Narrative Experience In The Stones Cry Out By Hikaru Okuizumi

Collecting evidences, gathering recourses, and providing reliable insights of a historical event are certainly not some easy tasks to perform for an author who has no first-hand experience of such event. Nevertheless, it is even more challenging for authors to re-organize, recount, and represent traumatic war-time memories to a body of audience with no direct experience of the intensely dangerous confrontations, especially belligerent experiences that happened abroad. To convey the anxiety and trauma resulted from extreme violence, moral conflicts and physio-psychological damages without unconsciously marginalizing any particular historical event, authors who write about traumatic experiences must be cautious when they try to visually and mentally

Even though on the surface Manase seems to have moved on from the military past by embodying his new identity—amateur geologist and bookseller, he is still severely haunted by the massacres of sick soldiers he witnessed. Among those memories, Manase’s interaction with the dying Lance Corporal remains the most impactful both as a trigger to post-war new life and as a reminder of the horrifying memories. While his inner struggle to move on from the past remains unsolved, those traumatic experiences end up blighting his relationship with the wife and

By doing so, Okuizumi seamlessly asserts his political standpoint while reminding the audience that although it may be possible to bury traumatic experiences, the memories could always lurk in the dark. Instead of chronological portrayal of Manase’s life before and after the war, Okuizumi intelligently switches the narrative back and forth within Manase’s seemingly contented yet actually distorted domestic life, ruined by his mysteriously excessive obsession over stone collection. If the narrative were to simply begin with Manase’s wartime experience in the Philippines and end with the tragic deaths of his tow sons, or vice versa, the audience would not be able to fully appreciate those haunting and overwhelming traumatic moments that Manase underwent. Perhaps by taking the words of the dying Lance Corporal as a sort of remedy for his horrifying military experience, Manase deliberately suppresses the agonizing memories from the war. However, as Manase never makes an effort to resolve his fear for the haunted past, he ends up losing grip of reality, and the unsolved trauma ends up shaping the tragedies that happened to his