Mourning Unmourned Deaths: Shamanic Rituals in Nora Okja Keller’s <Comfort Woman>

Abstract

This paper reads Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman with emphasis on the mother-daughter relationship. Having undergone multiple rapes and sexual objectification, Akiko, a former Korean comfort woman, is deprived of the possession of her female body, let alone her own identity and agency. Her impoverished body is later claimed by the spirit of Induk, a murdered comfort woman, through the process of melancholic identification, in which one takes in the shadow of one’s lost love object by denying its death and loss. Transforming into a shaman who incorporates the memories and legacies of lost love objects like Induk and her own mother, Akiko mediates unresolved wishes and desires of wandering spirits and ghosts. Approaching Akiko’s shamanism as a psychological space in which she preserves what she loved but lost in reality, this paper claims that Akiko’s shamanism functions to offer mourning rituals for unacknowledged lives and deaths, like those of the comfort women during the war. The reconciliation process that Akiko’s daughter Beccah undergoes with her shamanic mother is also examined by tracing Beccah’s melancholic identification with her mother and other matrilineal spirits. Tracing the way Beccah comes to understand her mother’s traumatic past and accept her mother’s legacies, the paper examines the transmission of mothers’ life-stories, secrets, and genealogies to their daughters.