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English(English) Article

You Can Check in Any Time You Want, But You Can Never Leave: The First Korean “Comfort Woman” Novel, Kim Soom’s One Left

About the Article

Article
https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/the-korea-blog/can-check-time-want-can-never-leave-first-korean-comfort-woman-novel-kim-sooms-one-left/
Journal
BLARB – BLOG
Issued Date
April 11, 2021
Page
-
Language
English(English)
Country
UNITED STATES
City
-
Book
One Left
Writer
Kim Soom
Translator
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton

About the Author

  • Kim Soom
  • Birth : 1974 ~ -
  • Occupation : Novelist
  • First Name : 숨
  • Family Name : 김
  • Korean Name : 김숨
  • ISNI : 0000000052953197
  • Works : 11
Descriptions - 1 Languages
  • English(English)

When a 92-year-old woman by the name of Lee died at last year, all of South Korea took notice. Her passing reduced to eighteen the official count of surviving Korean “comfort women,” who as girls were kept in sexual servitude to the Japanese military during the Second World War. Six months later, University of Washington press published an English translation of a Korean novel that imagines the future, inevitable and surely not far off, when that number falls to one. But an official count is just that, as Kim Soom reminds us with the character of One Left‘s 93-year-old protagonist P’unggil, a former comfort woman who never registered herself as such with the government. The death of the second-to-last member of the acknowledged group plunges her into an extended recollection of her own experience, which constitutes this “first Korean novel devoted exclusively to the subject of the comfort women.”

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