One Left: A Novel

by Kim Soom

  And she can’t eat squid. Because the suction cups remind her of the mounded sores that erupted in her groin when she came down with syphilis. When the sores erupted even her eyes would start itching. Itching so badly she felt like poking her eyes with a needle.

  There was hunger at the Manchurian comfort station too. Haha served tin bowls of gruel to the girls for breakfast. The gruel was clear as water, so clear the girls could see their entire face reflected in it, and the only side dish was pasty-looking kimchi that was going bad. More often than not it was weevils or maggots floating to the surface of the gruel instead of bits of meat. When the gruel was gone the girls scooped at their face reflected in the bottom of the bowl. But all the scooping in the world could never fill them.

  “I want to be happy until the very end.”

  Eating shit would be better than this. She grimaced as she swallowed the fluid.

  And then he stripped her naked and ordered her to give him a massage. Crouching like a sick kitten on his back, she massaged his shoulders.

  The villagers who remembered her asked, “Where have you been all these years? You were a baby girl when you left.”

  “Depends on how I do . . .”

  “Why are you lying to us?” said the girl who had shared her rice cake. Earning her a slap in the face from haha.

  Not until they arrived at the Manchuria comfort station did the girls imagine there were such places in this world.

  “These Korean bitches are hopeless,” the man said, then hit the tottering girl in the head with his baton. The girl spun once like a slow-motion top, fell to her knees, then collapsed to the ground. “Leave her alone—she can die for all I care,” he barked when the other girls went to her aid.

  The girls clutched one another’s hands to avoid being set adrift by the wave of humanity. Most of them were 15 or 16, and they sported every possible clothing style. One girl wore a Japanese cardigan along with the common baggy pants, and another girl was dressed in a white silk chŏgori and a black silk ch’ima. She herself wore the funny-looking cropped pants and the black chŏgori of coarse cotton that she had thrown on before going out to the marsh.

  She’s scared to open the gate and enter the yard. She’d like to return to the alley but realizes she has no place to go.

  She had returned home alive but legally was dead because none of her siblings was eager to correct her status in the official records, and she herself kept postponing action since the change in status was a time-consuming affair.

  Sundŏk was addicted as well and her face was a bilious dark color. She would cling to otosan begging him to save her. “Sure, I can save you,” he would coo before injecting her.

  Dinner was almost always wheat gruel made by boiling salted clumps of dough. Eating a bowl of it left the girls with the smell of wallpaper paste coming from their mouth. With dinner constantly interrupted by the arrival of soldiers, even this meager fare was eaten only a few spoonfuls at a time. She often cooks noodles for herself but never soup with wheat dumplings, which reminds her of the wheat gruel.

  I want to be born a girl . . . once more, just once, I want to be born a girl.

  “Is there ever going to be an end to these fucking guys?” Ch’unhŭi ŏnni would grumble whenever the soldiers surged into the yard.

  Just like the girls became the property of a haha, okusan, obasan, or otosan after they were snatched and taken away while weeding the field, picking cotton, fetching water from the village well, returning home from washing laundry in the stream, heading to school, or tending to their ailing father.

  “I’ll going to be weaving in a Yamada factory,” said a pockmarked girl with narrow eyes.

  She fibbed that she had left home but ended up by mistake in Pusan, where she ended up working as a live-in maid. She dared not tell them about Manchuria.

  “That’s news to me,” said haha with a straight face.

  No one offered a helping hand. What if they were sucked down trying to hold on to a girl so feeble she could barely stand? She stamped her feet in frustration as a group of girls slogged hand in hand through the water. She counted them, seven in all, and every single one made it safely to the other side.

  After Number Two fell asleep she told herself what she wanted most: A mom. A mom is what I want most.

  Sister-in-law also mentioned that she had seen Kim Haksun on television, weeping. “And did you know that in Japan they say that the women in the Volunteer Corps went off to practice a trade?” Volunteer Corps?!

  That morning, too, the girls washed and hung their sakku to dry before gathering in the yard. Punsŏn stretched her legs out toward the sun; for most of the winter she’d been making the rounds of the other girls’ rooms to keep herself warm, ever since her body had shut down because of the cold and dampness and she could no longer take men—after which haha cut off her supply of hot water for her canister pack and the pea coal for her brazier. Punsŏn used to visit her just long enough to warm her feet with the hot-water pack.

  She overheard otosan talking with the man. She had a basic understanding of Japanese by then, thanks to haha’s insistence that the girls speak Japanese. Haha also had Kisuk ŏnni and Sundŏk, who knew Japanese, teach the girls who didn’t. The first phrase she learned was Irasayemase! “Welcome!” This was how they were to greet the soldiers arriving at the comfort station.

  The tiniest drop of this solution turned water red, a little more made it black. Fatal if swallowed, it was used for washing the girls’ privates.

  “You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave,” said Changshil ŏnni. Her lips were the color of an eggplant. The previous night a noncommissioned officer had knocked out three of her front teeth. He’d put his finger in her vagina and was trying to wiggle it around when she said, “Why don’t you try that on your mother instead?” Earning her a beating from the enraged soldier. By the time she left the comfort station she had lost almost all her teeth.

  “Don’t you take my little girl, you’ll have to kill me first!” her mother screamed as she clutched Punsŏn. The MPs stomped on her belly.

  “They told me I’ll be a nurse,” said a bucktooth girl in a red brocade chŏgori and a coal-black knee-high ch’ima.

  “We’ll take good care of you if you sacrifice yourself for Imperial Japan.”

  Afraid they might kill her, she dared not ask where they were taking her.

  “Don’t worry. Just do as you’re told and take a lot of soldiers, and then we’ll send you home—you won’t even have to ask.”

  “If we’re gonna die this, that, or the other way, why not get out of here?” said Pokcha ŏnni.

  During an ancestral ritual this sister-in-law, oblivious to the end, nonchalantly mentioned that a distant relative had served as a comfort woman. “Can you believe she was wandering around in the snow without any shoes on? Her siblings had her committed to a mental hospital.”

  She followed the river upstream, searching for a narrower crossing she might be able to wade, and came across a sprawled-out woman who had been shot and killed.

  Haha could tell by the number of tickets a girl gave her how many soldiers she’d taken the previous day. She also posted a graph ranking the girls by their productivity. The girl who turned in the fewest tickets had to skip a meal and clean the outhouse instead. The most productive girl was presented with the finest clothing haha had on hand as well as extra food items such as canned goods. For haha tickets meant cash since she would sell them back to the soldiers.

  She noticed in the line three girls linked at the wrist by a rope, looking like a string of dried fish. Presumably the rope was to prevent them from escaping.

  Could the last one be Aesun? Aesun with her swarthy face and thin eyelids drank the potassium permanganate solution she was supposed to dilute with water to clean her privates. Fortunately Kŭmbok ŏnni found her and made her throw up. But the solution left her throat raw. And her vocal cords too, so that she sounded like a parrot when she spoke.

 
“Did they really cut her open to get rid of her baby?”

  “I am not a comfort woman.”

  “Soldiers? What if they shoot me? Then I won’t be able to take care of them.”

  “I mean you have to take the soldiers to bed with you,” said haha.

  As far as the family was concerned she was dead. Her brother had reported her as such after twelve years had gone by.

  From there a thirty-minute walk brought them to a thatch-roofed structure coated with red dust; it lacked the usual brushwood fence. A military truck was parked close by and Japanese soldiers hovered around. Otosan shouted at the girls to form a line. When the girls backpedaled, not wanting to be the first in line, he punched Kŭmbok ŏnni in the face. Startled, Kŭmbok ŏnni cupped her cheeks and returned to the front of the line. One by one the girls went inside. She herself was the third from the end. The twig door swung open and shut when the girls went in and out but she couldn’t see inside.

  “Are you going all the way to Manchuria?”

  All she could think of was how scared she was.

  While the sakku were drying, the girls were in the yard taking in the sun. But they never had enough time because the soldiers began flocking in at nine in the morning. The enlisted men came between nine and five, the NCOs from five to ten, and the officers from ten to midnight. Some of the officers came in the middle of the night.

  Haha and otosan would have a girl’s uterus removed at their pleasure—yet another way in which the girls were treated like livestock. If a girl got pregnant, her uterus was removed fetus and all as a preventive measure. A pregnant girl wouldn’t fetch the price of a dog.

  Mother dying.

  Yet again she feels all alone and wishes she had a child, a daughter.

  She knows that some girls who were comfort women received money. A girl who was at a Singapore comfort station, for example, said the girls there were given 60 percent of what the soldiers paid. And so she took in as many men as her body could handle, to rake in as much money as possible—by then she’d spent three years at a Guangdong comfort station, after being promised a factory job, and she was already a fallen woman. What with Japan emphasizing the need to save in order to fill the national war chest, she deposited her comfort station earnings in a military postal savings account under her Japanese name of Kimiko. By the end of the war she had saved up a tidy sum, but then the war ended and her account was frozen. She brought her bankbook back home to Korea just in case, but when she went to Japan and her bank refused to let her make a withdrawal, she ripped up the bankbook.

  “Two thousand yen.”

  He must have been almost the same age as that student. Only once did a Korean soldier come and go from her at the comfort station in Manchuria; he was from Chaech’ŏn,North Ch’ungch’ŏng Province. The Japanese さ, written in red inside a circle on his armband, meant he was a so-called student volunteer taken into the Japanese army, according to Kŭmbok ŏnni. There was a Korean soldier who came once in a long while to Kŭmbok ŏnni, and she referred to him as oppa, as if he were her older brother. Kŭmbok ŏnni said that she and oppa would have a smoke and talk about home and end up crying. When the soldier from Chaech’ŏn entered her she put her hand to his chest and her fingers felt all too fully the cracking and breaking of his heart. She thought she would see him a couple more times, but she never saw him again. And then Kŭmbok ŏnni’s oppa stopped coming. The girls believed that if a familiar face no longer showed up, then its owner must have died in battle.

  Lacking a calendar, the girls never knew the day of the week or the date and could only assume Sunday had arrived by the number of soldiers who came and went. The days were anonymous, and as they streamed by, the girls broke down.

  One night at the comfort station a drunken officer took his dagger and made a cut in her privates. She was barely 13 and her underdeveloped genitalia wouldn’t admit him.

  Her burning body smelled like rotting fish.

  She herself made plans to escape with Pokcha ŏnni and three other girls—Kunja, Aesun, and a girl from Namhae whose name she couldn’t remember. All the other girls wanted to join as well, but their swollen privates made walking difficult. Hyangsuk wept as she ushered them off.

  “Yŏngsun. What is this place anyway?” The girl seemed to come out of her trance, her eyes widening.

  Any talk of marrying her off sent her ballistic.

  Without replying she looked around the house. It hadn’t changed during her twelve-year absence, a tiny hole-in-the-wall dwelling with a spiny orange tree that functioned as a hedge.

  But she’s made do with it and has survived until now.

  So when the other girls mentioned “Taejŏn” she assumed they were in Taejŏn—and “Pongch’ŏn” meant Pongch’ŏn—and “Ch’ŏngjin,” Ch’ŏngjin.

  And she’s still at the comfort station in Manchuria, a 13-year-old girl.

  Hanok ŏnni also knew that granny-flower roots would do the job. They bloomed all around the family burial mounds back home. She kept her eyes peeled for them in Manchuria but no luck.

  The day after some seventy men came and went from her body, she took her can of sakku to the washbasin and found Hyangsuk by herself also washing sakku. She kept her distance from Hyangsuk. Her privates throbbed and stung, as if she’d been mutilated with a knife. She felt like peeing, but not a drop came out. She counted the soldiers who had come and gone from her but gave up at sixty-eight.

  Working at silk factory. Take care till my return. Don’t write back.

  The soldiers had at Ch’unhŭi ŏnni, bloody privates and all, as soon as she returned from her abortion.

  It’s a question she must have asked herself hundreds of times during the train ride. Where am I? Until she got on the train in Taegu, the only world she knew lay within an hour’s walk of her home. She could vaguely tell the train was heading north. North, ever north—but why? It was a question she couldn’t voice.

  The driver, fuming by now, herded the girls inside the barbed wire. He had a mustache and wore a pair of sallow-colored knickers, a cheap fur cap, and gold-rimmed glasses with thick lenses.

  “How I wish the two of you had come back together!” the woman wailed, and with tobacco-stained fingers grabbed her arm as if the arm itself were Kunja.

  With his dagger otosan left the would-be runaway with a gash across the ankle.

  Their first hideout was an endless field of wild millet. The stalks were well over six feet high and swung incessantly. Pokcha ŏnni, who had promised not to cry, plopped down and broke into tears. Here and there they spotted low earthenware pots similar to soy-sauce crocks back home. Peering inside in hopes of finding something edible, she was hit with a potent stench. The Chinese had buried corpses inside the pots. Rain had seeped in and the smell of the rotting corpses ate away at her nose.

  While the girls were taking soldiers, they could hear the crackling of the fire and smell Tongsuk ŏnni’s burning body. The bursting of her swollen stomach and the cracking of her burning bones circulated in the heavens before settling in the girls’ ears.

  “You have to tell them to use it, otherwise someone gets sick.” Kŭmbok ŏnni would drill this into the new girls.

  She just can’t bring herself to say that it reminds her of semen.

  Father, though clear in the head, did not recognize her. It had been a long time since he last saw her, and now her face was sallow and ruined like the wilted blossom of a rotten cucumber.

  If her mother were still alive she’d want to ask, For goodness’ sake, why didn’t you go look yourself instead of sending my poor little sisters?

  The girls in this comfort station in Manchuria could hear one another’s screams, an endless round of pain, through the thin plywood walls of their rooms. And they could hear one another moaning and groaning.

  “What do you mean, take the soldiers?” said the girl who was supposed to be working at the Yamada factory. This girl didn’t know whether the train was bound for China or Japan, but was dead set on goi
ng to the Yamada factory. Hearing this, she herself figured the factory must be to the north.

  Add the names created by the soldiers and the total increased to a dozen. The soldiers who visited her body named her as they pleased. Tomiko, Yoshiko, Chieko, Fuyuko, Emiko, Yaeko . . .

  It was more than seventy years ago, when she was gathering snails from the riverside marsh, that the men had appeared from out of nowhere and brought her up to the road. Where one man took her by the arms and another by the legs and she found herself being tossed into the back of a truck, suspended in air before crashing onto the floor of the cargo bin. Half a dozen other girls huddled there.

  Yŏnsun, scrawny and malnourished though she was, socked away the hardtack, taffy, and canned goods she got from the soldiers, instead of consuming them herself. She couldn’t get over thoughts of her younger siblings, whom she imagined nibbling on cuckoo lilies or wild rose petals when they had nothing to eat. The cuckoo lilies blossomed in early summer around the time the cuckoos could be heard calling, and her siblings ate the tender shoots fresh off the stalk, though they left a bitter taste. Yŏnsun said she would ask the lieutenant who was one of her regulars to have her stash sent home. He had a daughter the same age as Yŏnsun. One day he went off to battle and didn’t return. Not long after, Yŏnsun was sent elsewhere. Cheekbones jutting from hollowed cheeks, Yŏnsun hugged her bundle tightly as she climbed into the truck.