Comfort Woman by Nora Okja Keller

remember thinking that I could not stop cleaning, washing, cooking, gluing, because if I did, the camp sounds would envelop me and I would be back there, trying to silence the noises I made eating, crying, relieving myself, breathing, living. As long as I was quiet, there was the hope that I would be overlooked and allowed to die in the darkness.
    Each day, I woke in silence, not sure of where I was. Then, when I sat up, saw the Jesus-on-the-cross hanging on the back of the door, and realized I was in the Mentholatum building with the missionaries, I would begin to hear the thunder of delivery trucks and the grinding metal of gears shifting. The rumbling of the trucks would get louder and louder, and I knew that if I did not jump out of bed and hurry into action, I would be delivered into the camps once again.
    I worked hard at the mission house, holding on to the labor to keep from spinning back into myself.

    Because I could not risk looking away from my chores, it took me a long time to recognize the others staying in the home. Every day, I met the same people over and over again as if for the first time. No matter how many times I would glance at the faces floating by and away from me, I was never able to catch and hold on to the individual features of each person.

    The missionaries saved several girls by pretending to hire them as employees of the Heaven and Earth Mentholatum and Matches Company. Used as a shield from the Japanese, who, not trusting foreign influences, discouraged Christianity but encouraged businesses for the revenue that could be sent back to the Emperor, the Mentholatum and Matches building had been erected at the start of the Japanese occupation and now appeared generations old.
    Roughly my age, the girls who were rescued were round-faced and pretty in their innocence, as I once had been. They braided their hair with bright-colored ribbons that flashed against their black hair and uniforms when they marched out of their common sleeping quarters and into the kitchen. Like children, they squirmed in their seats, stifling giggles and gossip when I swept past them.
    Later, when I could once again hear what others heard, I caught their whispers flying against me: Why does the minister always save the sweetest pastry for the devil girl? And see how he always touches her head, gives her the prettiest ribbons for her braid?
    Even the missionaries gossiped. I heard Sister Red Nose say, The wild child is possessed, a false light luring away the faithful. Sister Milk Breath, giving me the name that Manshin Ahjima predicted would be mine at the mission, muttered, Mary Magdalene, a curse, whenever I passed her way.
    Once, when questioned to his face about his treatment of me, the minister smiled, a fleeting quirk of the lips, and said, What man of you, having a hundred sheep, doth not leave the ninety and nine to go after that one which is lost, until he finds it?
    Putting his hand on my head, he looked at his sheep until they dropped their eyes. Rejoice, he said to them, for I have found a lamb that once was lost.
    Later the young girls fluttered around me. Will the handsome minister save you? they giggled.
    I wish he would save me, one said.
    As long as he saves me some ribbon, another grumbled. Akiko must get more than her fair share, don’t you, Akiko?
    Oh, it’s not fair, the girls cried. Akiko always gets more of everything because they say she’s touched. I think you are just acting. You wait till the war is over, Akiko. Our families will find us and we’ll marry rich men and have everything. What will you have, crazy Akiko, with no family and no mind?
    Because they were still young, they had faith that the war would end and the Japanese would be defeated. That their lives would resume their prewar scripts, as if the war and their abandonment caused only a brief stutter in the opera they envisioned for themselves.
    Because they were still babies, really, I did not tell them what I knew was