SOURCE: "The Haunting," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 23, 1997, p. 9.

[In the following review, Rubin calls Keller's Comfort Woman "a poignant and impressive debut."]

The ugly story of the women and girls forced to serve as "comfort women" in the "recreation camps" designed to accommodate the sexual needs of Japanese soldiers during World War II took a long time to come to light. Women who had been victimized in this way were devalued not only in the eyes of their communities but often in their own eyes. This bitterly ironic paradigm is not limited to traditional sexist cultures. Almost everywhere, it seems, far too many victims struggle with feelings of shame and despair, while too few victimizers are troubled by guilt.

This powerful first novel [Comfort Woman] by a young writer born in Korea and raised in Hawaii tells the intertwined stories of a Korean-born woman...