Reading the “Comfort Women” in Cloud Atlas: A Comparative Approach

Abstract

This paper discusses some of the ways in which the interchange of fiction and reality can be studied through the use of a historical archive. In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the chapter entitled “An Orison of Sonmi~451” will be compared with the history of the Japanese military sex slaves or “Comfort Women”. The paper puts forward three main arguments. First, it suggests Sonmi’s futuristic fictional story is an archived narrative which contains the realistic issue of the service industry in modern times and references the human history of the collective self-expression of traumatic events. Second, it delineates the two narratives, the slave life of Sonmi in Cloud Atlas and the tragic history of the “Comfort Women” during the Second World War. Finally, the paper examines the testimonial features in the painting archive of these Korean survivors preserved by the two websites, the House of Sharing and the e-museum of the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, suggesting that these two digital archives are equivalent to the technological device of the “orison” in Sonmi’s narrative. The paper concludes that the absence of language in the painting archive appeals strongly to a cosmopolitan morality in transcending effective language barriers in order to advance the causes of peace and reconciliation.