This paper analyzes the animating potential of narrative in Medoruma Shun's Me no oku no mori (In the Woods of Memory, 2009). The novel's narrative structure embodies both the constant circulation of traumatic memories, particularly surrounding sexual violence, and the inevitable gaps in such memories. The text draws the reader in turn into its spiral of telling and re-telling, shifting the burden of narrating history onto countless new witnesses. Moreover, the act of narrating this violent past necessarily entails the acknowledgment of one's own complicity in its violent reverberations in the present.

This review plumbs the deep narrative structure of Hong Yunshin's “Comfort Stations” as Remembered by Okinawans during World War II (Brill, 2020). It begins by situating her work in the historical tensions between Okinawa and mainland Japan as viewed through their disparate responses to the “comfort women” issue. Hong's discussion of military “comfort stations” during the Battle of Okinawa focuses not on the sexually enslaved, but on the collateral trauma of Okinawans who witnessed that violence in their daily lives. Tomiyama hightlights the author's emphasis on the postwar ressurection and reworking of battlefield memories, which today have become productive sites of remembrance and resistance. He joins Hong in noting that the memory work of war survivors is part of an ensemble of collective postcolonial practices that are shaping a self-reflective and distinctively Okinawan consciousness. This process of discovery, Tomiyama writes, challenges the territorial and ethno-nationalist assumptions of the contemporary Japanese state.