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Translator's Introduction Born in Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, Medoruma Shun currently teaches Japanese at a vocational high school on Miyako Island, far removed from Tokyo's literary world. (The author's name is given in Japanese order, with surname first. Although he has been winning literary awards in Okinawa since his university days, Medoruma was largely unknown among mainland Japanese readers until Droplets (Suiteki) was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in the summer of 1997. The Akutagawa Prize is Japan's most prestigious award for fiction, and Medoruma was the second writer from Okinawa to receive the award in two years-a fact critics deemed noteworthy since Okinawans represent only one percent of Japan's population and have maintained a distinct ethnic identity within this nation that takes pride in its so-called homogeneity.
Several of the characters in Droplets speak in an Okinawan dialect that would be incomprehensible to mainland Japanese readers without the accompanying glosses, which Medoruma unobtrusively incorporates into the text. Since the dialect is a salient part of this story, the translator has attempted to evoke the atmosphere of the original by rendering those dialogues into a non-standard English, loosely based on the speech patterns of Appalachia. Readers should bear in mind, however, that the Okinawan landscape resembles that of Hawaii more than it does Appalachia or even mainland Japan. Surrounded by coral reefs and covered with lush green foliage and brilliant flowers, the Ryukyu Islands appear exotic to most Japanese. Yet Droplets centers on a more humble image from Okinawa's landscape-the gourd melon. Roughly the size and shape of a watermelon, the gourd melon is usually boiled and eaten as a vegetable. Shortly after the Battle of Okinawa, abnormally large vegetables began to appear, presumably nourished by the countless corpses absorbed into the soil.
MICHAEL MOLASKY
It was during a dry spell in mid-June, the rainy season, when Tokusho's leg suddenly swelled up. He lay napping on a steel-framed army cot in the back room, away from the scorching sun of the cloudless sky. The heat had subsided now that it was past five o'clock, and he was sleeping comfortably when he was awakened by a feverish sensation in his right leg. He looked down to see that the lower half of his leg had swelled up...