SOURCE: "They Gotta Be Making This Up," in Newsweek, April 28, 1997, p. 78.

[In the following review, Shapiro asserts that in Comfort Woman, Keller has "an emotional touch so sure and a sense of language so precise she seems to have sprung into print full-grown as a novelist."]

Her name is Akiko, or so her daughter Beccah has always believed. Not until her mother's death does Beccah learn that Akiko's real name was torn from her at the age of 12, when she was sold from a Korean village to be a "comfort woman"—a sex slave for Japanese troops in World War II. These two stories, Akiko's and Beccah's, make up the somber skeins that Nora Okja Keller beautifully weaves together in Comfort Woman, her first novel.

Akiko's harrowing memories of the "recreation center" are seared into her brain and soul, from the first night she is raped—"It was...