History tends to focus on the fighters, not on civilians. That gap is explored in the first chapter of Susumu Higa’s Okniawa collection, Sword of Sand.

Okinawa is the smallest of Japan’s main islands. The Okinawa prefecture itself has a tenuous relationship with mainland Japan. When the Imperial Japanese Army arrives to the various islands surrounding Okinawa during World War II, they’re met with just enough amicability, but those left on the island after the young men had already been conscripted experience some disdain. No one wants their home to be the island where the fighting will take place once the Americans arrive.

We see this in the titular “Sword of Sand” story that opens the volume—when a man from the Navy arrives to tell the residents that a garrison will be stationed on their small island, the remaining older residents whisper dissent. In other stories, like “Sands of the Setting Sun,” we can see how those garrisons ended up like bandits, robbing towns and executing civilians, even after the war was over.

Higa’s focus throughout this first volume is on life—the life of his mother, the people of Okinawa, and those who made it through the war. The army conscripted most men on the island into the army. The younger boys had no choice but to help with the war effort, either through training or labor. Higa, himself as a young child then, remembers how his mother kept him and his siblings alive while their island was being bombed and soldiers routinely drove them from safety. In all of these stories, we see how life can persevere despite the war and this is all the more apparent in a story like “School” where a group of students are kept from the front line as they need to help their professor preserve a trove of ancient documents uncovered beneath Shuri Castle. Their own lives are spared as they document the lives of those who had lived on the island generations ago.

Sword of Sand sits within you after its closing chapter, “Dirt Thieves,” as the images of Okinawa and the surrounding islands after the war burrow deep within your psyche. Even something as simple as two men collecting dirt for pottery decades after the war, the shadow of the war looms heavily.

Get excited. Get informed.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, 651, & 674) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.