author seems to hesitate, proceeding at times too cautiously with qualifying terms to label Okinawa as a “de-facto colony” (p. 5), “a neocolonial locale,” (p. 43) or a space that was simply drawn “into the nation's fold” (p. 27). While this tension might be intentional, the impact of her later arguments could be strengthened by establishing more clearly the specific meaning of “colonial modernity,” along with when, how, or in what specific instances Okinawa vacillates betwixt and between a colony and an ethnic minority region within the nation.
More analytical treatment of empire and theories of imperialism could help move Bhowmik's critiques beyond the confines of Japan's nationalism into frameworks that might re-position Okinawan literature in connection with other former colonial spaces in East Asia. This approach could shed greater light not only on prewar literature as subaltern where antimainland = anti-colonial sentiment, but also on postwar struggles with imperial hangovers and new contestations between the U.S. and Japan as competing empires., Bhowmik's work remains impressive, providing a well-written, critical read for scholars working on Okinawa, literature and cultural history in Japan, cultural studies in East Asia, and world literatures.
