SOURCE: "No Man's Land," in Time, May 5, 1997, pp. 101-2.

[In the following excerpt, Farley asserts that "although Keller's prose, at a few points, has more ambition than lyricism, overall [Comfort Woman] is a sturdy, eloquent book."]

Nora Okja Keller used to think real writers looked like Ernest Hemingway. Gruff, bearded, white, male. She was none of those. She was an immigrant, born in Seoul to a Korean mother and a white American father, and raised in Hawaii. But Keller's image of herself started to change in 1993, when she went to a symposium on human rights at the University of Hawaii at Manoa; there she heard an elderly Korean woman tell her true story of being a "comfort woman" during World War II, when she was one of the many foreigners forced by the Japanese into prostitution camps that serviced their soldiers. The story haunted Keller. Who would pass...