A Crucial ReckoningSome stories are too terrible to be told. Perhaps that is why it took seventy-five years for One Left, by Kim Soom, to be written. Hers is the first Korean novel about Korean women captured as sex slaves during the Pacific War. Of 200,000 women and girls, stolen and enslaved, only 20,000 returned alive. It took decades for the cruelties to be acknowledged and the victims remembered. And, as is often true in sexual abuse, the sufferers’ own guilt and shame also perpetuated the silence.As One Left begins, the 93-year-old protagonist hears a story on television introducing the only remaining comfort woman in Korea. The protagonist, called simply “she”, has never revealed her own survivor status. But now, if the woman on television dies, she will be the only one left.She lives with her cat Nabi in a house that belongs to her nephew. The house, with an outdoor faucet and latrine, sits on a mere fifty-nine square yards of land. In an opening scene, she discovers a dead magpie lying next to her shoes—two Korean symbols that reappear throughout the story. As she wanders the streets, interacting in her neighborhood, we meet a beauty parlour woman; convenience shop owners; and an old man who cares for his disabled son by selling copper junk and captured kittens.The kittens reappear too, serving as one of the story’s metaphors: “Just like the girls became the property of a haha, okusan, obason, or otosan after they were snatched and taken away while weeding the field, picking cotton, fetching water from the village well, returning home from washing laundry in the stream, heading to school or tending to their ailing father.”Each of the protagonist’s present-day interactions sparks a flashback to Manchuria, where she was forced to work. In these interludes, we meet her friends—other girls taken, as young as thirteen, to service Japanese soldiers. In the 1930s and 1940s, these Korean girls were promised factory jobs, or simply kidnapped. Transported via truck or train, once in Manchuria they were forced to have sex with soldiers, physically abused for breaking the rules, induced into opium addiction, surgically maimed, and required to wash and reuse condoms. Their superiors charged them for food, menstrual pads, hot water, and heat, until, buried in debt, the girls could never buy their way out.As a reader, I search novels for comparisons to my own life. In this case, my privileged circumstances bear no resemblance to the horrors exposed in the book. So, instead, I read to learn and empathize. There was much here to absorb about misogyny, cruelty, and hegemony.The novel unearths a litany of atrocities, documented by Kim Soom’s extensive research. Chapter by chapter, graphic details come directly from testimonies of real-life comfort women. Information is identified by a footnote with sources listed at the end of the book.Without melodrama, using the straightforward power of truth, Kim Soom reveals the barbarities. Yes, it is fiction, but corroborated by facts. “He told her to swallow his semen.”—“The bullet passed through her uterus. It didn’t kill her, but it left her like a rotten pumpkin down there.”—“To keep them from escaping, he had strung electric wire around the compound.”One Left, translated by Bruce and Ju-chan Fulton, employs artful and evocative language, creating striking visual images: “As soon as she saw the girls emerging from the cargo bin, she started counting heads, like a rancher taking inventory of his livestock.”—“The sun was setting and the afterglow was blood red.”Woven in and around wartime flashbacks and modern present-day, the woman on television reappears. Her story spurs the protagonist to consider. Was she right to remain silent? Is it time to speak up? Or is she still afraid of stigmatization and social exile?How can she divulge the truth? And what would be the consequences? No one knows she was captured at thirteen to be a sex slave. No one knows that every day, men visited her by the dozen. Fifty on Sundays.With her end-of-life looming, she faces decisions and dilemmas. How long will her money last? Will a proposed demolition destroy her home? Will her nephew move her to a nursing home? Will she die alone with her secret? Or decide to share the truth?Twenty-first-century newspapers report on human trafficking. There is an international #MeToo movement. Women and girls account for 99% of sex industry victims. The statistics are shocking, but they can seem removed from daily life. But, in One Left, I experienced these abominations in my gut—the broken bones, ripped vaginas, and perpetual hunger—through Kim Soom’s compelling character.This story is strewn with themes of memory and guilt, domination and abuse, the human instinct toward self-preservation, and faith in gods and humanity. Through this fictionalized account of true events, readers gain insight about those who committed crimes, those who abetted the criminals, and the long-lasting effects of sex crimes. I read the 224 pages in just a few days, but weeks later, its images haunt me.