pookiebear6's Full Review: Nora Okja Keller - Comfort Woman
Kim Soon Hyo, the mother in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman, is not sure how to share her own story of being a comfort woman with her daughter, Beccah Bradley. In fact, in some ways Akiko, as she was known in the comfort stations, is not sure whether to share her story at all. This uncertainty, bound and tangled with motherly love, compels both Beccah and Akiko to form their identities in the fluid space between them.
Comfort women, kept in imprisoned prostitutes in Japanese camps during World War II, are a story of history that are not often brought to light (and are, in fact, denied by many to have even happened). The fact that Keller devotes this novel to their stories, as presented by a woman and her daughter, is something that cannot be dismissed, in whatever form, but Keller manages to present a story that is well-written and delicately told.
Beccah’s childhood dreams of fitting into American culture surrounded by Marie Osmond and blue-eyed dolls, and Akiko’s own strained relationship with Beccah’s father, an American missionary, find common ground in the unspoken ties that unite mother and daughter.
The motif of language is one that is of interesting focus in the story. Akiko, who spoke to own her mother in a sort of secret language (17), employs a similar method to “speak” to the comfort women. “I would sing to the women,” she relates. “When I hummed certain sections, the women knew to take those unsung words for a message” (20). A definite note of strength is found in this: As comfort women ravaged by the soldiers, the aspect of physicality, the sense of touch, would have been all too real for these women. Akiko, however, is able to use this physicality in a different way, to communicate in a way that avoids “useless words.” She watches her husband teach their daughter how to speak German, English, and Japanese, and worries about her confusion.
As her mother’s stories begin to emerge about the horrors these women faced, Beccah learns that naming - the other main theme of the book - is important as an aspect of identity, and the calling out of a true name acts as the affirmation and celebration of a life. False names only act as more of that spoken, dissecting language. One of the character’s final pronouncements of naming is an affirmation of the life she lived before being owned by the Japanese: “I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister” (20).
Taking a difficult subject and rendering it with compassion and the right amount of sympathy is not always easy, and while it has a rocky start, Keller manages to do this quite well, and with vivid memorable imagery and characters. It is obviously not the easiest read for numerous reasons, but it is well worth the effort.
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