The woman attempts to build a relationship with her daughter who has grown up in America, while recounting the horrors she endured during the war. The Comfort Woman' is a shocking tale of a young Korean girl forced by the invading Japanese forces to become a sex slave to the army men. Keller's book is a compelling look into these little known women, and the effect their slavery had on the rest of their lives, and the lives of their families. While some women may have chosen to follow and serve the troops, the Japanese conscripted women from Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Burmese, and even Dutch Indonesian (Mitsios 244), and for many years, the Japanese denied their existence. One critic noted, however, 'One must keep in mind, however, that the notion of comfort women is not a Japanese invention in fact, it is as old as the Roman Empire' (Mitsios 244). Keller's book is a novel, but the things Akiko (the mother) faced in the book are the same type of things any comfort woman would have faced, and it is difficult to read about the cruelties and horrors she faced.

Even today, little is understood about the lives of nearly 100,000 women who were eventually forced into servicing the Japanese. My friend turned it back on me and said, 'You should write about this, you're Korean'' (Hong). She remembers, 'I couldn't believe that people didn't know about this, that we don't learn about this in history books, so I tried to get my friend to write an article about this. The author, who grew up in a biracial family in Hawaii, did not know about comfort women until she listened to a woman speak about her experiences in 1993, and hearing the woman's story so completely overtook her that she felt she had to write about it.

Korean women were forced to care for the Japanese soldiers, and become sex slaves to the men. Beccah must deal with the death of her mother, the absence of a father, and the knowledge that she never really knew her mother at all, which may be the most difficult part of her life to deal with.Ĭomfort women actually existed during the Second World War. The book explores many sides of several feminist theories, including the all-important mother-daughter relationship, which can insinuate itself into every facet of our adult lives. 'The Comfort Woman' is the moving tale of a daughter struggling to understand her mother while coming to grips with her own emotionally unsatisfying life. ¶ … Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller women's theories of the mother-daughter relationship and absent father throughout the book.