One Left: A Novel

"One of the reasons that some people find Korean fiction dark and depressing is that it covers some of the worst episodes of modern Korean history. Many people still have very negative feelings about the Japanese colonial period. Millions of family members remain divided by the Korean War. There were many who were incarcerated, and in some cases, tortured, during almost thirty years of military dictatorship. What is significant about books like One Left is that the author is retrieving a significant population of Koreans from historical oblivion, and—once again—giving them voices, like Hwang Sok-Yong did in The Guest. Believe it or not, it’s estimated that more than 200,000 Korean girls were taken from their ancestral villages after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. They were physically taken, or manipulated by promises of a good job in a factory somewhere, where they could send money back to their families and their villages. Most of them ended up on trains that delivered them to so-called ‘comfort stations’ in Manchuria, where they were forced to sexually service as many as fifty Japanese soldiers a day. Not until 1991, 46 years after World War Two ended, did the first of the survivors go public. Only a small percentage ever made their way back to Korea. For these girls inducted into sexual servitude, the euphemism ‘comfort women’ came into being; they’re more properly understood as sex slaves, women in indentured sexual servitude. Not until five years ago was there a novel that focused exclusively on these women. Kim Soom researched all of the survivors’ commentaries, testimonies, newspaper articles, memoir-type essays. At least one of the women she cited gave testimony before the US Congress. And so all the detail in the book is based on historical evidence. So, historically, the account is accurate, but Kim Soon has placed the story in the present, in a neighbourhood undergoing redevelopment. Most of the residents have moved out in advance of the demolition. The narrator is an unregistered former comfort woman, and most of the novel consists of flashbacks of the protagonist. In the present, she’s keeping count of the surviving women. As the novel begins, there are more than 50, but by the end there is only ‘one left,’ the title of our translation. The Korean title is, literally, ‘One Person.’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . At the end of the novel the protagonist decides to go to the university hospital where the last woman lies close to death, to tell her that when she’s gone, there will still be one left: she herself. On the way to the hospital, she remembers a time when she and some of the other girls from the Manchurian comfort station were on their way into a nearby town to serve the soldiers stationed there, and they had to cross a river in a boat. On their way back, the boat encountered rough water, and the protagonist was thrown overboard. She thought she was done for, but felt arms taking hold of her, and heard voices calling out her given name, a name she had not used or even thought of for seventy years. So in this way she is reclaiming her identity, the name she was given at birth, reclaiming those twelve or thirteen years spent in her childhood village. And by doing so she stands for each one of the 200,000-plus girls who were taken away. That’s the meaning of Kim Soom’s ‘One Person.’ Not only has the Japanese Government not issued a formal apology to those victims of sexual servitude, but the Republic of Korea has not either. There are many who perhaps out of a sense of collective guilt would probably be happy to see those women remain in the shadows, remain buried. But by returning these individuals to historical memory, we can validate their voices and move on with awareness, and a will to make sure it doesn’t happen again."