HONEY IN THE WOUND

Honey can be a salve or a sweetener but, as Han illustrates so vividly, not all wounds can be healed by the oft-employed Korean folk remedy.

Han explores the dehumanizing practice of sexual enslavement in a narrative that employs realism of both the stark and the magical kind as she follows several generations of Korean women through perilous times. Beginning with the story of twins, Geum-Ja, a girl, and Geum-Jin, a boy, born in a mountainous region of Korea in 1902, Han traces the increasingly malignant effects of Japanese occupation. Thirteen-year-old Geum-Ja, who mysteriously disappears from the family’s compound one night, assumes the form of a tiger and exerts power and protection over her family in that guise. Geum-Jin grows up in her absence and goes on to get married and father three children, but his family is brutalized by Japanese soldiers in a raid on their home in 1931. The only apparent survivor is his daughter Song Young-Ja, whose heartbreaking story forms the core of the saga. A childless couple opens their home to Song Young-Ja but she is molested by the husband and then sent away by the wife. A demeaning job in a teahouse—a hotbed of gossip and espionage—evolves over time. Still, Song Young-Ja’s constrained but relatively safe existence comes to a cruel end in 1941 when she is captured by Japanese soldiers and transported to a camp where women serve as sex slaves. Her experiences are brutally recounted in corrosive detail. Song Young-Ja subversively employs her own supernatural ability to incorporate her emotional state into the foods she prepares but still suffers incalculable harm. Decades pass before the injuries suffered by the enslaved women are publicly acknowledged. It is with the aid of Song Young-Ja’s young granddaughter—who harbors a mysterious ability of her own—that she begins to confront her past. Han has incorporated extensive research into a revelatory work of harrowing fiction.

Han exposes a diabolical world of pain and validates the hidden powers of “powerless” women.