In Comfort Woman Nora Okja Keller expounds upon her award-winning short story "Mother-Tongue." The book is about a mother who tells her daughter on her deathbed about her traumatic past as a Japanese sex slave during WWII. Beccah had always resented her mother for being strange and emotionally distant during her childhood. Akiko would disappear into trances and worked as a psychic/medium at a local cafe in Hawaii. Although Beccah always loved her mother, she never could understand her bizarre behavior. When she learns about the travesty of her mom's life in the camp, she realizes that Akiko needed to retreat into her spiritualism in order to maintain sanity after all that trauma. As a young child, Akiko had been sold by her older sister to the Japanese after her Korean parents' deaths. She lived in a single stall in a Japanese recreation camp for the duration of the war, being brutally raped and abused a hundred times a day by the soldiers. At one point she was forcibly given an abortion which forever afterward ruined her health. When she escaped, she married an American named Bradely who took her to Hawaii. She learns that she's pregnant with Beccah as soon as she settles into her new life.
Keller's book is an essential piece of literature which should be read by everyone. She's telling a story which has remained in the shadows for too long. These so called "Comfort Women" were mostly Korean girls who had been captured and brutalized into submission. Serving an entire army, they lived seemingly endless lives of squalor and abuse. Nearly all of the women caught sexually transmitted diseases which eventually killed them. Some were beat to death. A few fortune girls, like Akiko, managed to escape and salvage a life of their own, but they could never forget the horrors of the war.
Keller offers an interesting perspective in her book. She herself was raised by a Korean mother on the island of Hawaii, largely without a father in the picture. Perhaps she sets the story there in order to add a sense of realism which she can only capture autobiographically. At any rate, the interaction between Beccah and Akiko as mother and daughter is powerful. Akiko is ready to pass on her legacy to her daughter, knowing that it is an essential piece of who Beccah is, whether she knows it or not. When Beccah learns the truth, she is understandably shocked. She changes her life because of this information. The real power of the story is in the mother-daughter relationship which demonstrates the significance of heritage as well as the fortitude of women. Although tragic, Akiko's story is one of female empowerment. Despite the horrors of her past, she has raised her daughter in a healthy, happy home to the best of her ability. Now Beccah is prepared to share her mother's story with others in order to perpetuate the cycle of healing and to bring to light the crimes of the war.
