![]() ![]() ![]() It is only the birth of Beccah that tethers her: "Blooming in the boundary between life and death, this child, with the tendril of her body, keeps me from crossing over and roots me to this earth." Beccah is in turns stifled and mortified by her mother's suffocating protectiveness, yet frightened by her absences into a spirit world of ravings and tyrannical ritual. Narrated in their two voices, what is harrowingly pieced together is the horror of Akiko's enslavement in a Japanese camp, her escape by abandoning her very name, her country and for a time her voice, a forced marriage to an American missionary, more intent on her body than her soul. ![]() Comfort Woman, the title of Nora Okja Keller's brave and utterly compelling first novel, tells of one such woman, the Korean Akiko, and her first-generation Hawaiian -American daughter Beccah. "Comfort women"-that dumbing-down euphemism for the almost one quarter of a million Asian women who were made sexual slaves of the Japanese military during World War Two. ![]()
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