Customer Reviews

Comfort Woman

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is captivating book about a former comfort woman, Akiko, and her daughter Beccah. Keller artfully weaves the tales of Akiko's comfort camp traumas with her new life as the mother of a teenage girl. Comfort Woman explores Beccah's hardships growing up with a less than normal mother, as the text serves as a journey for Beccah to understand her mother's past life. While discovering facts about her mother, Beccah finds herself on a journey of her own, as she begins to create her own self. Strangely, she finds much more of Akiko in her than she would ever have thought. Though parts of this book are painfully realistic, it is a deeply moving book. It is beautifully written and is certain to both warm and tear at your heart.

Comfort Woman is a beautifully written novel. The themes that run through most Asian American Women Literature are seen, but in an inventive way. The decentering of the story provides the story with an added dynamic play of not knowing who the protagonist is, and not needing to know. Postmodern in nature, this book rejects the typical beginning, middle, and end. Both the narratives of the mother and the daughter are necessary for this work. The daughter's are most important of all (I was shocked to read that someone thought they could be removed). This is not a fun read, it is shocking, moving, and requires much of the reader. If you are not willing to think while reading, then this book is not for you. It's a great book to use for discussion. I love the book, I own it, and I've bought it for many others.

Nora Okja Keller's 'Comfort Woman' is that troublesome sort of book: a shimmeringly beautifully written story about a shudderingly horrible event.

A Korean mother, spiritually dead as a result of mass rapes by Japanese soldiers, attempts to protect her half-American daughter from all harm while at the same time fighting off the ghosts and demons of her Korean heritage. Not surprisingly, the daughter is confused, not least because the mother never reveals to her what has driven her to despair.

Much of the action works out in dreams, trances and ravings, and Keller is masterful at the difficult task of transferring the insubstantial confusion of dreams to the rigid format of words on a page.

Though he does not occupy much space, the character of the husband is savagely drawn. The entire novel is economical, packing a great many stories and ideas into 200 pages.

The setting, in Honolulu, is not drawn in great detail but (unlike most other novels set in Hawaii) is authentic as far as it goes. The pidgen dialogue of Auntie Reno will bring a smile to anyone who has ever spent time around a genuine Hawaiian 'tita.' (Literally, 'sister,' figuratively, a tough cookie who pulls no punches.)

There is one minor flaw in the book. The daughter works writing obituaries at a newspaper. The description of how she goes about this is not the way it happens at real newspapers. This does not detract from the novel and will not be noticed by anybody who has not written newspaper obituaries.

Comfort Woman is a very good novel that at once questions widely held ideas about memory, history, and the relationship between outsiders and mainstream culture. At the same time the novel tells a more personal tale about a mother and a daughter.

The prose is simple, accessable, and at the same time beautiful.

Without knowing anything about Asian-American history or literature, anyone can enjoy this book.

Daniel Clausen
danielclausen.com

Keller Inspired by `Comfort Woman' THE KOREA TIMES 970830 By Yang Sung-jin Staff Reporter... Every Wednesday morning in front of the Japanese Embassy in downtown Seoul dozens of students, civil activists and religious leaders protest against the Japanese government, which still denies its involvement in the operation of "Chongshingdae" or sex slave corps in the last world war. It is estimated that over 200,000 Asian women, many in their early teens, were kidnapped, coaxed or sold to serve as "comfort women" at frontline brothels operated by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. After ceaseless rapings, many comfort women were murdered by the Japanese army. These women perished in the darkest chapter of history. Yet history cannot be forgotten, especially if it is too horrible to forget. And the largely neglected history has deeply moved one mother to write a novel depicting these women. "Comfort Woman," published April by Viking in the U.S., drew critical attention as soon as it hit bookstores for the book's sensitive issue and beautiful lyricism. The author arrived in Seoul Monday to promote the Korean version. Nora Okja Keller was inspired to write "Comfort Woman" after hearing a lecture at the University of Hawaii in 1993, she said in an interview with The Korea Times Wednesday. The speaker was a comfort woman, Hwang Keum-ju, who was touring universities to talk about her experiences during the war. "Before attending the lecture, I had no idea about comfort woman. This was the first time I heard about chongshingdae, and her story just hit me so forcefully; I really felt like somebody had to write about this...a story that many people would hear about again and again so this kind of thing can never happen again," said the 31-year-old author. At first, she did not even consider writing the story herself because of the immensity of the topic, both emotionally and historically, for the previously unpublished author. Yet the 71-year-old comfort woman's past was too moving to go unnoticed. The story began haunting Keller. "I started dreaming about it. When I got up, I just wrote down some images of my dream. I had images of war and, like, camp, just dull like that. Some of the things she talked about merged into my dream and that was the start of it...as a short story," and Keller, who was awarded the Pushcart Prize in 1995 for a short story about comfort woman, which later prompted the novel. The 213 pages of the English version is indeed strewn with images of war, pain and lost connections. The story is told by the alternating voices of two women: Kim Hyo-soon, the former comfort woman, otherwise called Akiko, and her Americanized daughter Beccah. Hyo-soon sometimes falls into a trance and dances feverishly while speaking the voices of the dead. Beccah, not knowing her mother's past, feels embarrassed at and ashamed of her mother's delusions. However, Beccah, a teenager growing up in Honolulu, feels her mother should be protected from the tormenting spirits. Hyo-soon is sold at the age of 12 to the Japanese Army by her sister who needs money for a dowry. In the recreation camp, she sees other young women treated like animals and forced nightly to have sex with, not one, but a long line of soldiers. One night a woman, called Akiko 40, begins screaming at the soldiers: "She talked loud and nonstop. In Korean and Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion of her country and her body. Even as they mounted her, she shouted: I am Korean, I am a woman, I am alive. I am 17, I had a family just like you do." For speaking the truth, Akiko 40 is killed. Before she dies, she reveals her Korean name, Induk. Her place in the camp is replaced by Hyo-soon, who becomes Akiko 41. With Induk as her guardian angel, Akiko manages to escape the camp after two years and is forced to marry a much older American missionary who desires the vulnerable 14-year-old. She gives birth to Beccah and settles in Hawaii, barely sketching a living. On the background material about the story, Keller said, "At that time in 1993 there was not a lot of material written in English on comfort woman." She contacted professor Alice Choe at University of Hawaii, who supplied her with historical documents, essays and copies of the letters written by comfort women to the Japanese government. "But all those things didn't have details about life in camp. So at that point I just had to take a leap of faith," said Keller, who is of German and Korean descent. She projected what information she knew-the structure and history of how camps were set up and some facts-and used her imagination and a mother's intuition. "For me the real story was about emotional conflict, individual pain that many people feel. As I said, I had documents, newspaper clippings. When you have the facts, sometimes, it lacks an element of emotion, so that was where I thought the drama started," said Keller. "In part, it's a story of the comfort camp, but it's also a story about inter-generational conflict and type of pain that continue from generation to generation, you know, the type of pain, trauma, and injustice," stressed Keller, who wrote the story right after she gave birth to her daughter, Tae. The psychological interplay between mother and daughter flows throughout the story, reflecting a delicate and yet strong Korean tradition of family relations. The reason behind Keller's attention to the inter-generational conflict is partly based upon her own experience. Born in Seoul, Keller went to the U.S. with her family when she was four and settled in Hawaii when she was seven. She spent most of her life in America, where she struggled with her own identity. She said, "When I was growing up in the States, there were not many Korean kids, so I hung around a lot with the Japanese and Chinese and American kids. As many kids rebel against their parents, at that time I rebelled also against the Korean culture, claiming I'm Americ an. "I was rebelling against my mother who was also rebelling against what I defined as culture (American). Now as an adult, I'm trying to go back and make a re-connection, build the bridges that I tried to burn as an adolescent. "Common to a lot of Asian American writings in the U.S. is that we struggle with what it means to be, in my case, Korean American, and we try to resolve it with writing. "It's such an irony. I do feel like I'm very drawn to Korean culture and yet I can't even speak the language. And that's a lot of conflict. And because of the conflict, I try to write about it," she said. The story moves back and forth between the world of the spirit and material, life and death. Beccah finally realizes her mother's past and appreciates her love only after Hyo-soon dies. The drama has not only two voices but also a time-shift. The mother's story takes place after her daughter is born. Hyo-soon looks at her daughter, and starts remembering her past. Beccah's story is in the present. With regard to the intricate merging of the present and the past, Keller said, "It's the whole idea of the pain that we carry. We cannot always keep it as secret. We can't always repress it because when something that traumatic happens, it always visited on next generation, our children, whether or not we know actual story. It affects our children. "People say the ending is so sad, very hopeless. But I think there's a sense of peace at the end. Beccah's able to resolve her relation, have bigger understanding of her mother, also of her own history and her own life because, up till then, she had very limited view of her history. But after learning about her mother life, she puts her mother and her grandmother into a larger picture," explained Keller.

Once I picked up this book, i could not put it down till i finished. I was in pain for what i read on the pages of the book was such vividly portrayed pain of Akiko that it emersed into my own blood. I am of Korean descent, and I have heard many times about Comfort women from the last world war. I feel deep pain for them, and respect for enduring all the years that came following. This book greatly personalizes and brings out the real lives of one of those comfort women, to convey to us, years later, how the war never had ended for those women thereafter.

I read this book for a class and it is one of the few required readings I actually enjoyed. The detail Keller goes into about the abuse of the Korean "comfort women" is shocking. Call me corny, but I got goosebumps reading this book and the images that were created in my head haunted me for days.
The book alternates between Beccah's(the daughter) and Akiko's (the mother/comfort woman) point of views. The character developement is incredible.
This book is definitely not a happy story, but is one that is extremely emotional to the point where you almost feel the character's pain. FABULOUS!

Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman provactively examines the mother/daughter relationship and the immigrant relationship to the ethnic community. Through Akiko's description of her role as a comfort woman (a sex slave to Japanese soldiers), the reader learns that she experienced much pain and trauma prior to the birth of her daughter. This experience coupled with her Korean ethnicity work to make Akiko the woman she is today. Akiko's daughter, Beccah, feels burdened by her ethnicity in the hierarchical community of Hawaii and is often embarrassed by her mother's connection to the spiritual world. However by the conclusion of the novel, events occur that enable Beccah to make peace with her ethnicity and her mother as well as gain self-awareness. She follows her heart and has learned to trust her relationship with her mother.
This book opened my eyes to the terrible sexual abuse that took place during the war, as well as conveyed the importance of the mother/daughter bond and one's relationship to their past. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it!

"Comfort Woman" focuses on a little-known historical topic that has recently received more attention and recognition. Keller recreates quite accurately some of the horrors that the comfort women endured. But I was not as interested in Beccah's story as I was in Akiko's. Keller is a talented writer. But this novel is a diamond in the rough.

This is a good book, with some fine writing, particularly in the first 100 pages or so. After that however, the story seemed to lose some of its power and began to drift. The book evidently came from earlier and shorter effort from the author; I wonder if that might not have been a better format for the story. Still, this book has passages of great beauty (and horror), and is worth a read. Keller has a voice of great sensitivity.