Sakiyama Tami's fiction centers on a particular topos—the island—rendered shima in katakana, the syllabary reserved for things foreign. As her orthographic choice suggests, Sakiyama's is a defamiliarized island that starkly contrasts with widely circulated images of Okinawa, which appear in film, television, print journalism, and tourist brochures. In these images the female body is often fused with the island terrain. This gendering of landscape stems from the region’s long constrained geopolitical position and persists despite Okinawa’s return to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. Rather than portray a semi-tropical exotic island to which the urban weary flock, Sakiyama depicts a dark and depopulated island, rife with conflict and poverty. Some construe this writing as a welcome turn toward interiority in Okinawan prose. The shadowy, recessed island, they argue, is a womb-like space in which Sakiyama’s protagonists contemplate their maladjusted urban lives. In this paper I will focus on Sakiyama's 1997 story “Fūsuitan” (Tale of Wind and Water), a work that marks a transition from Sakiyama’s first stories, which involve a search for lost islands, to later ones that feature the pursuit of lost sounds. I argue that Sakiyama resists the all too common tendency to ascribe gender to Okinawa. She does far more than reverse the male and female identity positions. Not only does Sakiyama destroy phallogocentric thought, she also creates an island freed from the discourse of healing, a discourse in which island girls have long figured. Ironically, Sakiyama accomplishes this by employing the figure of the siren, a mythical seductress.
