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Narrative Strategies of the Okinawan Postmemory Generation: Physical Internalization of Absent Memories and Ethical Solidarity

SON Ji-Youn 1

1경희대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study examines a shift in Okinawan literature more than eighty years after the end of the Second World War: from “first-generation postmemory” literature, which relied on the living voices of survivors, to “second-generation postmemory” literature, written as even the voices of those who experienced the war are fading away. In first-generation literature, exemplified by the work of Medoruma Shun, memories of the war return to the bodies of those who lived through it, and sensing their pain functions as a practice of resistance against everyday violence. For second-generation writers, separated from the war by more than a generation, internalization—the bodily reception of another’s pain—takes on the character of ethical and practical mourning: an effort both to actively reconstruct a severed history and to respond to an absent other. The three writers examined here—Nohara Masaki, Akahoshi Toshizo, and Haga Kaoru—closely combine two acts in their works. One is the act of recording, which traces the past through photographs, registers, and the writing of fiction. The other is the sensory act of internalization, through which the indigestible residue of suffering is received into the subject’s own body. Through an imagined ritual, Nohara summons the wounds omitted from official history into a space of communalmourning. Akahoshi depicts a son who, after a bodily transference in which he enters his father’s body and endures the trauma of the battlefield, resolves to carry on, through writing, a memory that can no longer be passed down by blood. Confronting the suffering of a Korean victim who is not related to the narrator by blood—an other with whom hasty identification is impermissible—Haga excludes the spectacle of massacre and instead restores the everyday warmth that the violence destroyed. In doing so, Haga’s work proposes the possibility of “non-appropriative mourning,” a form of mourning that refuses to claim the suffering of others as one’s own. Through literary imagination, the work of these second-generation writers sustains a historical dialogue that is in danger of being broken off with the passing of earlier generations, and it transforms past loss into the possibility of present solidarity. This study shows that the end of testimony does not mean the disappearance of memory. The significance of this study lies in clarifying concretely how Okinawan second-generation postmemory literature moves beyond silence and oblivion toward a “future in which mourning is possible.”

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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