Reading Okinawa

Japanese Text:

Medoruma, Shun. “Denreihei” [The Army Messenger]. Umukaji tu chiriti: Medoruma Shun tanpenshū shōsetsu senshū 3 [Carried off with the Shadows: Medoruma Shun Short Stories Anthology, Vol. 3]. Tokyo: Kageshobō, 2013. 259-91.


Click here to get Japanese-English flashcards for “Denreihei.” Strongly recommended for anyone who wants to read the story in Japanese.


1. Introduction

“Denreihei” [The Army Messenger] first appeared in the October 2004 issue of Ginzō and was republished in Umukaji tu chiriti, the third volume of Medoruma’s collected works.


2. Characters

Kinjō 金城

The protagonist for the first two sections. Kinjō is a juku teacher in his mid-30s. During a confrontation with some US soldiers, he sees a headless Japanese soldier. Later, he tells the story at Crossroads, a rundown bar.

US soldiers 四人の米兵

Four soldiers in a car ask Kinjō where they can find some girls, and after he kicks their car, they run after him and beat him up.

Ōshiro 大城

A history teacher and one of the regulars at Crossroads. He listens to Kinjō’s story and makes inappropriate comments.

Tomori 友利

The protagonist of the final three sections of the story. Tomori is the owner of Crossroads, the bar that Kinjō frequents. Three years ago, his daughter, Izumi, died in a traffic accident. From two years ago, Tomori has been living apart from his wife, Yoshimi.

Tomori’s parents 友利の両親

Tomori’s father was gentle and kind to his family until he noticed what appeared to be a headless soldier in a picture he took of the Koza riot. At that time, he told his wife about the death of Iju, a friend whose head was blown off during the war. After seeing Iju in the photo, Tomori’s father became obsessed with the idea of taking another photograph of his dead friend. When the family fell on hard times, Tomori’s mother struggled to keep the family together.

Iju　伊集

Iju is a friend of Tomori’s father who worked as a messenger during the Battle of Okinawa and whose head was blown off during the US naval bombardment. Tomori’s father found Iju’s headless corpse but was unable to fulfill his promise to bury the body. As a ghost, Iju continues to run around delivering messages. Sometimes he rescues people who are in trouble.


3. Plot

Section 1 (261-8)

Kinjō, a cram school teacher, is jogging late at night. He’s gotten out of shape since starting his job five years ago. As he’s jogging, four US soldiers pull up and ask where they can find some girls. He’s about to answer, but when he recalls the rape that occurred three months earlier, he ignores them and starts to walk away. They continue to pester him, so he screams and kicks their car. As the driver is getting out, Kinjō slams the door against him and runs off. Just when he’s about to get caught, a hand pulls him beside a vending machine, and the soldiers run past. But then they notice him, beat him up, and leave. Kinjō notices a headless solider in a disheveled Japanese army uniform. The soldier salutes and runs off. Seeing some headlights coming towards him, Kinjō panics and dashes off towards his apartment.

Section 2 (268-76)

A month later, Kinjō is drinking at Crossroads and tells about what happened with the soldiers, though neglecting to mention that he slammed the door on the driver. After he describes the headless soldier he saw at the vending machine, the owner of the bar, Tomori, tells them about the legend of the headless army messenger. Then he shows them a photo of the Koza riot with what appears to be a headless soldier in the smoke. Kinjō says that the soldier is the same one that rescued him a month earlier, and Tomori curiously asks where Kinjō saw him.

Section 3 (276-84)

The point of view switches to Tomori. After his customers leave, Tomori takes down the photo and reminisces about his childhood. When the Koza riot had broken out, Tomori’s father took pictures of the incident but decided not to display them. One day, he was closely examining one of the photos and suddenly changed. For the first time, he told Tomori’s mother about his war experience: Iju, his classmate, didn’t return one night after delivering a message. In order to search for his friend, Tomori’s father volunteered for the next mission and found Iju’s headless corpse near a family’s scattered remains. He promised to go back to bury his friend’s body but never could.

After seeing what appeared to be the ghost of his friend in the photo, Tomori’s father became obsessed with taking another picture of the ghost. He spent all his time taking photos all over town, and the family situation began to deteriorate. This continued for about six years. They bought a bar, and the mother worked day and night to keep them in business. One day, Tomori’s father suddenly threw out his camera and dedicated himself to running the business. The family’s situation improved considerably, and Tomori went to cooking school. After his father retired, Tomori took over the business, and when he father died, he turned the shop into a cocktail bar.

Tomori married Toshimi, and five years later, they had a daughter, Izumi. Together with Tomori’s mother, they lived happily until one day . . .

Section 4 (284-7)

Tomori puts the photo back and returns home to his apartment, where he lives alone. He listens to a message on his answering service from his wife asking him to put his seal on the divorce form and to mail it back to her. Three years ago, their daughter died in a traffic accident, and after that Tomomi and his wife couldn’t get along. Two years ago, Toshimi left, shortly after Tomomi’s mother started urging them to have another child. After that, Tomomi couldn’t stand to see his mother either, and he started living on his own. Since then, his life has fallen into disarray.

Tomori puts his seal on the divorce form, puts it back in the envelope, and then goes out to get some glue . . .

Section 5 (287-91)

It’s five-thirty in the morning. At the convenience store, Tomori purchases glue, beer, whisky, and a disposable camera. After sealing and posting the envelope with the divorce form, he goes to the vending machine that Kinjō mentioned and takes some pictures. As he heads back towards Park Avenue, he sees a small girl, whom he thinks is his daughter, Izumi. When he runs after her, she disappears, so he takes some pictures of the area. For the first time, he understands how his father must have felt when he was obsessed with taking a picture of Iju. But he feels that it’s too late for everything.

Tomori goes to Central Park and climbs the lookout platform. He takes off his belt, puts it around his neck, and hangs himself from the railing. Barely conscious, he feels someone banging on his back and then his lungs filling with air. Tomori looks up and sees the headless army messenger salute and then run off. Unable to see the soldier anymore, Tomori smashes the disposable camera, pulls out the film, and throws it away. Collapsing on the concrete floor, he suppresses his voice and cries.


4. Historical and Cultural Background

1. The Koza Riot コザ暴動

The Koza Riot was a spontaneous, unplanned riot that took place in Koza (now Okinawa City) on December 20, 1970. Though triggered by a traffic accident, the riot reflected the anger that many Okinawans felt towards the US military occupation.


5. Setting

The story takes place in Okinawa City, formerly Koza, about three months after the rape of an Okinawan elementary school girl by three US servicemen on September 4, 1995. That means the first section of the story takes place in December 1995, and the other sections take place in January 1996. The setting is significant both the time and location serve to emphasize the chain of violence that can be traced back to the Battle of Okinawa. Not only is Okinawa City the location of Kadena Air Base, the largest military base in Okinawa, but also where numerous bars that cater to US soldiers can be found. The story’s references to the 1970 Koza Riot and the infamous 1995 rape incident also serve to emphasize the chain of violence that connects contemporary Okinawa to its war past.


6. Point Of View

Although the entire story is narrated in third person, the point of view suddenly shifts from Kinjō to Tomori after the second section, and remains with Tomori until the end. Though the jump in point of view is jarring at first, readers will later notice that the shift serves to move the perspective from the public to the private, and from the objective to subjective. Since Kinjō does not know anything about the ghost, his experience seems to suggest a more public haunting of the environment. For the reader, this also provides some objective evidence in support of the ghost’s existence. In contrast to Kinjō’s experience, however, Tomori’s interaction with the ghost reflects his relationship with his father and his trauma over the loss of his daughter. In other words, if it weren’t for the first section told from Kinjō’s point of view, readers would be able to interpret the ghost as being entirely in Tomori’s mind. Kinjō’s experience serves to complicate such an interpretation.


7. Themes

Trauma and Its Impact

“Denreihei” explores how war memory and trauma can have a major impact on families and communities. The most obvious example, of course, is Tomori’s father. Though he manages to suppress his traumatic memory of his friend’s death for many years, the photograph of the Koza Riot triggers the trauma anew, causes him to become obsessed, and has devastating effects on the family: Tomori’s mother must work two jobs to keep the family afloat, and Tomori becomes a problem student. By the time Tomori’s father overcomes his problem, the family has already become irreversibly damaged. Similarly, Tomori and his wife are unable to overcome the tragedy of their daughter’s death and end up getting divorced.


8. Criticism

Tomoyuki Suzuki dedicates a chapter of his book on Medoruma Shun’s fiction to “Denreihei.” After a theoretical discussion of the ways that war memory can be communicated through literature, Suzuki focuses on the possible symbolic meanings of the headless army messenger. In a section considering a political reading of the text, he lists four possible interpretations of the army messenger: (1) one who reveals that war continues to be part of daily life in Okinawa; (2) a witness of the war who has been robbed of his voice; (3) a symbol of an Okinawa that has been robbed of its face, or ability to be a party in political negotiations; and (4) one who encourages others to continue living amidst despair (131-2). In all or these interpretations, the headless army messenger symbolizes how Okinawa continues to be tied to its war past, through a cycle of violence that includes rape, base violence, the Koza Riot, and war trauma. This view of Okinawa is in opposition to the view of Okinawa as a tropical resort or site of spiritual healing. At this point in his interpretation, Suzuki expresses frustration at not knowing how to respond to this political message of the text and begins to look for more literary interpretations that can help to break this impasse.

In a section entitled, “The Army Messenger as a Kind of Moving Machine: Towards another Political Reading,” Suzuki considers a humorous interpretation of the army messenger (135-40). Viewing the messenger as cute and comic, Suzuki see the messenger as providing comic relief to the rest of the story. The messenger salutes without a head, marches around like a mechanical toy, and fails to help those with whom he interacts. Significantly, his actions transcend the situations of the other characters. Though the ghost seems to rescue Kinjō and Tomori in their moments of crisis, he then abandons them and leaves their situations unchanged: Kinjō ends up being beaten up by the US soldiers; Tomori, left sobbing on his own. Connecting this observation to Kafka’s fiction and Deleuze’s discussion of minor literature, Suzuki sees the headless ghost as representing an unspecified hope in the face of the world of despair in which the characters are left behind in.

In the final section, Suzuki considers one final interpretation: reading “Denreihei” as a ghost story. He points out that readers are in the position of Ōshiro, a customer who listens to Kinjō’s and Tomori’s story about the ghost. In other words, we can read the story as a simple report of an experience, which we are free to believe or not.

Kyle Ikeda discusses “Denreihei” in terms of transgenerational war trauma. In “Geographically-Proximate Postmemory: Sites of War and the Enabling of Vicarious Narration in Medoruma Shun’s Fiction,” Ikeda points out how Tomori’s response to the death of his daughter parallels the father’s reaction to the headless army messenger, and argues that the story depicts “hauntings of the landscape for both survivors and their children” (51). Since Tomori lives at the site of the war, he must confront the pain of the past, including his own trauma. By symbolically reenacting is father’s obsession, Tomori comes to a deeper understanding of his father’s war experience. This reenactment leads Tomori to despair, but the appearance of the ghost suggests that he learns from the experience. Just as Tomori’s father gets rid of his camera and recovers from his obsession, Tomori throws out his camera and resolves to live. Ikeda expands the argument to include Kinjō, who is unrelated to Tomori’s family. The fact that someone who knows nothing about Iju’s death would also see the ghost suggests a more general, public haunting of the landscape. Ikeda points out that the Okinawan religious belief about mabui (the human spirit or soul) and the desire to carry out proper funeral rites can help to explain such hauntings. Even today, many families and communities have been unable to recover the remains of those who died in the war.


9. Symbolism

The Army Messenger　伝令兵

As Suzuki explains, Medoruma’s text strongly encourages readers to interpret the headless army messenger in symbolic terms. On the simplest level, the messenger is the ghost of Iju, Tomori’s father’s friend who died in the war. Clearly, however, the ghost also symbolizes Tomori’s father’s angst over not burying Iju’s corpse, and by extension, a symbol of other bodies that have not been recovered. The fact that he is a messenger suggests that he is attempting to convey a message from the past. The symbol is further complicated by the fact that he is headless and therefore incapable of speaking or communicating.

Camera カメラ

Both Tomori and his father become obsessed with the idea of taking pictures of the ghosts in order to prove their existence. In this way, the cameras symbolize the desire to have objective proof for the hauntings. Similarly, their choices to discard their cameras reflect a relinquishing of that desire, or at least recognition that trauma cannot be fully explained in objective or scientific terms.


10. Discussion Questions

1. Why does Medoruma have two points of view in the story, instead of just one?

2. Why does Kinjō get angry with the US soldiers?

3. What is Ōshiro’s role in the story?

4. How are Kinjō and Tomori similar? How are they different?

5. How do Kinjō and Ōshiro react to Tomori’s story about the army messenger?

6. What does the ghost represent? How do you explain the fact that Kinjō also sees the ghost?

7. How do Tomori’s experiences mirror those of his father?

8. How does Izumi’s death impact Tomori and his relationship with his wife?

9. Why does Tomori try to commit suicide?

10. What is the significance of Tomori’s throwing away the camera at the end of the story?


11. Works Cited

Ikeda, Kyle. “Geographically-Proximate Postmemory: Sites of War and the Enabling of Vicarious Narration in Medoruma Shun’s Fiction.” IJOS: International Journal of Okinawan Studies, 3.2 (2012). 37-59.

Medoruma, Shun. “Denreihei” [The Army Messenger]. Umukaji tu chiriti: Medoruma Shun tanpenshū shōsetsu senshū 3 [Carried off with the Shadows: Medoruma Shun Short Stories Anthology, Vol. 3]. Tokyo: Kageshobō, 2013. 259-91.

Suzuki, Tomoyuki. “Chapter 3: Kao no nai kioku.” Me no oku ni tsukitaterareta kotoba no mori. Tokyo: Shobunshu, 2013. 117-44.

Report by Kasumi Sminkey.