By Beth Gardiner, Associated Press writer
With her stylish looks, girlish giggle and a smile that seems twice the size of her tiny frame, Nora Okja Keller hardly fits the profile of an intense young writer -- let alone one whose debut work focuses on a subject as gruesome as forced prostitution.
If it's an agonized artist you want, you'll have to look elsewhere. But for elegant, emotional prose and a moving first novel, Ms. Keller will do just fine.
Her recently published "Comfort Woman" (Viking) illuminates the complicated relationship between Akiko, a Korean immigrant haunted by her enslavement in a World War II sex camp, and her daughter Beccah, who's trying desperately to cobble together a straightforward, unhyphenated American identity. The two live in polyglot Hawaii, where the Korean-American Ms. Keller also makes her home.
But the 31-year-old writer emphasizes that "Comfort Woman," which takes its title from the euphemism the Japanese army gave to its sex slaves, is not autobiographical.
Ms. Keller, who emigrated to the United States from Seoul, South Korea, at age 3, first learned of the Japanese military's so-called "recreation centers" in 1993, when she heard survivor Keum Ja Hwang lecture at the University of Hawaii.
"I felt like the story chose me," said Ms. Keller, sipping iced tea in the corner booth of a midtown Manhattan coffee shop. "I was just so deeply moved by her experience, I turned to the person next to me and said, 'You've got to write about this! ... Somebody's got to write about this.' I didn't think it was going to be me."
But when Ms. Keller, then a short-story writer and part-time University of Hawaii English teacher, began dreaming about Ms. Keum's experience, her reticence quickly vanished.
"I started having dreams about war and camps. And one of the only ways I could exorcise it from my dreams was to write it down," she said. "I felt at times I was possessed by this story."
Within days, Ms. Keller says, she had pounded out a draft of a short story. After a little prodding from friends, she decided to expand it into a novel.
But with an infant daughter -- Tae, now 3 -- at home, it wasn't always easy.
"I would get up for her midnight feeding or her 2 o'clock feeding, and then stay awake and write until the next feeding or until morning," Ms. Keller recalls. "I don't know how I did it."
Motherhood had a powerful effect on her writing. Despite its political overtones, "Comfort Woman" is fundamentally the story of a mother and daughter struggling to connect.
While the shadow of Akiko's wartime ordeal pervades the novel, descriptions of life in the comfort camps fill just a few pages. What's more important, to Ms. Keller's mind, are the ways in which the harrowing experience lives on, shattering Akiko's psyche and shaping her relationships with others, particularly her late-in-life daughter.
"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," Beccah recalls in the book. "It was as if the mother I knew turned off, checked out, and someone else came to rent the space."
Akiko often retreats to a tortured realm of spirits and superstition, dancing maniacally in the cramped apartment she shares with her daughter and burning all Beccah's red clothes to ward off death.
Beccah later remembers a childhood spent "rocking my mother, cradling her head and upper body in my lap ... when she cried out for my father, for Saja the Death Soldier, for the spirits that teased her with their cacklings, for anyone who cared, to kill her."
Although her years in the comfort camps left her fighting a lifelong battle against madness, Akiko never tells Beccah what she endured. Nor has she revealed to anyone -- even her late husband -- her real, Korean name, Soon Hyo, stolen when she was forced into prostitution.
Her shame, it seems, is too great, and the memories too awful. As "Comfort Woman" unfolds, in alternating chapters narrated by Akiko and Beccah, the reader slowly learns why.
"Whenever I stopped for a beat, for a breath, I heard men laughing and betting on how many men one comfort woman could service," Akiko recalls after her escape from the camp. "I heard the counting reach 124 before I could not bear to hear one more number."
Since its release in April, "Comfort Woman" has dazzled reviewers, who are tossing around phrases like "phenomenal debut" and "lyrical and haunting" and comparing Ms. Keller's focus on immigrant mothers and daughters to that of "The Joy Luck Club" author Amy Tan.
All the fuss has turned Ms. Keller's low-key life upside down.
But she says her new circumstances won't change who she is.
"My real life is my daughter, my husband, my friends, my community at home," she says with a wistful smile, longing for the gentle Hawaiian sun as she gazes at the gray Manhattan landscape. "I really know where my center is."
Beccah: "My mother chanted and swayed until she fell into a trance. Then she got up and, eyes sealed, danced through the apartment: on the sofa bed, around the black-lacquered coffee table, over dining room chairs, around me. And as she danced, my mother touched our possessions, feeling -- she later explained -- for the red. My mother held her hands in front of her, and like divining rods, they swung toward the color of blood. ... Clawing through the bedroom closets and drawers, she collected everything red, from T-shirts and running shorts to a library copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' to the bag of Red Hots I bought with my own money and stashed in my sock drawer ... Red Disaster, the way my mother explained it, was like the bacteria we had learned about in health class: invisible and everywhere in the air around us ... contagious and sometimes deadly. Burning the red from our apartment was my mother's version of washing my hands."
Beccah's mother, Akiko: One victim of forced prostitution "denounced the soldiers, yelling at them to stop their invasion of her country and her body. ... 'I am Korea, I am a woman, I am alive. I am seventeen, I had a family just like you do, I am a daughter, I am a sister.' ... Just before daybreak, they took her out of her stall and into the woods, where we couldn't hear her anymore. ... A lesson, they told the rest of us, warning us into silence."
Beccah: "To ensure my safe passage through the critical year of the fire snake, my mother decided to meet me after school one day in order to purify the campus. Taking the same route as the morning bus, my mother walked and chanted her way from The Shacks to Ala Wai Elementary. Every few yards, she dipped into her shoulder bag and threw out handfuls of barley and rice -- scrap offerings to lure the wandering dead and noxious influences away from the path I took to and from home every day. ... When I first saw the frail, wild-haired lady in pajamas throwing handfuls of pebbles into the crowd, I did not realize she was my mother. Only when she raised her arms into the air and pivoted toward me for a moment ... did I recognize her. I wanted to scream, to tell the kids to shut their mouths and go to hell. ... I wanted to help my mother, shield her from the children's sharp-toothed barbs, and take her home. And yet I didn't want to. Because for the first time, as I watched and listened to the children taunting my mother, using their tongues to mangle what she said into what they heard, I saw and heard what they did. And I was ashamed."
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