She was teased by her classmates because her mother was so strange, making her resentful of Akiko.

Akiko 40 suffers a breakdown and begins shouting in defiance, so she is brutally executed as a message, and Akiko finds herself selected to replace her as Akiko 41.īeccah remembers her childhood. They live terrible lives confined to the stall. The women in the stalls serve as prostitutes for the Japanese soldiers and they take on the name assigned to their stall. At first Akiko serves in the recreation camp by helping the women in the stalls, who all have iterated names such as Tamayo 29 or Akiko 40. She remembers that after her own parents died in Korea during World War II, her older sister, in need of a dowry to get married, sold her to the Japanese. She reflects on the fact that her daughter, Beccah, is the only living thing she loves. Her name is not really Akiko, it is Soon Hyo. The story switches to Akiko’s point-of-view as a young mother. Beccah reluctantly admits that this probably saved their lives. After a series of bad jobs she is hired by Auntie Reno, who employs her as a waitress in her café but also believes that Akiko has a real connection to the spirit world and employs her as a medium. After her father’s death, Akiko tries to move them both back to Korea, but only makes it as far as the Big Island of Hawaii, where Akiko is forced to put Beccah into school and get a job. She reflects on her relationship with her mother she loved her very much when she was calm, but she recalls how she would go into fits and commune with spirits. Beccah worries that she has done the same when Akiko passes away, remembering many times in her youth when she wished Akiko dead. Akiko makes it clear that this was not a fast, sudden act of violence but rather a result brought about through intention-she wished him dead, and eventually he died.

The story opens with Beccah remembering her mother confessing to the murder of her father, who had died several years earlier. When Akiko passes away, Beccah is largely ignorant of her mother’s life story, and the reader learns about Akiko’s life concurrently with Beccah’s discoveries. Using alternating points of view, Keller tells the story of Beccah, a Korean-American woman born and raised in Hawaii, and her Korean mother, Akiko. Comfort Woman is the debut novel by Nora Okja Keller, published in 1997.

Nora okja keller