Book Review: "Grass" By Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Find out how this graphic novel got its title. Photo by Cheyenne Trujillo.

As of July 2, 2021, only 14 out of the 240 registered Korean survivors of Japan's military sexual slavery are still alive. This number diminishes even further when compared to the estimated 100,000—200,000 Korean girls and women kidnapped to serve as comfort women.

To start, the term comfort women is a misnomer.

And that is how the biographical graphic novel Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim opens. 

On the very first page, nestled right above a flowering tree, she writes:

The term 'comfort women' is widely used to refer to the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery. A direct translation of the Japanese euphemism for 'prostitute,' ianfu, the term continues to be controversial...since it reflects only the perspective of the Japanese military and distorts the victim's experiences.

Despite the failings of the term, this is the most common phrasing used to refer to this specific form of sexual slavery and the word that Gendry-Kim uses in Grass. 

Grass details the journey of survivor Lee Ok-Sun (referred to as Granny Lee Ok-Sun in the novel), a Korean woman in her 90s who was sold off as a laborer at 14 years old and kidnapped to be a comfort woman just a year later. She now lives at the House of Sharing in Seoul, South Korea where author Gendry-Kim met and interviewed her. 

This graphic novel is told in black inky paintings with black and white panels. A visual novel may seem like an odd choice to tell such a dark story. Yet, this form amplifies the impact of the story and offers the reader a respite as well.

Instead of just reading the last conversation between Granny Lee Ok-Sun and her father, the reader sees her young face light up with hope and excitement when her father tells her she will work at an udon shop and go to school. 

Food was scarce during the Japanese occupation, and only boys were allowed to go to school. Although Granny Lee Ok-Sun would be separated from her family, the udon shop would fulfill her basic needs and dream of getting an education. 

On her last night with her family, her father combs her hair and gives her life advice against the setting of a white backdrop. Each panel is all white up until the very last one when the conversation reaches its climax. 

The completely black final panel contrasts sharply from the rest. Her father, etched in white, has his back to her as a young Granny Lee Ok-Sun sits on the floor—grinning wide—promising her father, 

I'll make lots of money, so the little ones won't go hungry. 

This visual illustration deepens the betrayal of her parents and loss of innocence as every promise made to Granny Lee Ok-Sun is broken.

She would never get the education she was promised, and she would never see her parents again.  

The udon shop owners sell her off to a tavern after months of miserable working conditions and begging to return home. While working at this tavern, Granny Lee Ok-Sun is kidnapped by two Korean men. They hand her over to Japanese soldiers who traffic her to work in a comfort station in a different county. 

Gendry-Kim's illustrations make the reader bear witness to the atrocities that Granny Lee Ok-Sun lived through. These were the most isolating years of her life, and the author and reader symbolically witness her inky caricature torn away from her family and forcibly passed around until she ends up in northeastern China.

Grass discusses abuse, sexual violence, war crimes, and medical neglect to name a few subjects people may find triggering. 

One of the most haunting scenes depicts a hallway with multiple doors and soldiers' boots lined up outside each door.

After describing such a heart-breaking scene, it may seem more bizarre that the illustrations offer any break from the traumatic scenes. But Grass is full of pages of sprawling trees, tall grass blowing in the wind, and open skies that are paired with the narrative.

These natural scenes provide whitespace and something to focus on—to stay grounded with—as the biography trudges through some of its darkest moments. Gendry-Kim feels this herself, commenting on the writing process as "walking through a long, dark, depressing tunnel." 

But she ends the book with this:

The winter is over, and the cold that seemed to last forever is thawing. Spring has finally come.

The final pages of the story show Granny Lee Ok-Sun with a large smile, shaping every crease on her aged face, followed on the next page by the silhouette of her 15-year-old self watching it snow on the mountain with her back to the reader.

Spring has come for Granny Lee Ok-Sun, too, after a long winter in her life.

While those scenes make reading the story manageable, they do not negate the impact of the Japanese Imperial Army. There are natural landscapes and equally dark illustrations.

Gendry-Kim's account of Granny Lee Ok-Sun's testimony is thorough as Grass shows the horrors of war and the Japanese Imperial Army without sensationalizing it and its impact on present-day Korea, China, and its victims. 

This is a moving account of the comfort stations captured in print that becomes increasingly important as deniers become more vocal. 

Over the past few years, various articles detailed how certain politicians have tried to remove comfort women from history books and retaliate against those who advocate for comfort women. 

Couple Kim Woon-Sung and Kim Seo-Kyung made 50 memorial statues to comfort women that are spread across the globe, nine of them being in the United States of America, and almost every installation brings a protest from Japan with it. 

The Young Girls Peace Monument in Georgia was moved three times (if you count its initial planned location in Atlanta) before settling in Blackburn Park in Brookhaven, GA.

The remaining registered Korean comfort women still protest outside of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, South Korea every Wednesday for an official apology and compensation from Japan. Recently, Japan's former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated on Friday, July 8. The news of his assassination is still unfolding as they investigate the motive for this attack. 

Visit the Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education to learn more about this issue and the latest news about comfort women around the world.

Stop by any Birmingham Public Library location to check out a copy of Grass and find more books by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim in our catalog, too. 

By Cheyenne Trujillo | Library Assistant Ⅲ, Public Relations