Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Acknowledgements
Teaser chapter
AUTHOR QUESTIONS
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
Also from Nora Okja Keller
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
Praise for Comfort Woman
Chosen by the Detroit Free Press as one of
the best books of the year
“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
PENGUIN BOOKS
COMFORT WOMAN
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
Published by the Penguin Group
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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
http://us.penguingroup.com
FOR TAE KATHLEEN
1
BECCAH
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 un
der 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.
The days my mother was well enough to catch the bus, I would eat all of my school lunch at one time instead of wrapping half of it to eat before bed. Working at Auntie Reno‘s, my mother was able to bring home leftovers from the daily special; Auntie Reno, who isn’t a blood relative, was good to us in that way: she always made sure we had enough to eat.
I have a habit I picked up from those small-kid days, one that I can’t seem to shake even now. Before eating my meals, I set aside a small mound of rice—or whatever I’m eating—as a sacrifice for the spirits or for God, in case either exists. Even eating out with friends, I push the food around on my plate, severing a small portion, and think the prayer I have prayed ever since I can remember: “Please, God—please, spirits and Induk—please, Daddy and whoever is listening: Leave my mother alone.”
I loved my mother during the normal times. She laughed and sang songs she made up. Instead of telling me to clear my papers and books off the table for dinner, she’d sing it to me. We’d play hatto, and while she dealt the cards, she’d sometimes tell me stories about my father or Korea—stories that began “Once on a time” but occasionally hinted at possible truths. And she’d sit and watch me do my homework, as if I were the TV, and mumble about how smart I was, so smart that could I really be her daughter? Though I used to grumble at her—“What? What you staring at? I got two heads or something?”—inside I was really loving it, seeing how she smiled, how she looked at me.
But always, no matter how many piles of rice I left for the gods, no matter how many times I prayed, there came the times when—as Auntie Reno used to say—the spirits claimed my mother.
When the spirits called to her, my mother would leave me and slip inside herself, to somewhere I could not and did not want to follow. It was as if the mother I knew turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space. During these times, the body of my mother would float through our one-bedroom apartment, slamming into walls and bookshelves and bumping into the corners of the coffee table and the television. If I could catch her, I would try to clean her cuts with Cambison ointment, dab the bruises with vinegar to stop the swelling. But most times I just left her food and water and hid in the bedroom, where I listened to long stretches of thumping accentuated by occasional shouts to a spirit named Induk.
It was worse when I was younger. When my father died, leaving us as guests of his most recent employers, at the Miami Mission House for Boys, my mother cashed what was left of his estate—several pieces of family jewelry, pearls mostly, and shares in a retirement village—paid off his hospital bills, and tried to return to Korea. She got as far as Hawai‘i when—not knowing anyone, broke, and with a young child to care for—my mother had to put me in school and find work. I remember my mother drifting in and out of under-the-table jobs—washing dishes in Vietnamese restaurants, slinging drinks in Korean bars on Ke’eaumoku—stringing together enough change to pay the weekly rent on a dirty second-floor apartment off Kapi‘olani Boulevard. I remember the darkness of that apartment: the brown imitation-wood wall paneling blackened from exhaust from the street, the boarded-up windows, the nights without electricity when we could not pay the bill. And I remember nights that seemed to last for days, when my mother dropped into a darkness of her own, so deep that I did not think she would ever come back to me.
At Ala Wai Elementary, where I was enrolled, I was taught that if I was ever in trouble I should tell my teachers or the police; I learned about 911. But in real life, I knew none of these people would understand, that they might even hurt my mother. I was on my own. At least until Auntie Reno discovered my mother’s potential.
The way Auntie Reno tells it, she was the only person who would hire my mother. Though my mother could speak English, Korean, and Japanese—which was a big plus in Waikiki—she had no real job skills or experience. “Out of dah goodness of my heart, I wen take your maddah as one cook,” Auntie Reno told me. “Even though she nevah even know how for fry hamburgah steak.”
The first few months on the job, my mother did well, despite the oil burns on her arms and face. Then the spirits—Saja the Death Messenger and Induk the Birth Grandmother—descended upon her, fighting over her loyalty and consciousness. During these times in which she shouted and punched at the air above her head, dancing as if to duck return jabs, I was afraid to let her out of the house, both because she might never come back and because—like a wandering yongson ghost finding its way back to its birthplace—she might. After roaming the streets, she could have led everyone back to me, the one who would have to explain my mother’s insanity. Each morning during her spell, I locked the door on her rantings and ravings, and each afternoon I raced home, fearful of what I’d find when I slipped back into our apartment.
The day Reno found out about my mother, I had just come home from school to find her dancing. At first I thought that she was back to normal, having fun listening to the radio or trying out a new American dance step, the bump-and-grind the teenagers were doing on Bandstand every week. But then I noticed the silence. Arms flailing, knees pumping into her chest, my mother danced without music. She must have been dancing a long time in that hot, airless apartment, because she was drenched in sweat: her hair slapped against, then stuck to her blotchy face, an
d water seeped from her pores, soaking the chest and underarms of her tunic blouse.
“Mom,” I yelled at her. When she didn’t look at me, I tried to grab one of her arms. She wrenched herself away and kept dancing.
“I got something for you to eat.” I held up the part of my school lunch that I had wrapped in a napkin and brought home: half of my pig-in-the-blanket and a peanut butter cookie. I could not remember the last time she ate. I remember hoping that she had eaten while I was at school, but when I checked the refrigerator and the cabinets, whatever food we had seemed untouched.
She danced away from me, hearing music I could not hear, dancing and dancing until her rasping gasps for breath filled the air and permeated each bite of pig-in-the-blanket I took. The food tasted like sweat and hot air, but I ate because I was hungry and because I could not let it go to waste. I ate everything, not even saving any of the cookie to place on the shrine on top of our bookshelf, because I was mad at the spirits and at God for taking my mother away from me.
While I tried to do my homework and my mother continued to dance, Auntie Reno came pounding at our door. “Let me in,” she bellowed. “I know you in dere, Akiko! You slackah! You lazy bum! You owe me for leaving me short so many days!”
I ran to the door and yelled through the crack: “Mrs. DeSilva-Chung, my mom is sick.”
“Lie!” she yelled back. “How come when I wen call, I heard her laugh and laugh and den hang up?”
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