A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

the truth, the words of Soon Hyo, had killed him. She knew about the power of words, of
speaking, remembering Akiko 40:
That is what, in the end, made Induk so special: she chose her own death. Using
the Japanese as her dagger, she taunted them with the language and truths they
perceived as insults. She sharpened their anger to the point where it equaled and
fused with their black hungers. She used them to end her life, to find release
(144).
When Beccah and Auntie Reno disagree about the proper funeral rites, it turns out the old
entrepreneur knew about Akiko’s powers in her own streetwise way: “Your maddah was
one survivah. Das how she can read other people. Das how come she can see their wishes
and their fears. Das how come she can travel out of dis world into hell, cause she already
been there and back and know the way” (203). Communication (and its failure) is the
leitmotif woven all through Comfort Woman, split into telling stories, naming, translation,
communication with the dead, becoming their voice, invocations, singing, wailing, and
silence. Unearthing a suppressed chapter of Korean/Japanese/Local history, Keller
imaginatively ‘gives voice’ to the silenced women.
After experiencing praise and success, Keller described another neglected aspect
of Korean (-American) history in her second novel, Fox Girl. A review sums it up
reductively as “how the Korean Bar came to Hawai’i.” 309 The narrator Hyun Jin and her
half-sister Sookie, who have grown up in the aftermath of the Korean War, are drawn into
the G.I. bars and seediness of a so-called ‘America Town.’ After her middle-class family
has abandoned her, Hyun Jin is left with few alternatives to selling her body. Her first job
leaves her pregnant, but she loses the fetus. When Sookie is pregnant, too, Hyun Jin
offers her money to keep the baby. She rescues the little girl from Sookie’s attempt to
drown her in order to be free to leave for the U.S.: A bar owner from Hawai’i has offered
to take them along, revealing a modern version of indentured labor. Hyun Jin brings her
baby niece secretly. Calling the recruiting lady’s wrath upon her, she hides in O’ahu’s
countryside, taken in by a resolute farmer. The end finds them living with the old woman,
the child with no name growing up in the refuge that is a plant nursery. In Fox Girl,
Keller’s leitmotif is transformation, exercised in endless variation to show the endurance
and strength of women in oppressive circumstances. In this context of shape-shifting and
309 Ryan Senaga, “Don’t call it a comeback,” in Honolulu Weekly, 04/24-30/2002.
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