Book Bearings
Cover of Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

Comfort Woman

Nora Okja Keller

  • 224 pages · about 4 hours
  • First published 1997
  • 6 editions
Buy on Bookshop.orgView on Open Library

Bookshop.org links may earn us a commission. It supports independent bookstores and costs you nothing.

1 About this book

Possessing a wisdom and maturity rarely found in a first novelist, Korean-American writer Nora Okja Keller tells a heartwrenching and enthralling tale in this, her literary debut. Comfort Woman is the story of Akiko, a Korean refugee of World War II, and Beccah, her daughter by an American missionary.

The two women are living on the edge of society—and sanity—in Honolulu, plagued by Akiko's periodic encounters with the spirits of the dead, and by Beccah's struggles to reclaim her mother from her past. Slowly and painfully Akiko reveals her tragic story and the horrifying years she was forced to serve as a "comfort woman" to Japanese soldiers.

As Beccah uncovers these truths, she discovers her own strength and the secret of the powers she herself possessed—the precious gifts her mother has given her. A San Francisco Chronicle bestsellerIn 1995, Nora Okja Keller received the Pushcart Prize for "Mother Tongue", a piece that is part of Comfort Woman.

Good for readers who want: historical fiction and a love story.

  • Historical fiction
  • Korean Americans
  • Romance
  • Korean American women
  • Korea
  • Mothers and daughters
  • Children
  • Mother-daughter relationship

2 About Nora Okja Keller

 

Nora Okja Keller (born 22 December 1966, in Seoul, South Korea) is a Korean-American author. Her 1997 breakthrough work of fiction, Comfort Woman, and her second book (2002), Fox Girl, focus on multigenerational trauma resulting from Korean women's experiences as sex slaves, euphemistically called comfort women, for Japanese and American troops during World War II and the ongoing Korean War.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

3 Similar books

Find a book that fits your moment