ABSTRACT
Sakiyama Tami, frequently paired with, yet largely overshadowed by
Medoruma Shun, is a remarkable author who has, in the past two decades,
written fiction and essays with growing confidence and aplomb. Notwith-
standing Medoruma Shun’s stylistic likeness to China’s revolutionary writer
Lu Xun, today, it is Sakiyama’s fiercely radical prose that most severely tests
the genre of Okinawan fiction. Since her recent declaration to write fiction
through a potent mixture of standard Japanese and regional dialect (shi-
makotoba), Sakiyama’s writing has come to virtually defy description.1
Critics certainly recognize considerable talent in the writer, twice nominated
for the Akutagawa Prize; yet, even the most generous often fail to under-
stand her opaque stories’ content, or even summarize, with any confidence,
their plots.2 For her part, Sakiyama likens her chosen method of writing
with dialect to being in hell, readily acknowledging that her modus oper-
andi may well be impossible. She also seems aware that her project will,
undoubtedly, limit her readership. Nevertheless, Sakiyama soldiers on in an
effort to destroy the kind of smooth Japanese writing whereby dialect is used simply to supplement a central language.3 Her undertaking, as ambi-
tious as it is risky, when taken as a whole, invokes the fiction of authors as
varied as Nakagami Kenji, Fukazawa Shichiro-, Sakaguchi Ango, and Izumi
Kyo-ka, all of whom unabashedly subvert writing conventions.
