One Left: A Novel

by Kim Soom

  She was getting hungry by the time the truck arrived at the Taegu train station and let the girls out.

  She’s always regretted not trying to escape then and there, but even if she were to return to that time, she wouldn’t dare think of making a run for it. The men who had taken her away kept an eye on the girls, and the station was crawling with Japanese military police and soldiers. Besides, she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of this station she had never seen before.

  The girls clutched one another’s hands to avoid being set adrift by the wave of humanity. Most of them were 15 or 16, and they sported every possible clothing style. One girl wore a Japanese cardigan along with the common baggy pants, and another girl was dressed in a white silk chŏgori and a black silk ch’ima. She herself wore the funny-looking cropped pants and the black chŏgori of coarse cotton that she had thrown on before going out to the marsh.

  Dressed in a white ch’ima and chŏgori, her silky hair in a bun, holding to her chest a rooster in a wrapping cloth, an old woman stood not far from the girls, waiting for the train. The rooster stuck its head out through the wrapping cloth and jerked it left and right, showing its vivid crimson comb.

  When the train’s black snout came into sight far down the tracks, coughing up black plumes of smoke, her left hand formed a tight fist. Swept up in the flow, she and the other girls boarded the train, bound for God-knows-where. Her left hand held six snails, clutching them so tightly the shells dug into her palm.

  Bringing up the rear as he herded the girls onto the train was a lanky, fiftyish man with a horse face. The one holding her by the legs when she’d been tossed into the back of the truck. Back then at least, a 50-year-old man was practically a grandpa. His salt-and-pepper hair was unkempt and he wore a scruffy, oversize pair of pants beneath a white chŏgori. He turned out to be the man who distributed hardtack to the girls during the train trip.

  The compartment was flanked with pairs of seats that faced each other, each seat accommodating three girls. Pairs of Japanese soldiers paced the aisle. The train had originated in P’ohang, and four girls from there were on board.

  She could still feel the snails stirring in her hand when the train passed a place called Wŏnsan.

  She tried to stay awake, afraid the snails would slip through her fingers and she’d never see them again. She clung to a hazy belief that the snails would return her to the riverside of her home. And so she kept moistening them with her fingertip lest they dry up and die. But the smelly-sweet spit she brought from her mouth to the snails dried in no time.

  She’s hit with a sudden thought: How did she feel? When she heard the other woman had passed on and now she’s the only one left?

  Frightened and lonely like a boat adrift on the vast ocean? Would it help if she knows I’m left too? Even though I’m not letting the world know, shouldn’t I tell her I’m still here, that there’s one more left?

  But she has no idea where the last one is.

  She herself was a comfort woman for the Japanese soldiers, but she’s unknown to the world at large because she never went public and reported herself as such.

  It occurs to her that there have to be others out there like her, former comfort women who out of shame or embarrassment have never gone public. What did they ever do wrong?

  Suddenly confused, she looks about her room, wondering where she is. Her eyes settle on the mirror.

  Where could this be?

  It’s a question she must have asked herself hundreds of times during the train ride. Where am I? Until she got on the train in Taegu, the only world she knew lay within an hour’s walk of her home. She could vaguely tell the train was heading north. North, ever north—but why? It was a question she couldn’t voice.

  So when the other girls mentioned “Taejŏn” she assumed they were in Taejŏn—and “Pongch’ŏn” meant Pongch’ŏn—and “Ch’ŏngjin,” Ch’ŏngjin.

  She was all ears to the other girls’ whispering.

  “Are you going all the way to Manchuria?”

  “Yeah!”

  “We are too!”

  “I heard in Manchuria we can earn sackfuls of money.”

  To girls who had never strayed more than a few miles from home, Manchuria was “way up there.”

  “They told me I’ll be a nurse,” said a bucktooth girl in a red brocade chŏgori and a coal-black knee-high ch’ima.

  “I’m going to work in a clothing factory,” said a girl in a spring-green chŏgori with her hair in a long braid.

  “I’ll going to be weaving in a Yamada factory,” said a pockmarked girl with narrow eyes.

  “I’m going to a nice place!” said the girl from the Taegu station in the white silk chŏgori and black silk ch’ima. She had round eyes and flashed a grin.

  “Did you say a nice place?”

  “The ward-chief uncle promised he’d get me a job in a nice place . . . my father asked him what I’d be doing at this place and he just said it was a nice place, a nice factory—so anyway, all I have to do is go there.”

  “Do they pay well?”

  “Depends on how I do . . .”

  “How about you?” she herself was asked by a girl next to her. “Which factory are you going to?” The wrist inside the girl’s cotton sleeve looked so fragile.

  “I’m not sure.” She was about to follow up by saying she’d been taken away while she was out looking for snails, but then her gaze met the hardtack man’s and she clamped her mouth shut.

  Sometimes the train stopped awhile inside a tunnel.

  Was it the third day or the fourth? She couldn’t remember. They might have changed trains, but she had no distinct memory of that either.

  When finally the hardtack man told the girls to get off the train, they’d arrived in Harbin. It was mid-May but felt like early March back home. The sky was cement gray and dreary. The girls didn’t know it could snow up to their ankles there. Their unwashed faces, layered with days of smoke from the train, looked charred. The round-eyed girl’s white chŏgori was sooty and wrinkled.

  Everywhere you looked were swarms of Japanese soldiers. They were in constant motion, a blanket roll seeming to grow out of their back, a rifle slung over their left shoulder. Others were asleep on the bare ground, grimacing as if from nightmares, heads facing the same direction. A few had youthful faces and looked like boys who had fallen asleep after tiring themselves out romping around. One was grinding his teeth in his sleep. Not even a horse-drawn cartful of gravel passing close by could awaken them.

  Off to the side of the station sat a mass of girls, each hugging a broadcloth bundle that was white or black. Their faces were dirty; maybe they hadn’t washed for days either. She watched as a mud-caked truck with torn canvas over the cargo bin pulled to a stop in front of them.

  For the better part of a day the truck bounced along a road across the wilderness plain before arriving at a building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence; the structure had plywood walls and a tile roof.

  A dumpy woman in a light beige kimono came shuffling out in geta. As soon as she saw the girls emerging from the cargo bin, she started counting heads, like a rancher taking inventory of his livestock.

  The sun was setting and the afterglow was blood red.

  Her gaze came to a stop at the far side of the barbed wire and she shrieked. A woman in a blue kimono, her face powdered with rouge, stood ghostlike; something was in her mouth. But it wasn’t a woman after all, rather a scarecrow with a mouthful of konyak jelly.

  The woman counting the girls suddenly began squabbling in Japanese with the truck driver. Startled, she hid behind a girl with a bundle. The girl had clutched the bundle to her bosom all the while, but when the train passed Ch’ŏngjin she produced squares of rice cake from the bundle and shared them with the other girls. Her mother had packed them for her trip, she said. The snow-white rice cake was dotted with black beans the size of mouse eyes. The beans were turning bad, but the girls chewed them till there was nothing left.

  The
driver, fuming by now, herded the girls inside the barbed wire. He had a mustache and wore a pair of sallow-colored knickers, a cheap fur cap, and gold-rimmed glasses with thick lenses.

  The woman instructed the girls to call her haha. Haha meant “mom” in Japanese, she learned later.

  Haha told the girls they would have to take the soldiers beginning the next day. She herself understood this to mean they would cook their meals and wash their uniforms and socks.

  “What do you mean, take the soldiers?” said the girl who was supposed to be working at the Yamada factory. This girl didn’t know whether the train was bound for China or Japan, but was dead set on going to the Yamada factory. Hearing this, she herself figured the factory must be to the north.

  “I mean you have to take the soldiers to bed with you,” said haha.

  Already puzzled at having arrived not at a factory but instead a hut-like structure resembling a pig pen, the girls now looked at one another, perplexed.

  “Why would we take soldiers to bed with us?” The girl who issued this challenge was the one who during the train ride had pointed out to the other girls that they were passing through Kyŏngsŏng, P’yŏngyang, Shinŭiju, and Antung and Changchun in Manchuria.

  “This is a place where we take soldiers, so you have to take the soldiers.”

  “They told me I’d be a nurse—I didn’t come here to take soldiers,” said the girl with the buck teeth.

  “We’ll take good care of you if you sacrifice yourself for Imperial Japan.”

  “They said they’d find me a nice place to work here,” said the girl with the round eyes.

  “That’s news to me,” said haha with a straight face.

  “Why are you lying to us?” said the girl who had shared her rice cake. Earning her a slap in the face from haha.

  Whimpering and whining, another girl asked to be taken home. Not until she paid back all the money they’d spent to bring her here to Manchuria, said haha. No girl would go home until she paid off her debt. She herself wanted to tell haha she’d been taken away while she was outside looking for snails, but she was too frightened to open her mouth.

  “Think about it, girls—if you don’t look after our brave soldiers, how can they win the war?” said haha.

  Another girl shook her head. “If I had known we’d be looking after soldiers, no way would I have come along.” When she added that instead of taking soldiers she would cook and do laundry, haha slapped her too.

  She herself still didn’t understand what sleeping with soldiers meant, or sacrificing herself for Imperial Japan. Her only thought was that she missed her mom. When she broke into sobs and pleaded with haha to send her home she too was slapped. “Don’t start!” snapped haha.

  Haha then told the Yamada factory hopeful, “Starting today you’re Fumiko.” And that’s how the pockmarked girl became Fumiko.

  If haha said that starting that day a girl was Okada, then the girl became Okada.

  Night came and haha deposited each of the girls in a separate, box-like room.

  When the girls were by themselves they called one another by the names they used back home.

  She murmurs their names as they come to mind.

  Kisuk ŏnni, 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. . .

  The girl on the train who said she was going to some nice place or other was Aesun, the one who was going to pick bellflowers for her was Tongsuk ŏnni, the girl bound for the Yamada factory was Pongae, and Hanok ŏnni had said she was going to work in a factory that made needles . . .

  Yŏnsun said she had left home without telling anyone, not even her mother, pretending she was going to the outhouse and dressed as usual to avoid suspicion. She was the oldest daughter and liked the idea of working at a factory and returning home with her earnings so her siblings wouldn’t go hungry.

  “When my mom had her youngest one it was tiny as a mouse, it was so malnourished,” said Yŏnsun. “Grandmother told me that women who have babies but don’t eat enough end up daft . . . so I went house to house with a bowl, begging for food, and I managed to feed my mom.”

  The girl who was convinced she’d be working as a nurse was Suok ŏnni.

  Parched as pasteboard, the tongue inside her pursed mouth is twitching. A name lingers at its tip but doesn’t quite come off.

  She remembers all these names because she frequently recites them, like a child doing her multiplication tables. She’ll count them off on her fingers as she calls them out, but still there are names that don’t surface.

  Some of the girls who were taken to Manchuria still went by a nickname; their parents hadn’t yet come up with a name that would go in the family register. One of these girls was from Pusan, and she had a heavy accent. At the comfort station this girl ended up with two Japanese names, one from haha and the other from a Japanese officer.

  She herself was also given a Japanese name by haha. Which meant she had four names in all—her nickname at home, the name her father had made for the family register, that name mis-recorded in the register, and now the one from haha.

  Add the names created by the soldiers and the total increased to a dozen. The soldiers who visited her body named her as they pleased. Tomiko, Yoshiko, Chieko, Fuyuko, Emiko, Yaeko . . .

  Maybe it was the one body and the four names that sometimes left her feeling that four different souls inhabited her.

  Four souls in a five-foot-tall frame.

  What she resented most in the comfort station was having only one body when dozens of men overran her like aphids.

  That one body was not hers.

  But she’s made do with it and has survived until now.

  The day after their arrival, haha called the girls out to the yard. Otosan, her husband, who was also the truck driver with the cheap fur hat, herded them off across the plain.

  Along the way they saw a Japanese army base. A roar broke out and there beyond a barbed-wire fence was a sprawling mural of soldiers in mustard-colored uniforms.

  From there a thirty-minute walk brought them to a thatch-roofed structure coated with red dust; it lacked the usual brushwood fence. A military truck was parked close by and Japanese soldiers hovered around. Otosan shouted at the girls to form a line. When the girls backpedaled, not wanting to be the first in line, he punched Kŭmbok ŏnni in the face. Startled, Kŭmbok ŏnni cupped her cheeks and returned to the front of the line. One by one the girls went inside. She herself was the third from the end. The twig door swung open and shut when the girls went in and out but she couldn’t see inside.

  Aesun was the first to go in, and when she came rushing out her face was ablaze as if she’d seen something she shouldn’t have. Hitching up her black silk ch’ima, she rushed behind the truck and plopped down, looking for all the world as if she wanted to disappear. In the meantime Haegŭm went inside and soon after there was a scream. Kŭmbok was the third one in; she walked out with a nasty scowl. The shorter the line, the more frightened she herself became. She searched for a possible hideout, but otosan’s combat boots were trampling on her shadow.

  Finally it was her turn. Waiting inside were a Japanese army doctor and a nurse. The nurse was a middle-aged Japanese woman with a large block of a face.

  Speaking in a mixture of Japanese and Korean, the nurse had her step up onto a small wooden platform that looked like a chair with a square cut out from the seat. Mounting the platform, she realized why all the other girls had rushed out straightening their ch’ima in a fluster. They’d been brought here for a gynecology checkup and the platform was where they were examined.

  “They brought us a baby. Akachan-o thure-te kita-ne,” grumbled the doctor, a pale man, and then she saw the metal instrument shaped like a duck beak and felt it in
her crotch.

  Back at the comfort station haha handed out dirty-yellow sack dresses and showed the girls how to use sakku, condoms.

  “Can’t you send me home?” Aesun begged her.

  “Don’t worry. Just do as you’re told and take a lot of soldiers, and then we’ll send you home—you won’t even have to ask.”

  Haha unrolled a sakku over her thumb as a demonstration. It looked like a shriveled carp bladder.

  That evening the girls began taking the soldiers. She was in the yard sobbing when she saw a group of Japanese soldiers surge toward the building. Next to her Haegŭm jumped up. Haegŭm, dejected from haha chopping off her hair as soon as the girls returned from their checkup, hair so precious not even her mother would have laid hands on it.

  The laughing and banter of the aroused men turned boisterous. Haha shouted at the girls to go to their rooms.

  The next morning she went to the canvas-covered laundry area in the backyard to find all the girls in tears as they washed their bloody underwear.

  The girls wouldn’t make eye contact with one another. Her swollen privates made it difficult to close her legs as she squatted, urine dribbling from her with a burning sensation as if she’d been stung by a caterpillar.

  “Let’s kill ourselves,” said Kŭmbok ŏnni to Tongsuk ŏnni.

  Haegŭm’s lower lip was bruised and swollen from where an officer arriving later in the night had bitten her. The swollen lip looked like a blood-gorged leech at rest.

  She can’t remember how many men came and went that first night.

  They toyed with her all night long, a 13-year old girl, as if they were playing pick-up sticks.

  She feels a spasm of shame. Flustered, she pounds her chest and mumbles to herself.

  I’ve sinned so much . . .

  She does this whenever and wherever—waking up in the middle of the night, crossing the street, waiting for the bus, having a meal— pounding her chest and mumbling these words. She’s sinned so much, an unwary girl who knew nothing of the world a few miles beyond her home when she was taken away.

  Though she’d done nothing wrong, she begged forgiveness from the Japanese officer who was the first of the men who visited her body. “I’m sorry, sir.” With his bayonet the officer slashed her sack dress, leaving her feeling she had wings that were being slashed.