2022-02-10

Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller Summary

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Akiko Bradley

Born Soon Hyo, Akiko is Becca's mother and a native-born Korean. She's a strong woman who has survived the horrors of her slavery during WWII in order to raise her daughter in a healthier life. After losing both parents at a young age, she was sold by her sister to the Japanese. They use her as a sex slave in one of their army recreation camps for the duration of the war. She barely survives the experience but manages to escape and make her own way in the world. She marries a man named Bradley in order to escape from Asia. He takes her to Hawaii where she discovers that she's pregnant from her time in the camp. Over the years she is a faithful wife to Bradley, but she doesn't love him. After her experiences she cannot bring herself to be emotionally intimate with anybody except her daughter and briefly at that. She adamantly believes that she can communicate with the spirit world and works as a medium at a local cafe on the Big Island. As an avid spiritualist, she often goes into trances and indulges in erratic behavior, doubtless to cope with her trauma. She cursed her husband, wishing him dead, and takes credit for his eventual passing.


Beccah Bradley

Beccah has grown up a pretty happy, normal kid in Hawaii. She's often resented her mother for behaving so strangely and professing spiritualism, blaming her for not supporting her emotionally. At her mother's deathbed, she learns the truth about Akiko's past and about her father's death. Of course she's stunned by the news, but she possesses her mother's fortitude to survive. She makes peace with Akiko, forgiving her for past wrongs. She decides to spread her mom's story in order to bring healing to other women who share her experiences and to shed light upon the travesties committed by the Japanese during the war. She's proud of her heritage and most importantly of her mother's bravery in surviving those experiences.


Mr. Bradley

He's an American who decides to take a wife back to Hawaii with him after the war. A cold, stern man, he receives Akiko's silence as demure submission. He's a harsh man to live with, often making Akiko regrets her decision to marry him. Although she is not his child, he raises Beccah like his daughter, but he's still a rather absent father.


The Minister

He and his family take in Akiko after she escapes from the camp. He's eager to place her in a home for adoption, but Akiko knows that the Japanese will likely enslave her as a house servant. When she objects, he suggests she marry this man, Bradley, to which she silently agrees.


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Comfort Woman Themes

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Spiritualism as an Outlet for Trauma

Akiko has experienced so much trauma in her life that it's a miracle she can still function. As Beccah recalls, she has often resented her mom for being emotionally unavailable during her childhood. Akiko found it impossible to be intimate and vulnerable after her time in the camp, having long ago abandoned her sense of personal identity and value. In order to cope with her trauma she often retreats into her spiritualist practices. They bring her peace and a sense of meaning. In fact she works as a psychic/medium at a local cafe, performing seances and trances for people. She finds comfort in her work, believing that all of her suffering has purchased for her a greater understanding and connection to the spirit world.
Abuse

Akiko's life has been one long train of abuse to which she never was given a choice. When she's just a child, she's sold into slavery to the Japanese by her older sister. She's too young to resist or even comprehend what's about to happen to her. Living in a Japanese military recreation camp, she is used as a prostitute for the duration of the war. Every day she services hundreds of filthy, vile men who infect her with diseases, rape her, and beat her. As the years go by, she gradually gives up. She claims that her spirit died in that camp and only her body lives on today. In order to escape Japan, she marries an American named Bradley. Broken in spirit, she refuses to talk to him most of the time. He uses her silence as an excuse to get whatever she wants from him. Eventually she wishes he was dead, and he does die. This long train of abuse has caused Akiko no end of trouble. Although she is a free woman in a safe place, she leads a solitary and painful life having kept her past a secret for so many years before her death.
Heritage

Beccah has grown up avidly listening to her mother talk about her native Korean culture. She's proud to be Asian American, often wishing she knew more about her heritage. When Akiko tells her daughter about her time during the war, she gives Beccah the final key to understanding her identity; Beccah is the product of her mother's time in the camp. She now understands how important these stories are, not just to her but to everyone. She's a part of something greater than herself. Keller does an excellent job portraying the significance of this moment shared between mother and daughter. While Akiko was powerless to help her situation, her daughter is now able to spread the truth and bring some semblance of justice to her. If nothing else, the two now better understand one another, and Beccah is given an opportunity to participate in her mother's legacy. All of this -- the good parts and the bad -- are a part of her heritage and of her identity.
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Quotes
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Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

"My mother was like a cat who could never catch the tail of happiness because she never stopped chasing it."

Beccah
Beccah recalls how her mother behaved erratically throughout her childhood. Understanding that Akiko was unhappy, Beccah attributed it to her inability to remain satisfied for very long. In truth Akiko is suffering from acute PTSD from her past trauma. Comparing her to a cat, Beccah most likely is referring to how distant and nervous her mother behaved. Cats are known to be moody, reserved, and easily frightened, all of which are natural responses to trauma.

"I was twelve when I was murdered, fourteen when I looked into the Yalu River and, finding no face looking back at me, knew that I was dead. I wanted to let the Yalu's currents carry my body to where it might find my spirit again, but the Japanese soldiers hurried me across the bridge before I could jump.”

Akiko
Akiko recalls being sold to the Japanese when she's twelve. She considers that the day her soul died. From that point on, she was just a body to be used by other people. Longing for death, she took every opportunity to escape from the camp including attempting suicide, but she was kept under close supervision at all times.

"The baby I could keep came when I was already dead."

Akiko
When Akiko becomes pregnant in the camp, she is forcibly given an abortion. They won't allow her to keep a child in such an environment which would decrease her usefulness and attractiveness. After she's free, she finds out that she's pregnant again, this time with Beccah. She keeps the second baby, but she is not the same person as before. This time she feels like a walking body with no soul.


"I wanted to help my mother, shield her from the children's sharp-toothed barbs. . . 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."

Beccah
Beccah is embarrassed by her mother's spiritualism because she doesn't understand it. For the longest time, she thought her mom was weak and needed to be defended when she got it into her head to do something bizarre in the name of the spirits. This time, however, she believes the kids. She too thinks her mom is kind of crazy.



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Comfort Woman Symbols, Allegory and Motifs

The clairvoyant mother

At first the reader meets the mother of the novel and thinks, oh, this must be the Comfort Woman from the title, a reference no doubt to her role in Beccah's life. Beccah certainly suggests this interpretation in her own point of view, until the reader and Beccah simultaneously learn a difficult and life-changing secret about Beccah's mother Akiko. The title of the novel is not in fact a reference to motherhood; it is simultaneously a bitter pet name that Akiko was forced to wear during a season of intense sex slavery to the Japanese during WWII. By the end of the book, the mother's actively clairvoyant behavior is explained by the trauma she used spiritual psychology to manage. Often the trauma is unmanageable, which explains the mother's occasional fugue states.

Prostitution as a maternal symbol

Suddenly, the reader is asked to reinterpret Beccah's self in light of her ancestral news. What happens to her mother could have happened to her, she knows. This is the value of the symbolism as well; by forcing to make Beccah imagine her mother as a sex slave, her injustice is fully awakened. She now sees the human evil of sex trafficking and sex slavery with the empathy and love she feels toward her own mother. The symbolism also goes toward a more general point; the mother symbolizes all women who are the victims of sexual abuse.

Name change and symbolism

It is highly symbolic that Akiko kept her name, even though it was a dehumanizing way of reducing her sense of self. Why would Akiko not switch her name back to Soon Hyo? That symbolically points to the permanent ways that sexual abuse changed Akiko's sense of self and identity. The name change ends up being a convenient reminder of her grief and abuse. She identifies with the things that have happened with her more than she identifies to the feelings she had before. That makes Beccah understand her own self in a surprising light.


The forced abortion

The abuse has a symbolic center; Akiko is made to be pregnant by what was essentially rape, but then to make matters worse, the natural course of animal life is refused to Akiko. Against her will, she is aborted of the fetus in a medically heinous way that leaves her with a life of chronic health issues. She is physically damaged in a permanent way by the cruel role she was forced to play. They treated her like livestock whose main value was for sexual abuse. Beccah's mother's life was defined by difficulties with conception and motherhood, a horrific injustice.

The question of patricide

Beccah is radically transformed by the story of her mother. Now she is removed from the innocence of thinking her mother is just a loony clairvoyant type, and placed into the experienced understanding of her mother's suffering. In light of this, the original question of the novel becomes fascinating. The missing husband died, making both Beccah and Akiko pretty happy. The question is this: was Akiko able to summon enough magical power through her clairvoyance to entice "the gods" into killing her husband? She believes she is guilty, and that is good enough for some serious symbolic analysis.



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The taste of the food that had been left in the fridge

After returning home from school to find her mother dancing to some unknown music, Becca finds out that the food that had been left in the fridge was untouched. To prevent the food from going to waste, she eats it comparing its implicitly foul taste to sweat and hot air using a simile. The comparison enhances imagery: "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."

Reference to Akiko as a wild child raised by tigers

When the missionaries found Akiko, they try to speak to her in all manner of languages including Chinese, Japanese and even Korean to try and elicit a response from her. Realizing that she cannot speak to them, the missionaries compare her to a wild child raised by tigers with the ability to communicate with animals: "She is like the wild child raised by tigers, I heard them say to each other. Physically human but able to speak only in the language of animals."

Sold like one of the cows before and after me

The narrator uses a simile in which she compares herself to a cow in reference to the manner in which she was sold as dowry. This direct comparison sheds light on how the girl child was viewed in this society: "I was her dowry, sold like one of the cows before and after me."


Skewered from her vagina to her mouth

After the previous Akiko denounces the soldiers and asks them to stop invading her country as well as her body saying she is Korean, the soldiers take her before daybreak and bring her back later with her body stabbed and pricked. A simile is used to describe her appearance comparing it to a pig that is ready for roasting. This enhances imagery: "They brought her back skewered from her vagina to her mouth, like a pig ready for roasting."

The laughing of the Toots and her Entourage like howling dogs

After Beccah sings excruciatingly poorly, as she slinks off the stage, the Entourage and the Toots are reported to laugh and howl like dogs. The use of this particular simile enhances imagery and a conceptual understanding of the hysterical nature of the laugh: "As I slunk off the stage, I heard Toots and her Entourage laughing and howling like dogs."


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Comfort Woman Irony

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by people who wish to remain anonymous

The Irony of Akiko's Older Sister
Older siblings usually feel an instinct to look out for and protect their younger siblings. In Akiko's case, however, her older sister sold her into slavery the moment their parents died. She wanted the money for her dowry in order to provide for her own safety during troubling times.

The Irony of the "Comfort Women"
The Japanese named their war prostitutes "Comfort Women." Such naming is a sick joke because these women have no comfort at all -- to give or to receive. They're used like objects instead of treated like people. The euphemism seems wildly inappropriate, but it's difficult to expect otherwise from such an atrocious institution as sex slaves.

The Irony of Beccah's Birth
Akiko's first child is forcibly aborted during her time in the camp. She never recovers from the procedure either physically or emotionally. When she finds out that she's pregnant the second time in Hawaii, she nearly laughs at the irony. Now she no longer has any sense of personal identity or meaning to her life, believing her soul died in the camp. She wishes she had been allowed to keep the first child back when she was still a person who could mother it well.


The Irony of Spiritualism
Spiritualism, along with most spiritual and religious practices, tends to make people uncomfortable. This is why all the kids at Beccah's school ridicule her mom for calling on the spirits. For Akiko, however, her spiritual practices provide her with a sense of peace amidst the traumatic memories floating around in her mind.

The Irony of Bradley's Death
When Akiko tells Beccah that she wished for her husband's death making it happen, she scares the girl. Beccah remembers all the times she had been angry with her mom and wished she would die. She's worried that she is somehow responsible for her mom's death now because of those moments of anger. It's a coincidence that Beccah's situation with her mom so closely parallels how Akiko dealt with her husband's abuse.

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Comfort Woman Imagery


Motherhood

Akiko is a portrait of motherhood, and for symbolic purposes, she is also the only experience of motherhood that Beccah ever knows. To Beccah, her mother's aspects are helpful pictures of life in the feminine mode. Beccah notices that Akiko is incredibly instinctual and urgent, and also a little bit on the wacky side, socially speaking. Beccah is forced to endure serious embarrassment, confusion, and terror whenever her mother slips into insane fugue states; she seems possessed by spirits from hell, but her story is an insightful demonstration of how she was made that way by injustice.

Magic and spiritual insight

As noticed above, Beccah's life is suspiciously near to witchcraft and clairvoyant behavior. One crucial detail to remember in regards to this imagery is that Akiko says that she has magically seduced fate into killing her abusive husband as a favor to her and Beccah. Beccah instantly fears that maybe she has also doomed her mother, because Beccah also seriously hates her mother. When she learns about Akiko's life, she realizes that the spiritualism and divining have helped her mother deal with unimaginable trauma, pain, hopelessness, and injustice.

War and sexual slavery

The story Akiko tells of her life is as a martyr of earth's most nightmarish era in the past hundred years. She was sold to Japan by her own family and forced into sex slavery for the Japanese army who hated her with prejudice. She was hated for her gender and for her ethnicity, as well as for her role in society as an involuntary prostitutes. To appreciate what that was like for Beccah's sense of her mother's imagery, imagine learning such news about one's own family. The sorrow is inherited by Beccah, because in order to properly judge her mother, she must remember the years of intense sexual and physical abuse.


Trauma and suffering

Now that Beccah has learned her mother's truth, it is time for her and the reader to reassess the fragile minded mother. Is she weak or strong? Beccah thought she was weak, but she is strong. Beccah's own life and existence is literally proof of this, because Akiko, whose name and identity are both changed by intense seasons of acute trauma and physical and emotional suffering, goes on from even a botched abortion to continue living. Her life is a martyrdom of warfare and human evil, and she is properly judged only as a survivor of one of the earth's most intimate and extreme suffering.
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Comfort Woman Literary Elements


Genre
Fiction

Setting and Context
The book is set in Hawaii.

Narrator and Point of View
Third-person narrative


Tone and Mood
Sad, overwhelming, gloomy, buoyant

Protagonist and Antagonist
Beccah Bradley is the protagonist of the story.

Major Conflict
The main conflict is that Beccah hates her mother, Akiko, because she believes that she is the cause of his death.

Climax
The climax comes when Akiko shares her life secrets about her past with her daughter, Beccah. At last, Beccah understands why her mother behaved in particular ways, and she made peace with her.

Foreshadowing
Akiko's death foreshadowed Beccah's decision to come to terms with reality.

Understatement
Akiko's hatred towards her husband is understated. Akiko did not marry her husband because of love, but because she did not want to get enslaved any longer. Therefore, she never loved her husband, and she always wished him dead.


Allusions
The story alludes to the challenges the Korean women went through in the concentration camps, which left them traumatized for the rest of her life.

Imagery
The imagery of the concentration camps is evident as described by Akiko. In the Camps, women are sexually abused, and they do have the power to protect themselves. Akiko was the victim of sex slavery in the camp, and that is where she conceived Beccah from.

Paradox
The main paradox is that Beccah lived most of her life thinking Bradley was her biological father, which was not the case. The harsh reality is that Beccah was a product of rape when her mother was serving as a sex slave in the camps.

Parallelism
The live-in concentration camps for women parallel ordinary marriage life.

Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A

Personification
The concentration camps are personified as monsters that deprive women of their integrity and identity.
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