The Comfort Woman
She had known that her father would die on the night of the summer festival. He was a coalminer in the small Japanese village of Kitamatsu on the southern island of Kyushu. She was one of the teenage girls who wore bright blue kimonos and struggled along the muddy pavements in their wooden sandals with the rest of the procession. The air was smoky and damp, loaded with the smells of grilled fish. Through the streets of the village the men carried a huge painted plaster dragon, mounted on a wooden palette, on their shoulders. After the rain started, the kimonos with their red sashes became wetter and more revealing and the girls danced more keenly to the cacophony of beating drums and clanging bells.
Even as she danced there was a tiny needle of light in her mind that told her there would be trouble. Once the procession finished she said to her father that she wanted him to take her home. He wouldn’t listen and kept drinking beer in the village square with the rest of the men. Their songs got louder and cruder. Then she saw him with the shiny red eye of the dragon in his hands. Her father was a poor man and the eye could be sold for at least a month’s wages. Then he was down in the mud and she could see them kicking, kicking him again and again until the eye slipped from his hands. No-one could hear her when she screamed at them to stop. He never got up.
Ten years later, in 1937, Japanese soldiers invaded China and occupied the city of Shanghai. She was still living in Kitamatsu with her elderly mother when they seized her. She was taken to stop the Japanese soldiers raping their way indiscriminately across the eastern Chinese seaboard, which would have inflamed local resistance to the occupation. They wanted her to control China. With her one body she held the Chinese at bay for her masters.
The kimono she wore now was gray and faded. As she was raped every day, ten times a day or even more, sometimes by two at once, she began to concentrate on the tiny tunnel of light that still existed in her mind. The needle-eye which had whispered to her that her father would die, which had soundlessly intimated the following year that her brother would come home from school camp in the mountains with a broken arm.
The needle’s eye became a little wider and seemed to become a tunnel that was inviting to enter. Each day with the brutes inside her she would crawl a little further along the tunnel. One day the tunnel got wider and she was able to stand up. It felt solid under her feet. She looked down and she could see the brutes down there, one between her legs and one at her ass and she suddenly felt that they were fucking a corpse. She could also see outside the hut, the slack-jawed soldiers smoking and waiting their turn. The tunnel opened out endlessly before her. She stepped forward into the light and was gone.