An excellent novel. (Review by Margaret von
Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
The issue of “comfort women”, kidnapped by
Japanese forces from Korea and China and forced into prostitution for the use
of their soldiers is one that has simmered shamefully along since the end of
the Second World War. Neither the Japanese nor the Korean governments have
shown sufficient willingness to confront the issue, let alone insist on a
genuine apology or reparations from the Japanese side. It has taken
determination by the surviving women themselves – now very few – and other
activists to drag this horrible episode into the light. They erected a bronze
statue of a comfort woman, the Statue of Peace, in Seoul opposite the Japanese
embassy: the Japanese demand its removal as the precursor to any kind of
admission or apology.
Mary Lynn Bracht, a Korean-American, has
taken the subject of comfort women for her very impressive debut novel, White Chrysanthemum. The politics and
history of Japan, Korea, China, Manchuria and Mongolia are little known in the
West, and make a fascinating and elegantly illuminated backdrop for the stories
of two sisters, Hana and Emi. They live on the island of Jeju off the southern
tip of the Korean peninsula and are the daughters of a haenyeo, one of the
women who dive for fish and crustaceans. Even under Japanese occupation, it was
a powerful, matriarchal society, now sadly reduced to little more than a
tourist attraction.
Bracht’s novel is told in alternating
chapters by Hana and Emi. Hana’s are set in 1943, the year in which, as a young
woman diver, she rushed out of the sea in an effort to save her little sister
from a Japanese soldier she saw approaching. She did save Emi, but was herself
taken captive and removed to a life of abuse and rape at a military brothel in
Mongolia. Emi’s story is set in 2011 when she is an elderly woman, consumed by
guilt that her sister vanished while protecting her and still desperately
trying to find her, or at least discover where she went and what was her fate.
Perhaps Bracht is guilty of striving a
little too hard for a sense of closure, if not exactly a happy ending to a
story that ended badly for the estimated two hundred thousand women taken into
slavery and for those left behind, but this is fiction and in White Chrysanthemum, she has created two
powerful and unforgettable characters. And shone a spotlight not only onto an
episode that should never be forgotten but onto the plight of women and girls
in all theatres of war. An excellent novel.
White
Chrysanthemum is published by Chatto & Windus. -
Margaret von Klemperer
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