Comfort Women

Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Women (Penguin Books, 1997) is the story of Akiko, a World War II Korean refugee, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary.

The two women were living on the edge of society in Honolulu, haunted by Akiko's periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah's struggles to reclaim her mother - a former comfort woman - from her past.

Akiko remembered a former comfort women whom everyone thought was crazy because she did not shut up.

"One night she talked loud and non-stop. In Korean and in Japanese, she denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop the 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 seventeen, I had a family just like you do. I am a daughter, I am a sister."

"Men left her stall quickly, some crying, most angrily joining the line for the woman next door. All through the night she talked, reclaiming her Korean name, reciting her family genealogy, even chanting the recipes her mother had passed on to her. Just before daybreak, they took her out of her stall and into the woods, where we couldn't hear her anymore. They brought her back skewered from her vagina to her mouth, like a pig ready for roasting. A lesson, they told the rest of us, warning us into silence."

Years later, Akiko continued to hear noises.

Noises of men laughing and betting on "how many men one comfort woman could service before she splits open." Noises of a woman being kicked because she had used an old shirt as a sanitary pad. Noises of a man sighing loudly as he "urinated on the body where he had just pumped his seeds."

Noises of trucks delivering more men, military supplies, and new women "to replace the ones that had died, their bodies erupting in pus." Noises of women's naked buttocks being slapped as they were paraded in front of a new arrival of troops. Noises of bullets ricocheting at the feet of women the soldiers were momentarily bored with.

Noises of a defiant comfort woman who bellowed the Korean national anthem "even after the soldiers had knocked her teeth out." Noises of men who "took their turns with us, until they could no longer create an erection." Noises of men who "plucked curling wires of my pubic hair, which they would carry to the front with them, talismans against danger and fear."

Akiko recalled: "If they had asked, I would have pulled them myself, and woven them into an amulet. Not to keep them safe from but to attract harm, each one of my hair a wish for death, and a call for justice."

Despite the trauma of soldiers banging in and out of the comfort cubicles and "in and out of our women's bodies", Akiko remembered that "what was left of our minds we guarded, kept private and separate."

On the division of Korea into two, Akiko had this to say:

"It still seems strange for me to think of Korea in terms of north and south, to realize a line we couldn't see or feel, a line we crossed with two steps, cut the body of my country in two. In dreams I will always see the thousands of people, the living and the dead, forming long queues that spiral out from the head and feet of Korea, not knowing that when they reach the navel they will have to turn back. Not knowing that they will never be able to return home. Not knowing they are forever lost."