Putnam’s Sons, Chatto & Windus, January 2018)
White Chrysanthemum, Mary Lynn Bracht (G.P. He traps her into travelling to Mongolia with him.
He reappears in the Manchurian brothel, where he becomes one of the guards, and where he regularly rapes Hana after hours. The soldier who kidnapped Hana, Corporal Morimoto, develops a fixation for her. She learns to hold her breath as a soldier invades her body, and she feels as if she is really struggling to breathe before rising to the surface for air to fill her lungs. As the men visit her each day she withdraws from reality and sees herself diving deep beneath the ocean, escaping her surroundings. With a clear head, she has the power to make herself retreat into her imagination. She refuses to drink opium tea, because she wants to keep a clear head:
The memory of diving now becomes an important gift for Hana. Here she spends her days being raped by the soldiers-men are allotted 30 minutes each, officers get longer. Immediately after her kidnapping, Hana is held captive in a brothel in Manchuria. Both sets of chapters are written largely in the present tense, a choice which serves to collapse the gap of over seventy years between the two strands of the novel. But Hana’s quick-thinking saves her sister she sacrifices herself, and she, not Emi, becomes the soldier’s victim-first of kidnapping, and then of rape and sustained abuse.īracht alternates between chapters set in 1943 which follow Hana’s harrowing story, and chapters set in 2011, which unpeel the lifelong effects on Emi of the loss of her sister. When Hana surfaces, she sees a Japanese soldier approaching her sister it seems inevitable that Emi must be kidnapped. One day in 1943, Hana has been diving, leaving Emi on the shore, to guard the catch. Diving, and resurfacing, are fitting metaphors for the characters’, and Korean society’s, suffering and survival.
Descriptions of diving, and the haenyeo way of life, occur through the novel, from the opening description of captive Hana’s memories of the ceremony through which she became a fully-fledged haenyeo, to the closing description of Hana diving in a lake in Mongolia. At the opening of the novel, Hana is sixteen and her younger sister Emi is still too young to dive, although she too soon becomes a haenyeo. They are strong, independent women who harvest bounty from the ocean floor to feed their families. In her debut novel, London-based Korean-American writer Mary Lynn Bracht explores the effects of these women’s abductions on their families and on wider society, and celebrates the power of women to survive horrific circumstances.īracht’s protagonists are haenyeo, female free divers from the southern Korean island of Jeju Island. W hite Chrysanthemum memorializes Korean comfort women-women forced into sexual slavery by Japanese occupying forces during World War Two.
0 kommentar(er)
