Silence in History and Memory: Narrating the Comfort Woman

Abstract

This article discusses the publication of Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman (1997) in the late 20th century United States. Situated in the intersection of history and memory, the novel reflects ways in which historically silenced traumas are articulated and reified in the form of fiction. By tracing the background of the comfort women issue, from the period of the Second World War to the late 20th century, this article argues that the elimination of the subject in official or (inter)-national historical discourses reveals ideological contradictions of so-called “universal” history. Rather than characterizing Comfort Woman as a literature solely interrogating Japan’s colonial past and crimes committed against Asian civilians during W.W.II, this article looks at its contextual relevance to the trilateral historiography of Japan, Korea, and the U.S. that evolved in the midst of Cold War politics.