Comfort Woman

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
Comfort Woman

 

“Lyrical and haunting.... A powerful book about mothers and daughters and the passions that bind one generation to another.”

—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times

 

“A beautiful first novel, lovingly written and lovingly told.
Comfort Woman
speaks eloquently for everyone who tries to imagine a parent's past, who tries to piece together a history that involves as much the dead as it does the living. Told with great grace, poetry and, yes, even humor, Nora Okja Keller has honored her ancestors and her readers with this book.
Comfort Woman
is not simply a story, but medicine for the spirit.”

—Sandra Cisneros, author of
The House on Mango Street and Loose Woman

 

“Comfort
Woman may have the elements of a classic mother-daughter tale, but it is so fresh and powerful that it reads like uncharted territory. And the storytelling is as rich as the story itself ”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

 

“Powerful and beautifully rendered.”

—
The Women's Review of Books

 

“Terrifyingly vivid ...
Comfort Woman
is a novel that demands intense reaction. Disturbing and beautiful, it takes its place in the American canon as a unique and exquisite tale.”

—
The Seattle Times

 

“There is nothing comfortable about Nora Okja Keller's Comfort
Woman.
A beautifully orchestrated, elegiac novel about a mother-daughter relationship that survives holocaust, madness, and death. Nora Okja Keller can write her way into the heart of darkness without losing her way. Her sense of humor, her lucid and graceful writing, her spunky characters keep our hearts from breaking.”

—Julia Alvarez, author of ¡
Yo!
and
How the Garcia Girls Lost TheirAccents

 

“A poignant and impressive debut ... Strongly imagined, well-paced, and written with an eloquently restrained lyricism that conveys the subtleties of feelings as well as the harshness of facts.”

—
Los Angeles Times

 

“Having existed in silence for so long, once spoken the story of the Korean ‘comfort women' immediately becomes mythic, heroic, and redemptive. This is not a novel about pity or hate, but rather one of strength and love.”

—Shawn Wong, author of
American Knees and Homebase

 

“A striking debut by a strongly gifted writer.... This impressive first novel depicts the atrocities of war and its lingering effects on a later generation. An intense study of a mother-daughter relationship ... piercing and moving in its evocation of feminine closeness. ... Akiko's flashbacks to her haunted past and Beccah's account of their lives together are told alternately, and it is one of Keller's several triumphs that she is able to render the two worlds so powerfully and distinctly.”

—
Publishers Weekly

 

“Nora Okja Keller's
Comfort Woman
strikes a pure note, humming its passages under your skin like a river of memory long after the book has been closed.”

—Cathy Song, author of School Figures and
Frameless Windows, Squares of Light

 

“Unusual and very special.... This mesmerizing, intimate book ranges from Korean folk culture to the lives of women, to immigrants adapting to America, to Christian missionaries in Asia ... Keller's blend of lyricism and fury makes
Comfort Woman
haunting.”

—
Detroit Free Press

 

“The water in Nora Okja Keller's
Comfort Woman
bathes her readers in an aqueous, musical prose. With intense lyrical fusion, Keller finds abundance in her Hawai‘i and her Korea as she brings the Yalu River to a stream behind a house in Honolulu in this novel brilliant in hues of indelible blue.”

—Lois-Ann Yamanaka, author of
Blu's Hanging and Wild Meat & the Bully Burgers

Nora Okja Keller, author of Fox Girl, was born in Seoul, Korea, and now lives in Hawaii. In 1995, Keller received the Pushcart Prize for “Mother Tongue,” a piece that is a part of
Comfort Woman.

PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL. England
First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1997
Published in Penguin Books 1998

Copyright © Nora Okja Keller, 1997

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which portions of this book, in slightly different form, first appeared:
Bamboo Ridge, Into the Fire: Asian American Prose,
edited by Sylvia Watanabe and Carol Bruchac, Greenfield Review Literary Center, Incorporated;
On a Bed of Rice; An Asian American Erotic Feast,
edited by Geraldine Kudaka, Anchor Books;
The Pushcart Prize XX,
edited by Bill Henderson with the Pushcart Prize editors, Pushcart Press; and
Writing Away Here.

PUBLISHER'S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

eISBN : 978-1-101-12767-4

 

On the fifth anniversary of my father's death, my mother confessed to his murder. We had been peeling the shrimp for his chesa, slicing through the crackling skins, popping the gray and slippery meat, ripe as fruit, into the kitchen sink. My mother, who was allergic to my father's favorite food, held her red and puffy hands under cold running water and scratched at her fingers. “Beccah-chan,” she told me without looking up, “I killed your father.”

My mother picked at her hands, rubbing at the blisters bubbling between her fingers. I turned the water off and wrapped her hands in a dish towel. “Shh, Mommy,” I said. “Don't start.”

“Never happen like this,” she said, trying to snap her fingers under the cloth. “I had to work at it.”

I led her to the kitchen table, clearing a place for her by pushing the stacks of offerings we planned to burn after I ate the remembrance feast my mother made to appease my father's spirit. My father died when I was five, and this yearly meal, with its persistent smell of the ocean, and the smoke and the ash that would penetrate our apartment for days after we burned the Monopoly money and paper-doll clothes, supplanted my dim memories of an actual man. Even when I unearthed the picture I had of him from my underwear drawer, stealing a look, I saw him less and less clearly, the image fading in almost imperceptible gradations each time I exposed it to light and scrutiny.

What stays with me, though, is the color of his eyes. While his face, his body, sit in shadows behind the black of the Bible he always carried with him, the blue of his eyes sharpen on me. At night before I fell asleep, I would try to imagine my father as an angel coming to comfort me. I gave him the face and voice of Mr. Rogers and waited for him to wrap me in that cardigan sweater, which would smell of mothballs and mint and Daddy. He would spirit me away, to a home on the Mainland complete with plush carpet and a cocker spaniel pup. My daddy, I knew, would save my mother and me, burning with his blue eyes the Korean ghosts and demons that fed off our lives.

But when he rolled me into the sweater, binding my arms behind me, my father opened his eyes not on the demons but on me. And the blue light from his eyes grew so bright it burned me, each night, into nothingness.

I don't remember what I felt the day my mother told me she had killed my father. Maybe anger, or fear. Not because I believed she had killed him, but because I thought she was slipping into one of her trances. I remember telling her, “Okay,” in a loud, slow voice, while I listed in my head the things that I needed to do: call Auntie Reno, buy enough oranges and incense sticks to last two weeks, secure the double locks on the doors when I left for school so my mother couldn't get out of the house.

Most of the time my mother seemed normal. Not normal like the moms on TV—the kind that baked cookies, joined the PTA, or came to weekly soccer games—but normal in that she seemed to know where she was and who I was. During those times, my mother would get up when she heard my alarm clock go off in the morning, and before I pressed the second snooze alarm, she'd have folded the blankets on her side of the bed, poured hot water for the tea, and made breakfast: fresh rice mixed with raw egg, shoyu, and Tabasco. After eating, we'd dress and then walk down the water-rotted hallway of our building, past the “three o‘clock” drunk asleep on the bottom stairs, to the bus stop. Instead of continuing straight to school, I'd wait with her until the number 8 came to take her to Reno's Waikiki Bar-B-Q Hut, where she worked as fry cook and clean-up girl.