Read Online Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller - Free Book Online Page A

for her spirit. I saw myself underneath the pumping bodies of Japanese soldiers and, in the later pages, saw my oldest sister beneath the same soldiers. I saw myself sitting in the river, and I saw myself walking and sleeping, walking and sleeping, until I died.
    At this point my mother closed the book. When I asked her why I could not see the rest of the book, the oldest spirit, whom I knew to be my great-grandmother, said, If you read the final chapters, you would know the universe. You would be dead.

    When I looked up, I was alone and could smell the sea, so I knew I had followed the river west. Ahead of me I saw the cluster of small adobe homes Induk had told me about, nestled into the hillside. I knocked at the first house, wanting to ask if I could sleep in the courtyard. No one answered there, nor at the second home I came to. Finally, after failing to wake anyone at the third home, I entered the courtyard anyway and disrobed at the well. In the cold night, I laid my clothes on the brittle mud surrounding the well and bathed in the ice-cold water, wanting to purify myself and knowing I never could.
    My skin felt waxy, as Induk’s had the day after the soldiers killed her, the day after she reclaimed her name and I became the new Akiko. When the other camp women and I went to the river to bathe, we found her skewered body, abandoned alongside the path. We wanted to take her to the river with us to prepare her body for the separation of its spirit. Someone she loved should have cleansed her skin with her favorite scented oil. Someone who loved her should have laid her body out, with her head to the south, and prepared a feast to feed her soul for its next and longest journey.
    The women from the camp wanted to do these things for her, but in the end we left her, just as the soldiers had, mounted on the pole, her nakedness only half concealed by the forest’s undergrowth, her eyes dry and open and staring toward the river.

    When my husband brings home toys for our newly born daughter, I pick out the dolls with the plastic skin and the unyielding, staring blue eyes and put them in the linen closet. Their skin feels like day-after-death skin, cold and hard though still faintly pliant. I feel sick thinking of my baby lying next to, gaining comfort from, the artificial dead. After I bury the dolls under the sheets and towels, I pick up my child, placing her against my chest. My body feels cold against her sleep-flushed warmth, yet she still snuggles, roots against me. As she nurses, her heat invades me and becomes mine, her heart beats against mine, becoming mine, becoming me, and gives me life.
    I try not to think of the dolls, stacked against each other in the closet, staring at us through the doors and walls with their unblinking, sightless eyes.

    I woke at dawn with my fingers dangling like bait in the water at the edge of the river, and a rope looped around my neck. Old-lady breasts, flattened and elongated from years of childbearing, flapped against the side of my head. When I tried to sit up, the breasts squawked, Aigu! The dead is sitting up! and swung away.
    Lifting my head against the noose, I could see that the breasts belonged to a gray-haired woman sitting cross-legged and naked on my clothes. Though her body was covered with wrinkles and age spots, her face was curiously unlined, youthful. I knew this was the Manshin Ahjima whom Induk had told me to find.
    She tugged on the end of the rope.
    Manshin Ahjima, I asked her, why am I tied?
    E-yah! the woman cried. The dead knows me! the old lady jumped to her feet, and the rope between us stretched taut.
    I lifted my hands to the rope, then pulled gently. The rope slithered from her grasp and onto the ground. Please, I said, why?
    The woman’s hand jerked as if she still held the rope. You were lost, she said, between this world and the next, and I was trying to lead you back. She lifted her breasts and scratched her scarred belly. Besides, you were