BOOKS & MORE
Charles La Shure Professor, Department of Korean Language and Literature, Seoul National University
A Disturbing Testimony of Truths about ‘Comfort Women’
One Left: A Novel By Kim Soom, Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, 224 pages, $19.95, Seattle: University of Washington Press [2020]
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During World War II, the imperial Japanese military set up a system of brothels intended to reduce incidences of wartime rape. Although these so-called “comfort stations” were supposed to be staffed with voluntary prostitutes, the vast majority of the women who worked them were either taken by force or tricked into sexual slavery with promises of well-paid factory jobs or other ruses. The women victimized in this way came to be known euphemistically as “comfort women.” Although Korean literature has been telling tragic stories of the Korean people throughout the modern era, comfort women have largely been ignored. This book by Kim Soom is an exception. The first novel to present the experiences of comfort women in such a raw and unflinching manner, it tells the story of one survivor who has never gone public with her experiences. When she learns that the last known comfort woman is nearing death, she is forced to look back over her life and decide whether she will continue to live in fear and silence or finally tell her story to the world. The novel is not for the faint of heart or the delicate of soul. In contrast to the designation “comfort women,” the pain, humiliation and degradation to which these young girls and women were subjected is portrayed here with no hint of euphemism. The very act of reading is traumatic. The story weaves back and forth between the present, in which our now 93-year-old grandmother lives in a desolate neighborhood slated for redevelopment, and the past, in which the then 13-year-old girl is taken by the Japanese while gathering marsh snails for her starving family and forced into sexual slavery in Manchuria. And yet it quickly becomes apparent that these are not merely flashbacks; our protagonist does not merely think back to the past, she relives it on a daily basis. While the seven years she spent at the comfort station may have long since come to an end, the suffering and trauma of that experience have never truly left her. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this novel is how it straddles the line between fact and fiction. As the creative work of the author, it is indeed a novel. But it is peppered with over 300 footnotes, providing sources from actual testimonies of real comfort women. How then, should the reader approach it? Is it a work of fiction or a work of history? It is in fact both, and as such, it is a testimony to the power of fiction to convey painful truths. Readers, even those already aware of the suffering of the comfort women, will likely be shocked by what they find here. But confronting this truth is the first step toward healing. KOREANA SPRING 2021
