SOURCE: A review of Comfort Woman, in The New York Times Book Review, August 31, 1997, p. 14.

[In the following review, Funderburg calls Keller's Comfort Woman "accomplished."]

A mother and daughter wrestle with the mother's plagued past in Nora Okja Keller's accomplished first novel [Comfort Woman]. The daughter, Beccah, comes of age in Hawaii, where she is taunted by other children because she is poor, because she is of Korean and American heritage, and because her mother, Akiko, seems to be mentally imbalanced. (When she isn't falling into trances, Akiko is performing strange rituals meant to protect Beccah from Saja, the Death Messenger, or honyaek, the cloud of Red Disaster.) The reader learns long before Beccah does that Akiko was sold away from her Korean family during World War II—as a sister's dowry—and forced into a "recreation center" run by the Japanese Army. There she was renamed and...