ABSTRACT
Okinawan writer Medoruma Shun’s story “Army Messenger” expands understandings of transgenerational trauma’s connection to the landscape by depicting how hauntings are intimately conditioned by unresolved legacies of the Battle of Okinawa and Okinawa’s neocolonial relationships with the United States and Japan. In “Army Messenger” the various buildings on the streets of Koza which reflect the city’s base-town economy, not only physically manifest the conditions of US military occupation, but also magnify feelings of anxiety and awaken subconscious fears connected to sites of war death in the wake of contemporary acts of violence. Through such depictions Medoruma’s story demonstrates the importance of the landscape and sites of the war past in the mediation of traumatic memories and geographically proximate postmemory. Although moments of provisional mourning occur in “Army Messenger,” the story resists a therapeutic reading of traumatic hauntings in Okinawa by underscoring the dilemma of consolatory recovery within ongoing conditions of neocolonial and military oppression.
