She is raped by 20 men a day … They don’t beat her if she lies still on the mat. Ten hours a day, six days a week, she ‘services’ soldiers. Hana’s time in the brothel is the most powerful and unforgettable of these situations: “They eat a meagre meal, then go to bed to start the day again. The generational impact of war is seen through a second narrator, Emi, who feels the crippling guilt of survivors and has allowed it to determine her life and relationships. Were it not for its barbaric content, the prose style could work well for a young adult audience. The plight of Hana and the other “comfort women” nonetheless comes through. It shares with exemplars of the form – Primo Levi's If This is a Man Rezak Hukanovic's The Tenth Circle of Hell – a simplicity to the prose that lets the events speak for themselves, though there is at times an awkwardness to Bracht's style as she tries to put the atrocities into the voices of her characters while failing to resist an authorial tone.

In a detailed author’s note that includes a historical timeline of a war-ravaged country, Bracht outlines the motivation behind the book: to document and draw attention to the horrors so the sins of the past are not repeated.Īlthough fictional in plot and character, her novel has the starkness of witness literature. Mary Lynn Bracht’s debut novel excels at shedding light on a relatively untold story, at least in the Western world, of the thousands of Korean women and girls who were sold into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during Japan’s colonisation of Korea in the second World War. It is a fitting metaphor for the horrific abuse that follows as Hana is kidnapped from a beach by Japanese soldiers after heroically hiding her younger sister Emi. Like many young women in her village, Hana has left school and embraced her Korean heritage as a haenyeo, a girl or woman who supports her family by diving deep into freezing waters to search for abalone or oysters, the latter a rarity following years of plundering by Japanese seamen. Sixteen-year-old Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation, schooled through a foreign tongue that denies her native language and culture. Meet ten of literature's most iconic heroines, jacketed in bold portraits by female photographers from around the world.Jeju Island, Korea, 1943. Moving between Hana in 1943 and Emi as an elderly woman today, White Chrysanthemum sheds light on a devastating history - and how the bond of sisterhood is strong enough to endure the evils of war. Saving her sister, Hana herself is captured and forced to become a 'comfort woman' in a Japanese military brothel.

One day Hana sees a Japanese soldier heading for where Emi is guarding the day's catch on the beach. This is the story of Hana and her little sister Emi, who are part of an island community of haenyo, women who make their living from free diving off the southernmost tip of Korea.

White chrysanthemum novel