It shares with exemplars of the form – Primo Levi's If This is a Man Rezak Hukanovic's The Tenth Circle of Hell – a simplicity to the prose that lets the events speak for themselves, though there is at times an awkwardness to Bracht's style as she tries to put the atrocities into the voices of her characters while failing to resist an authorial tone. In a detailed author’s note that includes a historical timeline of a war-ravaged country, Bracht outlines the motivation behind the book: to document and draw attention to the horrors so the sins of the past are not repeated.Īlthough fictional in plot and character, her novel has the starkness of witness literature. Mary Lynn Bracht’s debut novel excels at shedding light on a relatively untold story, at least in the Western world, of the thousands of Korean women and girls who were sold into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during Japan’s colonisation of Korea in the second World War. It is a fitting metaphor for the horrific abuse that follows as Hana is kidnapped from a beach by Japanese soldiers after heroically hiding her younger sister Emi. Like many young women in her village, Hana has left school and embraced her Korean heritage as a haenyeo, a girl or woman who supports her family by diving deep into freezing waters to search for abalone or oysters, the latter a rarity following years of plundering by Japanese seamen. Sixteen-year-old Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation, schooled through a foreign tongue that denies her native language and culture.
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May 2023
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