The best anyone can hope for, Gendry-Kim seems to conclude, is to say, collectively, “This happened.” Despite occasional moments of disjointed plotting, Gendry-Kim tells Ok-sun’s powerful story with grace, artfulness, and humility it deserves witness. After the war, Ok-sun finds relative peace, but it’s clear that politicians lack the power and will to enact true healing. At the Chinese outpost where Japanese soldiers rape her regularly, there is no “comfort,” just a dirty work camp where her visitors, up to forty a day, are “all the same.” When Ok-sun describes her first rape, Gendry-Kim draws six black panels with Ok-sun’s terrified face bursting out of the frame. Ok-sun-depicted as a wrinkly old woman in the present day and a round-faced, triangle-nosed girl in her youth-is sold twice as a child into domestic work (though promised she was going to school) in poverty-stricken, occupied Korea before Japanese forces kidnap her. and I mean it when I say they are hard to read.

Gendry-Kim hoped to learn about social class and gender disparity during World War II and write a book about this subject.

This graphic novel is totally devastating - from Lee's tough childhood filled with poverty and responsibilities beyond her age to the moment when she becomes a sexual slave. Grass, Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, Janet Hong (trans) (Drawn & Quarterly, August 2019) S ome years back, graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim interviewed an elderly Korean woman named Lee Ok-sun. Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World Wara disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history. In telling the difficult, moving story of Korean former “comfort woman” Granny Lee Ok-sun, Gendry-Kim faces a philosophical question as well as an artistic one: what can be redeemed in a life defined largely by cruelty? In swift black brushstrokes that feel both contemporary and, in key wordless pauses, classical, Gendry-Kim follows Ok-sun’s narration of her life (based on interviews) with minimal editorializing. GRASS by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim is a graphic memoir about Lee Ok-sun, a Korean woman who was forced to be a 'comfort woman' for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II.

Grass keum suk