Okinawa is having a moment. Recently a Telegraph travel destination, to many in the west it’s still unfamiliar except as a location of the Pacific theatre. To Elizabeth Miki Brina, the author of Speak, Okinawa, it was also unfamiliar until she was 34 — though her own mother is Okinawan, and she had spent time there as a child. Not until the break up of a relationship which played out the toxicities of her own family relations did she attempt to unravel her mother’s heritage: Okinawa’s brutal history, not Japanese, yet owned by, and at the mercy, of Japan; its persecution by America; its current state of suffering and her father’s role in that, as part of the US occupying forces that still run it as a garrison island.
Brina’s mother is working in a nightclub next to one of the 40 American military bases on this small tropical island when she meets Brina’s father. Their daughter asks: ‘Is love possible in a place like this, in a situation like this, between two people from separate worlds, on opposite sides of war and conquest?’ Much of the book is concerned with answering this question.
There is a self-loathing guilt, the legacy of internalised racism, that cuts a seam through the story: an extended apology to a mother Brina never understood, who does not speak the same language and who has different cultural values. Brina grows up in Fairport, a suburb of Rochester, New York, firmly in her father’s world and he, a kindly PTSD sufferer with a hero complex, maintains a rigid balance of power. Meanwhile, her mother, unable to fit in, alienated even from her own daughter, gets blind drunk and sobs on the phone to the people she has left behind.
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