Silence in History and Memory: Narrating the Comfort Woman

This article discusses the publication of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) in the late 20th century United States. Situated in the intersection of history and memory, the novel reflects ways in which historically silenced traumas are articulated and reified in the form of fiction. By tracing the background of the comfort women issue, from the period of the Second World War to the late 20th century, this article argues that the elimination of the subject in official or (inter)-national historical discourses reveals ideological contradictions of so-called “universal” history. Rather than characterizing Comfort Woman as a literature solely interrogating Japan’s colonial past and crimes committed against Asian civilians during W.W.II, this article looks at its contextual relevance to the trilateral historiography of Japan, Korea, and the U.S. that evolved in the midst of Cold War politics.

This article examines some of the narrative strategies Keller deploys in addressing the question of political and historical unconsciousness in Comfort Woman. For instance, her use of minority discourse as a trope of counter-memory provides a complex, yet compelling reading of the comfort women issue. By portraying Akiko — a former comfort woman — as a post-war Asian immigrant in the U.S., the novel indirectly suggests that U.S. involvement in Asia throughout the Cold War has altered and complicated some of the unhistoricized crises that occurred around W.W.II. At the same time, by displacing Akiko from Japanese and Korean nation-space, the novel also critiques the exclusive and selective construction of national historiography. This refers to contemporary Japan’s unwillingness to confront her own fascist past and (post)-colonial Korea’s nationalist — oftentimes masculinist — formulation of history that marginalizes issues like comfort women. Minority discourse, in this case, strategically functions as counter-memory by emphasizing the contradictory position of personal memory in (trans)-national history.