Since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, Koza, a military base town adjacent to the largest US Air Force base in the Asia-Pacific, has served as fertile ground for the setting of literature from Okinawa. The writing of Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko and, in particular, Sakiyama Tami illustrates the impact the US military has had on residents of Koza from the dispossession of land to aircraft and vehicular accidents to rape and murder. Their writing on aging bar hostesses, vibrant mixed-race children, and intrepid tourists rails against interminable war, the loss of home, and violated bodies. Furthermore, their work stands counter to male writers’ literature of Koza in the form of indelible female characters who challenge depictions of passivity through bold action.

Introduction

In this chapter I introduce readers to three contemporary female authors—Tōma Hiroko, Yoshida Sueko, and Sakiyama Tami. Their works depict the culturally hybrid space of Koza, a military base town in Okinawa built from the ashes of war. In its early days, Koza’s bars, nightclubs, pawnshops, and restaurants attracted individuals to the city from across Okinawa and its surrounding islands. These new residents’ interactions with and observations of U.S. military servicemen resulted in a flourishing of writing by women starting in the 1980s, after a dearth of such literature.

Relative to the scant writing by women prior to Okinawa’s reversion to Japanese sovereignty on May 15, 1972, women have published steadily post-reversion often setting their works on the town of Koza. Although Koza is not explicitly named in Tōma Hiroko’s poem “Senaka” (2005, Backbone*), the line “street bright with neon are the man’s playground” most certainly refers to Koza. “Kamaara shinjū” (1984, Love Suicide at Kamaara*) by Yoshida Sueko is set squarely in Kamaara, a district of Koza, and Sakiyama Tami’s Kuja genshikō (2017, Passage Through Phantasmic Kuja) is a collection of seven thematically linked short stories in which Koza, or Kuja, as Sakiyama’s renders it, figures prominently. What is it about Koza that impels these authors to set their work there?

Koza, a heterogenous space wherein the foreign and the local intermingle, is at once built upon land forcibly seized by American occupation soldiers and fertile ground for the rich literature of a growing number of female authors in Okinawa.