In 1995, Nora Okja Keller won the Pushcart Prize for a short story about a Korean comfort woman. As a young girl during World War II, Akiko was taken by the Japanese Army to be used as a sex slave.
Now, Keller has expanded Akiko's story into a novel. In alternating chapters, Keller tells the story of Akiko and her daughter, Beccah.As long as Akiko is alive, Beccah never knows about her mother's sad past. And yet, instinctively, Beccah does know some things.
She knows her mother disliked her father. She knows her mother has an intense spiritual life. For days at a time, Akiko will withdraw from her daughter, in order to yell and weep and commune with the world of the dead.
The daughter knows her mother loves her desperately. Akiko only comes back to the world of the living because she loves Beccah and wants to protect her.
And what an upbringing Beccah gets. Akiko can't always remember to cook for her child, but she will do anything - set fires, throw knives - to protect Beccah from the evil energy that surrounds them both.
When Beccah falls in love for the first time, Akiko performs a ceremony to make sure it is the last time Beccah ever makes her heart vulnerable to a man.
In this, Akiko is successful. Beccah grows up to tire of a man almost as soon as she loves him. His vulnerability annoys her.
Looking back on the only boy she ever loved, Beccah grieves: "Years ago, I was the one who told Max it was time to move on, yet it seems he is the one who has done so. He composed his life in steady measures, fulfilling with someone else the plans we made. . . . And I am the one who is stuck, envious of the normalcy of his unexceptional life."
Although it is fiction, "Comfort Woman" contains much truth. Here is one: After the war, people just wanted to go on, to sweep the sadness away. They succeeded, to varying degrees. Their children are curious about this time in history - and curious about what their parents' lives were like when they were young. This generation is fascinated by the untold stories from World War II.
"Comfort Woman" is a good first novel. In telling the story of an immigrant mother and her daughter, Keller is like, but not as compelling as, Amy Tan.
In telling the story of the comfort women, however, Keller does something new and brave. In this sense, "Comfort Woman" is extremely compelling.
Keller understands how hurt echoes through the generations. She writes about how humans hurt and degrade each other during war, and about the much more subtle ways they hurt each other during peacetime.