Echoes of War. Postmemory and the Haunting of the Past in Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997)

Abstract

Linda Hutcheon’s critical response offers contemporary authors an opportunity to reimagine history through the postmodern concept of historiographic metafiction, which explores the past as not one original truth but as “plural truths” (Hutcheon 1998: 109) that can be reinterpreted. Consequently, this approach enables marginalised voices, those often omitted from official record, to reclaim their narrative authority in order to represent their lived experiences. Building on this foundation, scholars use Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory so as to counteract official and exclusionary versions of the past by examining how one generation transmits history and memory to the next, as it reflects on how memory functions as a mechanism for the survival of cultural material.

These ideas converge in Nora Okja Keller’s novel Comfort Woman (1997), which centres on the story of a former Korean woman, Akiko, forced into sexual slavery through the Japanese Occupation in Korea, her country’s intervention in the Pacific War. Through an intergenerational dialogue, Keller does not only offer the fragmented history of Akiko, but also the perspective of her daughter, Beccah, who inherits her mother’s cryptic and disorienting memories that shape her personality, her life, and her own trauma. The main objective of this article, hence, will focus on the historical representation of a war-time period from a memory that is damaged and abused, while also emphasizing the role of the mother-daughter relationship. Moreover, this research will also accentuate the importance of absenteeism, silence, and cryptic phantoms as a metaphoric representation for repression and resistance.