A tale of forgetting and remembrance

Being an ardent admirer of K-pop culture, I wonder why I was hitherto unaware of this gem of a book, One Left by Kim Soom, and the excruciatingly painful truth it delineates. But, surely, the answer lies in the question: is it popular literature, or a serious work of scholarship? It depicts a disturbingly dark chapter of Korea under Japanese rule during the Pacific War, through a seemingly difficult narrative structure infused with memory and time shifts. No wonder this novel lacks mass appeal.

Translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton had to face quite an ordeal to publish this book despite winning the prestigious PEN/Heim Fund Grants for their work. The publishers were conflicted about whether to market it as a piece of fiction or a historical work. The carefully put endnotes, along with sources, indeed reflect Soom's assiduous research to establish the authenticity of the text. This, ultimately, is a chronicle of "comfort women" who were forced to work as sex slaves for the Japanese Army during the Second World War—a truth that the Japanese Government has contested, and even some Koreans seem to be sceptical about and are ashamed of. Nonetheless, this is a moving work of fiction, created out of rigorous study of the comfort women of Korea.

To summarise the plot, this novel is set at a time when only one registered comfort woman is still alive. However, she is on her deathbed. This narrative, thus, progresses through the protagonist's (who is a hidden comfort woman and remains nameless till the last chapter of the novel) reminiscences of her harrowing experience in a comfort station; her life story is intermingled with her isolated life at present. Moreover, her recollection of post-conflict Korea also shows how these comfort women faced extreme social ostracisation, given the shame, humiliation, and disgust that followed the revelation of their identities. Hence, the last few chapters feelingly portray the psychological conflict of the protagonist to remain hidden because of the threats of social ostracisation, and the desire to reclaim her identity since no one will be left to chronicle the voices of comfort women after the last one dies.

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Undoubtedly, recording one of the most painful incidents in the history of Korea which remains mostly unacknowledged in the public domain, is in itself a step towards remembrance and acknowledgement. This clash between public amnesia and a personal narrative of remembrance seems to be reiterated throughout this text. This novel, thus, depicts how coercive outward forces ruptured the identity of the comfort women in myriad ways, who had to change their names and were raped so many times that their bodies did not feel like theirs anymore. This attempt to obliterate their identities did not end with the war. Nevertheless, resistance against such erasure is represented at the end of the novel, through the nameless protagonist, who suddenly remembers her name, as she decides to reclaim her agency by meeting the last surviving victim and revealing her identity.

To emphasise this dichotomy between the coerced subalternity of comfort women and the desire to recover their agency, Soom uses a mask as a symbol. The protagonist is given one by another nameless girl from the neighbourhood. Although the mask has eyes, it lacks a mouth. Later, she carves a mouth out of the mask as she contemplates coming out as a victim. The firm decision to express her identity comes after her nephew crushes the mask with the mouth beneath his foot and tries to force her out of the house. Such usage of symbols, metaphors, and images is one important characteristic of Soom's writing style, especially, the animal imagery becomes a motif through its recurrent appearance in the novel, evoking the general tendency prevalent in all living beings, of the powerful to dominate the powerless.

In one interview, Soom has reflected on how she started writing this novel. As she heard on television that the number of registered comfort women was declining, she had a vision one day, of an elderly comfort woman sitting all by herself in a room, like an island in a vast ocean. She indeed creates such a character through the language of affect, revealing how shame, fear, and disgust alienate her from society. However, the desire for love and connection seems to overpower the pessimistic tone of the story, since towards the end of the novel, the last surviving comfort woman alludes to a passage from Tolstoy's Resurrection (1899) that looks forward to a world where all living beings coexist happily. Despite the emphasis on the despondent situation of comfort women and their reparation, this longing for a world filled with empathy, love, and peaceful coexistence seems to be the beating heart of this novel.

Moumita Haque Shenjutee is Lecturer, Department of English, University of Dhaka.