One Left: A Novel Read online

  One Left

  One Left

  A Novel

  Kim Soom

  Translated by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

  Foreword by Bonnie Oh

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

  Seattle

  One Left is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).

  한명 (One left)

  by Kim Soom

  First published in 2016 by Hyundae Munhak Co., Ltd., Korea

  © Kim Soom

  All rights reserved

  English-language edition © 2020 by the University of Washington Press

  Translation © 2020 by Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

  This English-language edition was published by arrangement with the University of Washington Press through HAN Agency Co., Korea.

  Design by Katrina Noble

  Composed in Arno Pro, typeface designed by Robert Slimbach

  24 23 22 21 205 4 3 2 1

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS

  uwapress.uw.edu

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006819

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020006820

  ISBN 978-0-295-74765-1 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-295-74766-8 (paperback),

  ISBN 978-0-295-74767-5 (ebook)

  Cover illustration: Copsychus saularis, Plate 27, Oriental magpie-robin, watercolor by Margaret Bushby Lascelles Cockburn from her Neilgherry Birds and Miscellaneous (1858). Natural History Museum, London, UK. Bridgeman Images.

  Frontispiece: Sonyŏ sang (Statue of a girl), created by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung. Photo courtesy of Choi Ho Shik.

  The paper used in this publication is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48–1984.∞

  FOREWORD

  Bonnie Oh

  The story, One Left, takes place in some future time when there are no known surviving comfort women except for a hidden one. Hence the title of the novel, One Left. The one left is referred to only as “she.”

  She is 93 years old and lives alone with a cat, named Nabi (butter-fly), in a dilapidated house on a nearly abandoned narrow street, 15-bŏnji (15th Street). The alley has neither trees nor potted plants, only empty houses, ready to be torn down for redevelopment. One morning she turns on her TV as she starts her morning chores, folding the faded blanket and wiping the warped floors, and she hears that the last of the surviving comfort women is about to die. She mutters, “And then there’s me!” She is about to step down into the yard when she sees a dead magpie next to her shoes, almost hidden, obviously Nabi’s offering to her to please her. She doesn’t like Nabi doing that and cringes. The lifeless bird transports her to her childhood home. Her ears are ringing with her mom’s voice, crying and pleading with her younger siblings to go find their oldest sister because the magpie is howling and her firstborn has not returned from the river.

  She was 13 and was gathering marsh snails on the riverbank. She was grabbed by men, thrown into a truck that sped away and then stopped at Taegu to load more girls, and was put on a train that raced in what appeared to be a northerly direction—seemingly indefinitely. After several days, disheveled and dirty, the girls boarded an open-back truck and were delivered to a building encircled by barbed-wire fence. It was May but felt like winter. It was Manchuria, which was a Japanese puppet state, little different from a colony. When she fell to the ground, six marsh snails were still squirming in her hand. That was more than seventy years ago, but she still feels the snails tickling her palm. On the train, she met other girls of similar age. All thought, claimed, or imagined they were headed for some place nice, where they could earn money to send home: Kunja going to a thread factory; Hanok, a couple of years older, to a needle factory; Aesun to someplace wonderful . . .

  Nabi’s yowling brings her back to reality. But everything she sees or touches reminds her of the incidents and friends at the comfort station. She remembers the Japanese officer who struck a match to Haegŭm’s pubic hair, the soldier who stabbed Kisuk in the thigh, the screams and pleas of girls begging for their lives. To her, the past and present are merged, with the past being more vivid. She murmurs and repeats, in order not to forget, their names as they come to mind: Kisuk ŏnni,1 Hanok ŏnni, Hunam ŏnni, Haegŭm . . . Kŭmbok ŏnni, Suok ŏnni, Punsŏn . . . Aesun, Tongsuk ŏnni, Yŏnsun, Pongae, Sŏksun ŏnni. . . . The girl sitting next to her on the train was Kisuk ŏnni. Sundŏk, Hyangsuk, Myŏngsuk ŏnni, Kunja, Pokcha ŏnni, T’anshil, Changshil ŏnni, Yŏngsun, Miok ŏnni. . . . And then there were Japanese names: Umeko, Kiyoko, Fumiko, Eiko, Kinoe, Asako . . . , randomly given by the station manager and by soldiers after they were finished with business. She herself had a dozen Japanese names and more than one Korean name. But her real name? She hasn’t heard it in a long, long time.

  One Left is the first Korean novel devoted exclusively to the subject of the comfort women. As the number of surviving victims dwindled, Kim Soom became concerned that the true details and extent of their horrific experiences would be lost—once all of them died. By the time the novel was published in 2016, a quarter century had elapsed since Kim Haksun had shocked the world by disclosing that she had been a comfort woman. Although the comfort women issue had immediately become an energetic national movement, the Korean public became weary of it due to the prolonged, unsuccessful effort of demanding that Japan take responsibility. The author felt urgently that the comfort women’s real, excruciatingly painful experiences might be forgotten unless depicted in a personal narrative.

  Kim Soom’s novel rebuts denials of the validity of the comfort women’s claims by synthesizing an intense personal story with pain-staking historical research. For the author, a novel became a fitting form to describe the true nature and scope of the cruelties these victims endured. Their accounts were often dismissed as inconceivable and too brutal to be real. In fact, a basis of Japanese denial is that “Japanese people could not possibly have done it.” It was not enough to describe in plain text that these young women were raped thirty to forty times a day. Kim Soom needed to graphically illustrate what happened to the young women’s private parts after being raped so many times and what happened to the young women when they could not satisfy the soldiers’ relentless demands: their swollen vaginas were slid open with swords, were pierced with nails or with heated metal rods.

  One Left is not born purely of the author’s creative imagination but is based on her exhaustive research and careful reading of the comfort women’s testimonies. To render credibility, Kim Soom appends hundreds of endnotes, commenting on virtually every episode and name in a book of just 268 pages in the Korean-language version. By exposing what happened to these women in extreme detail, Kim transcends testimonies and historical records to capture the gut-wrenching suffering of the victims.

  The term comfort women is a euphemism for sex slaves of the Imperial Japanese military during World War II, or the Pacific War, in Asia from 1931 to 1945. An estimated two hundred thousand 2 young women and girls were “recruited” in a variety of ways—deception, coercion, and abduction—and confined in “comfort stations” in China, Manchuria, and other Pacific-region countries, including Australia. The ages of the kidnapped girls ranged from as young as 11 to 25 or older. Of those, 80 percent were Koreans, because Korea�
��the entire peninsula—was then Japan’s colony, and Japanese men supposedly preferred Korean women to those of other nationalities. Most were from destitute rural areas, especially from Kyŏngsang Province. Poverty was endemic in colonial Korea, contrary to recent Japanese claims that Japan had developed the Korean economy and later laid the foundation for the South Korean economic “miracle on the Han.”

  These young women and girls were raped by tens of Japanese soldiers a day. Soldiers in the afternoons and the officers in the evenings lined up in queues outside the girls’ stalls, which were divided by fabric or plywood panels. The slightest insubordination resulted in severe punishments, beatings, deprivation of food and medicines, isolation. When they became pregnant, their babies were taken and their uteruses taken out altogether. Women who could not be cured of gonorrhea or syphilis were removed from the site and never seen again.

  At the war’s end many were slaughtered on site or thrown from aboard ships on return trips to their home countries3—to eradicate the evidence. Only twenty thousand survived. Some returned to their native lands; others remained where they were, hiding, not knowing for years that Japan had been defeated. Many who reached their home countries led hidden lives, eking out a living working various service jobs. Few married and fewer could bear children. The few who did saw their children suffer serious health problems, from brain diseases, to muscular problems, to early death due to the mothers’ previous venereal disease infections.

  For decades these women remained silent as the world swept history under the rug. The Japanese government concealed it to the best of its ability. In the Cold War era, Japan was geographically and ideologically on the front line of the anti-Communist struggle, and the United States coddled its former enemy for fear of offending it. The US even preserved Japan’s Imperial system despite the fact that Emperor Hirohito had been directly involved in all military activities, including establishment of the comfort women system. Gen. Douglas MacArthur reneged on his own early judgment and released war criminals, including Kishi Nobusuke, the maternal grandfather of the current right-wing Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe.

  In 1987 the decades-long military dictatorship in Korea came to an end, ushering in the minjung, or “popular democracy.” Two scholars, Yoon Chung-ok of Korea and Yoshimi Yoshiaki of Japan,4 unearthed materials on comfort women and published their work. Finally, the decades-old Cold War and the Soviet Union ended within the span of two years, 1989–91. These events converged to create an atmosphere favorable for supporters of comfort women to persuade Kim Haksun to break the silence on August 14, 1991. She opened the floodgates, sending a tidal wave across the globe. One former comfort woman after another appeared, and a total of 238 registered with the South Korean government. Later in the fall, the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance for the Issues of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (formerly, the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan) was established. In the following year, Dongwoo Lee Hahm, then a World Bank employee, founded the Washington Coalition for Comfort Women Issues (WCCW) in the United States.

  Since 1992, the comfort women movement has mounted efforts to build a support system for the victims, establishing places of residence and providing government stipends. Activists have also brought suits against Japan (all of them lost) and have presented demands to the Japanese government: to acknowledge the existence of and official involvement in the system and to offer an official apology and compensation. Other related activities have emerged: weekly noontime demonstrations (held on Wednesdays), running for nearly three decades, in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul; academic conferences and symposiums across the United States and abroad; and statues and memorials erected to honor the comfort women. There are more than ten in the United States and several others across the globe, including in Germany, Australia, China, the Philippines, and South Korea. The United Nations has declared that crimes against comfort women are crimes against humanity and a violation of human rights, and it has passed resolutions calling for Japan to meet the victims’ demands.

  Also impressive is the growth and expansion of interest in the subject in academia. After the first academic conference in 1996 at Georgetown University,5 countless such gatherings have been held all over the world. A significant number of young scholars are pursuing graduate studies on the subject.6

  After half-hearted cooperation and a few personal apologies from individual prime ministers in the early 1990s, Japan is now denying nearly all aspects of the issue and calling comfort women professional prostitutes. The Japanese government has spent more than half a billion dollars to incentivize its overseas residents and diplomats to engage in obstructionist activities.

  In December 2015 the South Korean government reached an oral, irreversible agreement with the Japanese government. The victims, supporters, and a majority of the Korean public condemned the accord and refused to recognize it. The relationship between Korea and Japan is at its worst in years, with no prospect for an easy or quick resolution.

  She, the last one, is back at the house, which is closer to demolition. Nearly half of the empty houses on 15-bŏnji have been razed. After a fitful night of sleep, she turns on the TV. She hears that the last of the 238 registered has not yet died but is barely hanging on, hooked up to a respirator and trying to speak, “I’m Yun Kŭmshil.” Haltingly and out of breath, the dying woman continues, “I can’t allow myself to die—not with no one after me to speak . . .”

  Wiping tears that have welled up, she, the silent and hidden one, makes a decision. She is going to see the last one—to assure herself that she’s still here and that she’ll tell it all.

  As she boards the minibus dressed in her best pink cardigan, a name flutters onto her tongue: P’unggil. It is her name—her real name that she had forgotten.

  She is P’unggil, 13 years old, and she is the one left.

  BONNIE OH was born and raised in South Korea. She is emerita distinguished professor of Korean studies at Georgetown University, where she served as director of the women’s studies program. She has published extensively on comfort women during World War II, the American military government in Korea, as well as on nationalism and feminism in Korea.

  NOTES

  Ŏnni means “older sister” in an honorable way, not necessarily meaning related.

  After publication of Chinese Comfort Women by Peipei Qiu of Vassar (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), the estimate doubled to four hundred thousand because the previously closed and vast country of China was opened to research.

  Tomiyama Taeko, “At the Bottom of the Pacific,” in Silenced by History (Tokyo: Gendai Kikaushitsu, 1995), 44.

  Yoshimi Yoshiaki is a professor of Japanese modern history at Chuo University in Tokyo. He is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility and author of Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  Margaret Stetz and I were co-conveners. The proceedings from this conference and additional material were edited and published five years after the meeting as Legacies of Comfort Women of World War II (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001). It turned out to be the first academic book on comfort women.

  Between 1995 and 2005, forty-six PhD dissertations were written on the topic. See Frank Joseph Shulman, chapter 8 in Comfort Women: A Movement for Justice and Women’s Rights in the United States (forthcoming).

  Between 1995 and 2005, forty-six PhD dissertations were written on the topic. See Frank Joseph Shulman, chapter 8 in Comfort Women: A Movement for Justice and Women’s Rights in the United States (forthcoming).

  Margaret Stetz and I were co-conveners. The proceedings from this conference and additional material were edited and published five years after the meeting as Legacies of Comfort Women of World War II (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001). It turned out to be the first academic book on comfort women.

  Yoshimi Yoshiaki is a professor of Japanese mode
rn history at Chuo University in Tokyo. He is a founding member of the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility and author of Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military during World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).

  Tomiyama Taeko, “At the Bottom of the Pacific,” in Silenced by History (Tokyo: Gendai Kikaushitsu, 1995), 44.

  After publication of Chinese Comfort Women by Peipei Qiu of Vassar (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014), the estimate doubled to four hundred thousand because the previously closed and vast country of China was opened to research.

  Ŏnni means “older sister” in an honorable way, not necessarily meaning related.

  One Left

  PROLOGUE

  SHE PICKS UP a seed and eyes it intently until she can almost see the tiny thing sucking her up. Once inside the pore-sized seed, she will never be found.

  But maybe the gods too would consider me dirty?

  She wonders what expression God would wear if He were to look down on her just then. Would He frown? Glower? Shrug? Would He look on me with pity? Does God have a face anyway? And does it get old like ours?

  Before she turned 14, her life was over, she had no future.

  She’s seized by a sudden urge to disgorge all.

  I want to tell it, then die.

  1

  NOW THERE’S ONLY one left. Yesterday there were two, but one of them passed away overnight.

  She hears this from the television as she’s folding her blanket, and her fingers go numb. Wasn’t it just a month ago that one of the last three passed? The synthetic blanket used to be the color of a tangerine, but now it’s faded to apricot.