On Eiki Matayoshi’s The Dance of Soldiers：Have the ‘Trauma’ of the Battle of Okinawa Healed?

This paper takes Eiki Matayoshi’s novel The Dance of Soldiers (2023) as its object, examining how Eisa dance functions as a medium for constructing communal war memory. Through a spatial-narrative analysis of Kyoduka Village during the war, it shows that villagers were compelled to support the Imperial Japanese ideology while remaining deeply influenced by traditional Okinawan culture. It then explores the communal war memory that emerged after the war, when the village came under U.S. occupation, with the Japanese wartime ideology being thereby overturned. Finally, it shows how the villagers resurrected Eisa dance in order to memorialize the war dead and temper their own grief. Eisa dance expresses the emotional trauma of Okinawans and their aspirations for belonging, in this way serving as a cultural practice that revives the community and rebuilds its self-identity. By comparing this work with Okinawan war-themed writings by authors such as Oshiro Tatsuhiro and Medoruma Shun, this paper clarifies that through the medium of Eisa dance, The Dance of Soldiers presents a possible pathway toward healing the trauma of the Battle of Okinawa.