by Kim Soom
Ch’unhŭi ŏnni plopped down. “See? We’ll never walk out of here alive.”
If the soldiers had trouble penetrating, they applied ointment to the sakku.
She herself didn’t know that the place she had come to was called a comfort station, only that once you were there you took Japanese soldiers. The same for the three-story brick building in the Chinese village. Not until she was older did she understand what a comfort station and a comfort woman were. Until then she assumed the place she was in was like a brothel. No one told her she was at a comfort station or that she was a victimized comfort woman.
She detested washing sakku as much as getting the 606 shot. What with haha badgering the girls to use them sparingly and never handing out enough of them in the first place, the girls would wash and reuse them. The soldiers who had come and gone from them tossed the used sakku in the can on their way out. The fishy stink from the sakku heaped in the can left the girls retching. After breakfast the girls took their cans to the washing area and cleaned the sakku of ejaculate inside and out. After drying them on a sheet of plywood they added a sprink-ling of white disinfecting powder. Every time the girls cleaned the sakku they would shudder at the thought of all the soldiers who had come and gone from them the previous night. And at the prospect of having to take the same number of soldiers during the night to come.
The brick building had wide, squat windows at regular intervals on each floor, but the windows had odd-looking grates over them. The metal gate to the building was like a folding door, and there was a sign made of wood on one of the posts. She herself couldn’t read Chinese and had no idea what the column of characters on the sign meant. Then the gate opened and an older girl rushed out. The girl was wearing a kimono, but she could tell the girl was from Korea. She could spot the ones from back home, whether they wore kimono or qipao. Across the street the girl went, toward a place that looked like a shop. Back she ran and as soon as she was through the gate it clanked shut as if it would never open again.
Pretty, oval-faced Hyangsuk, a P’yŏngyang kisaeng academy graduate who was coveted among the officers, suffered terribly from menstrual cramps. Unable to take men during her period, she was led to the nearby village by haha, who instructed a Chinese gynecologist to apply an icepack to her privates. It felt like her frozen privates were breaking off, she whimpered, and then out squirted a flood of dark blood.
“I want to go home. I miss Mom’s cooking. I want my scoop of barley rice with the kimchi on top,” whimpered Kunja.
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.
“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.”
A woman with missing teeth was the first to pounce. “Why didn’t my daughter come back?”
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?
Before they knew it, the girls were separated from one another.
Depending on where a new girl was from, the others might pelt her with questions: “What’s happening in Taegu?” “How’s life in Pusan?”
“Then you should go sell yourself.”
She has a mind to do so, to be a witness. But how? And why now? She’s never said a word, hiding the truth this way, covering it up that way, she’s grown helplessly old, and soon she herself will be at death’s doorstep.
When five years had passed and her oldest girl hadn’t returned, Mother picked half a dozen ears of corn from their kitchen garden and went to see the fortune teller who lived out behind the tobacco patch. “She crossed the sea and she’s dead and gone.” Hearing this, Mother adopted a nightly ritual of setting out three bowls of water—one on the soy sauce crock, one on the crock of fermented soybean paste, and one on the crock of hot pepper paste—and bowing to each. No matter that the soybean paste crock was empty, the soybean mash that would have filled it having been nibbled up already by the hungry girls.
He told her to swallow his semen. When she protested, the soldier unsheathed the knife from his waistband and stabbed the tatami.
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.
In another room a petty officer struck a match to Haegŭm’s pubic hair.
Her menstruation stopped before she turned 40.
At any given time her vagina would prolapse and not even a needle could penetrate it.
Mother dead.
Hunam ŏnni was five years older and shot herself up with opium five times a day. When it got to the point that she spent all day crying in bed, regardless of the soldiers coming and going from her body, otosan took her by the hair and dragged her outside as if she were a straw mat and dumped her out on the barren plains, while the other girls looked on from inside the barbed wire. And on that particular day it was overcast and blustery. The winds that blew in Manchuria smelled of horses. A sea of birds black as coal flocked toward Hunam ŏnni as if mistaking her bawling for a birdcall.
Word got out among the girls that the icepack treatment had shrunk Hyangsuk’s uterus to the size of a chicken gizzard.
For haha, coming up with the girls’ debt was easier than pricing a pig or cow for sale at the market. No need for the scales, an abacus, or knowledge of a going price. All she had to do was declare that a girl’s debt was such-and-such and that was it.
Kŭmbok ŏnni kept the fragment in the wooden box that contained her clothing. A year later when she left the comfort station it was the first item she packed in her cloth bundle. She said if she made it back home she would go to Tongsuk ŏnni’s home village and bury it there.
Am I the only one who survived? She felt guilt clogging her throat so that the barley rice wouldn’t go down.
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.
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.
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.
Three years had passed and the number of girls had grown from twenty-five to thirty-two—and this despite the fact that quite a few girls had left. Not that any of them had walked out on her own. Safer to say they had all come down sick and were told to leave. Haha made the girls with serious diseases, such as syphilis, use a separate outhouse until they got better, and then they had to take soldiers again. The girls had two chances at this salvage operation; if they were infected a third time, otosan would load them into the truck and take them away—or soldiers might show up for that purpose. None of the girls taken away had e
ver returned. Haha was tight-lipped about the fate of the girls, whether they’d gone home or to another comfort station.
Less than five days after their escape, she was on her own and found refuge in a Chinese home, the only habitable dwelling in sight. Spotting only men’s clothing hanging from the collapsing earthen wall, she realized soon enough that a widower lived there. The man threatened to report her to the Japanese authorities if she left, and that would mean her death, so she was stuck there. She wasn’t aware that Japan had lost the war and Korea was liberated.
One day a Japanese officer shot Myŏngsuk ŏnni down below. Because she’d refused, even after being beaten. Beaten unconscious, she continued to refuse after she came to. The bullet passed through her uterus. It didn’t kill her, but it left her like a rotten pumpkin down there.
A few days ago she too had a sudden recollection, and it was enough to interfere with her sleep. The girls had been taken to the outpost, and three soldiers, cackling and jabbering, decided to have some fun with her as she emerged from the outhouse. She backpedaled when she saw them, and one of the men took a dagger from his waistband and mimicked slitting his throat. She drew near, faltering, and they dragged her into the woods, where the man with the knife continued to threaten her while a second soldier was cajoling her. The third one stopped them but took off his pants like the other two and was quick to do his business when his turn came.
The place to which she followed the old woman was a Japanese-built bathhouse. She looked after a seven-month-old baby and ran errands but received no payment there either.
While she was begging forgiveness, Kisuk ŏnni was begging for her life. And mercy be, Kisuk’s soldier merely stabbed her in the thigh.
When she was a live-in maid in Pusan she had a bachelor suitor. Despite the shuddering she felt at the thought of men, the prospect of a normal family life with this man prompted her to visit a gynecologist. The doctor said only that childbirth would be difficult because of her tilted uterus. She dared not tell him about Manchuria, and without telling the bachelor she left Pusan.
KIM SOOM was born in Ulsan, South Kyŏngsang Province, and earned a degree in social welfare from Taejŏn University. She first appeared in print in 1997 and has since published six story collections and nine novels. She is the recipient of the Hŏ Kyun (2012), Daesan (2013), Yi Sang (2015), and Tongni-Mogwŏl (2017) literary prizes as well as the 2017 Special Reunification Prize. One Left is her first novel to appear in English translation.
BRUCE AND JU-CHAN FULTON have translated numerous works of modern Korean fiction. Their awards and fellowships include the first US National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship for a Korean project and an America PEN Heim Translation Grant for One Left. Bruce Fulton is the inaugural holder of the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation and associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia.
