About the Book
This volume contains two novellas from Okinawa in translation, along with an introduction providing historical background and a concluding essay that compares and evaluates the works. Set in the 1960s, "Cocktail Party" is the story of a man whose daughter is raped by an American soldier. "Child of Okinawa" is told through the eyes of a young boy in the 1950s growing up in a bar/brothel that his parents run near a large American military base. In telling the stories of their protagonists, the authors Oshiro Tatsuhiro and Higashi Mineo extract such experiences from the mesmerizing context of newspaper headlines and television "sound bites," bringing them to an intensely personal level that is the special realm of literature.