Princess Pari in Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman

When she attended a human rights symposium in 1993, Nora Okja Keller listened to the testimony of Keum Ju Hwang and learned the truth of Japanese military sex slavery in World War II. Keller was so haunted by the graphic images of the former military comfort woman's horrible experience that her dreams were filled with "images of war and women, of blood and birth." She found that the only way to "exorcise these images was through writing."¹ Keller's reminiscence of her peculiar experience is shamanistic in its images and implications: she seems to have been possessed by the spirits of comfort women, who urged her to bear witness to their military sex slavery in writing. In an interview with the novelist, Martha Cinader astutely asked Keller whether she had seen herself "as a shaman" while writing Comfort Woman. Keller's answer was quite interesting: "I really felt that sometimes I entered a type of trance, that I was really connected to something higher [than] myself . . . . I was almost like a medium."² No wonder Keller transforms a former comfort woman, Soon Hyo, into a shaman in her fiction and, as Kathleen Brogan observes, "the authorial haunting finds reflection in the novel's double story of haunting."³

Heinz Insu Fenkl regards Soon Hyo's "shamanic transformation" as "unexpected" in his review of Comfort Woman.⁴ But Keller's transformation of her protagonist is not so arbitrary and incongruous as it seems. It is commonly believed that "spirits in search of human victims to possess are particularly attracted by those whose souls have been ‘fractured' . . . by personal tragedies or exploitations others have caused them to suffer."⁵ A former comfort woman whose life was brutally shattered by her horrendous experience and trauma might have easily attracted the attention of spirits looking for their victims. In fact, shamanism is one of the two "self-curative professions" that some Korean survivors of military sexual slavery have taken up in order to deal with their psychological scars.⁶ Dai Sil Kim-Gibson reported three cases of former comfort women who had become shamans after their return to Korea, and one former military sex slave, Jok Gan Bae, clearly ascribed her shamanhood to her experience as a comfort woman.⁷

What is really unique in Keller's Comfort Woman is less the transformation of a former military sex slave into a shaman than the portrayal of a former comfort woman as Princess Pari. Princess Pari is the prominent female deity in the fundamentally women-centered Korean shamanism. The Princess is the ur-shaman who leads the spirit of the dead to the other world in a shamanistic rite. In her literary requiem for the spirits of comfort women, Keller appropriately represents Soon Hyo and her daughter, Beccah, as Princess Pari in order to remember the victims of Japanese military sex slavery and to guide the spirits of comfort women to the next world. Keller not only portrays her protagonists as Princess Pari but also manipulates Pari Kongju (Princess Pari), the shamanistic narrative about Princess Pari, with an interventionist and revisionist agenda to critique Korean patriarchy, agnation, androcentrism, and misogyny as well as Japanese patriarchy, militarism, colonialism, ethnocentrism, and the emperor system. At the same time, the Korean American novelist appropriates the Korean shamanistic myth ultimately to endow her main characters, a Korean immigrant woman and her biracial daughter, with a psychological anchor and cultural agency in their struggles against American patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

Thus Princess Pari is one of the most significant motifs in Keller's shamanistic reconfiguration of comfort women.⁸ But Keller scholars have not addressed the significance of the shamanistic deity properly in their studies of Comfort Woman. If Princess Pari is mentioned at all in Keller criticism, the scholars have not developed the motif of Princess Pari adequately. Some critics even discuss the myth...