Will I love One Left?

The novel One Left begins when the elderly protagonist hears a TV report on the last surviving Korean “comfort woman.” She is in fact also a comfort station survivor, one who has remained silent and hence unknown to the public. At the age of thirteen, she was kidnapped into a Japanese military comfort station in northeast China. The protagonist's thoughts flash back and forth between her present-day life and the wartime horrors, the details of which are drawn from  real survivors’ testimonies. “Fifteen men a day was normal,” she recalls, “but on Sunday fifty men… show more.

Millions of victims of man-made historical disasters await rediscovery from the murky corners of history to which they have been consigned. One Left returns to historical memory the 200,000-plus Korean girls who were taken from their home villages during World War Two to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military in “comfort stations.” The end of this disturbing novel is brilliant: the protagonist reclaims her identity, and by extension that of each of the “comfort women,” by recalling the name given her at birth—a name she has not used in the 70 years since she returned to her homeland… show more.