The Stories That Have Not Been Told: Comfort Women, Nora Okja Keller’s Novels and the Subaltern’s Performance of History

The Stories That Have Not Been Told: Comfort Women, Nora Okja Keller’s Novels and the Subaltern’s Performance of History

In Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1998), the young heroine of the novel, Beccah, gets to know the life of her Korean mother, Akiko, a former Japanese sex slave (“comfort woman”), and her other female ancestors, whose spirits often haunt Akiko’s body. This paper analyzes the subalternity of the former Korean comfort women under Japanese imperialism and explores the (im)possibility of their enunciation from various postcolonial theoretical perspectives. The first part of this paper problematizes the oppressive ideological mechanisms that frustrated victimized women’s attempts to speak out, such as Japanese imperialism and patriarchal and anti-colonial nationalist discourses in Korea. The second part of this paper explores how Beccah’s use of Korean and her metonymic understanding of Akiko’s unedited testimony is an on-going practice, constantly reweaving different layers of meaning and historical memories, and eventually rewriting the colonizer’s versions of the victimized women’s lives, beyond a strict sense of national and cultural boundaries.