ABSTRACT

This paper examines the significance of reading two Korean American novels which address the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery (known as the “comfort women” system) in the context of Japan: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. I will explore how this act can facilitate the understanding of the militarized sexual violence in the present social and discursive context of Japan, where the issue suffers from a strong backlash. Lee’s A Gesture Life with its critique of multiple militarized imperialisms challenges the Japanese revisionists’ effort to deny the egregious wrongs of Japan’s military sexual slavery; it also responds to popular criticism in Japan that Korean/Americans disregard the practices of Western imperial and military violence and only condemn Japanese war crimes. The paper in turn also reads Keller’s Comfort Woman through the frame of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a Japanese Canadian novel which remembers the internment and U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. My aim here is to examine both the risks and possibilities which this reading can generate. While it can help us see the comparable acts of remembering war sufferings from the standpoint of diasporas, it can also erase the non-equivalence between the two histories.

摘要

本文探讨了阅读两本针对日本背景下的日本军事性奴隶制问题（称为“慰安妇”系统）的韩裔美国人小说的意义：娜拉·奥卡·凯勒的“慰安妇”和李昌瑞的“手势生活”。我将探讨在当前的日本社会和话语背景下，这一行为如何能促进人们对军事性暴力的理解，在日本，该问题受到强烈反对。李的手势生活日本修正主义者以多重军事帝国主义的批判来否认日本军事性奴役的严重错误。它也回应了日本的流行批评，即朝鲜/美国人无视西方帝国主义和军事暴力的作法，只谴责日本的战争罪行。报纸还通过乔伊·香川（Joy Kogawa）的《欧巴桑》（Obasan）的框架读了凯勒的《慰安妇》，这是一部加拿大日文小说，它回想起了拘留和美国对长崎的原子弹袭击。我的目的是检查该读数可能产生的风险和可能性。从侨民的角度来看，它可以帮助我们看到回忆战争苦难的可比举动，但它也可以消除两种历史之间的不平等。