WHITE CHRYSANTHEMUM by Mary Lynn Bracht

This book is a novel, but is based 100% on fact, a subject we really know little about, one of great cruelty, pain, brutality perpetrated by the Imperial Japanese army from the early 1930s through to 1945. Despite the diplomatic and political squirming that still seems to go on between Japan and the many countries they decimated over these years, the 'comfort women' policy did happen. The girls and young women of Korea were swept up in their thousands to 'comfort' the soldiers of the Japanese army, raped up to 30-40 times a day. It was only in 1993 that the Japanese government finally acknowledged the existence of comfort women.

This novel tells the story of two Korean sisters, Hana and Emi, separated during the war. Hana is dragged away by a Japanese soldier to a life of sexual slavery; Emi is left to grow up wondering what happened to her sister. Hana’s narrative covers the war years, while in Emi’s chapters it is 2011, and the elderly Emi is still looking for her sister.

The subject matter is quite brutal, you want to cry for Hana and what she goes through, and for Emi who blames herself for her sister's disappearance. War is a terrible thing, as we have seen with the accounts coming out of post war Europe. And here is another part of the world that suffered equally awful things; finally we are hearing their stories too. The author herself is of South Korean descent. It was on a trip back to her mother's village that she first learnt about the fate of girls as young as 14, possibly even younger, who found themselves in a living hell. The writing, told entirely in the present tense, is incredibly compassionate and kind towards these girls/women, most never surviving the war, and those who did treated as outcasts and damaged goods when they did return to their homelands. And white chrysanthemums? This flower is a symbol of mourning in Korea, placed on coffins at funerals, laid on graves, placed at the water's edge. So unbearably sad.