Comfort Woman, by Nora Okja Keller

A mother’s mental illness rooted in a tortured past as a comfort woman is discovered by her daughter through interesting use of alternating chapters of voices past/present, real and ghost. Published in 1997, Keller’s book was among the first in the U.S. to tackle the brutality of this practice during the Pacific War, when Japan conscripted young girls as “comfort nurses” for their troops stationed throughout the empire.

Fox Girl by Nora Okja Keller

A young girl discovers that her mother is really her stepmother (who hates her) and is tossed out of house. She assumes a life of fringe living around a G.I. base (early 1960s?) in the worst parts of town, surrounded by the misfits and abandoned who scrabble for a hard life in a tough competitive world. She becomes a bar girl in the worst way and eventually makes her way to Hawaii and refuge with a friend’s child. Violence is depicted with such graphic detail that the author was criticized for extremity/graphic treatment of sexual violence with the argument that it begets further violence. It is a pitifuland difficult tale of abuse and hardship, told well, with a memorable protagonist.