On December 14th, 2020, GWIKS hosted a special book talk with translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton about their latest work, One Left, originally written by Kim Soom, which discusses the topic of Korean comfort women in World War II captured for the first time through a Korean narrative.
To start with some background on how the couple came upon the book and why it had taken so long — 75 years — for a novel like this to be written. During his time as a professor teaching modern Korean literature, Bruce Fulton found dedicate a day to teach about the Korean War. What was curious to him during that time was that he could not find much literature that talked about the experience of the war during the time of the war; a majority of the works that had been published highlighted the circumstances of the war only after the fact. This led to him questioning why this was the case, and ultimately he was led to the answer being that it was just too painful to document and revisit. This would lead him and his wife Ju-chan to focus their attention on translating works of fiction in English about the war that involved trauma, in hopes of helping readers both in Korea and outside of Korea to understand the stereotype of why Korean fiction is considered somber with a new lens of empathy.
This eventually led the couple to translate One Left by Kim Soom. Ju-Chan described Kim Soom as a workhorse, having written 19 novels within the past decade and having a unique writing style that is very fast but also very detailed in its research and narrative. One Left would be her first novel published in English, sprouted after three other books written in Korean regarding comfort women, as Kim Soom took directly to answering the question, “Who is going to tell the stories of these women once they have passed away?” The writing process of the novel was stressful on Kim Soom in its own right, but the goal of continuing to tell their stories to new audiences and new generations was undoubtedly worth it.
What the Fultons found to be the brilliance of this novel was the fact that author Kim Soom worked diligently to research the testimonies of the surviving women affected by this tragedy and was able to create a narrative based solely on the voices of these women. This is not only a novel that captures the story of Korean Comfort women through the eyes of its victims but was also published by a Korean woman who showed dedication to telling the story of their legacies in a detailed, engaging manner. The novel follows the story of our unnamed protagonist through reflections of her past traumas and her present-day experience as the “One Left”, the last of the comfort women. Through this emotional journey of losing herself and reclaiming her name, her identity, the reader begins to understand in reading this experience that this is not the story of just the “One Left”, but rather, the story of hundreds of girls who had to endure this atrocity after being taken from their ancestry homes during the war period.
The message that Kim Soom left with this book is when reading One Left and other stories are to think of these individuals as if they were your mother, your sister, or your neighbor. Try your best to remove the shame from this experience and allow them to tell their stories that need to be heard.
