SOURCE: A review of Comfort Woman, in Publishers Nora Okja Keller

[In the following review of Comfort Woman, the critic states, "Though piercing and moving in its evocation of feminine closeness,… the narrative becomes somewhat claustrophobic."]

This impressive first novel [Comfort Woman] by a Hawaii-based writer of mixed Korean and American ancestry depicts one of the atrocities of war and its lingering effects on a later generation. An intense study of a mother-daughter relationship, it dwells simultaneously in the world of spirits and the social milieu of the adolescent schoolgirl who later becomes a career woman with lovers. Beccah is a youngish, contemporary Hawaiian whose Korean mother, Akiko, was sold into prostitution as a young woman and sent to a "recreation camp" to service the occupying Japanese army. Akiko developed a resilience that allowed her to distance herself from the daily plundering of her body...