Nora Keller - Comfort Woman

Not long after I started working for the Bulletin, I saw Tiffi Sugimoto. She wandered into the news building, looking for the marketing department, and even after all the years that had passed, I recognized her right away. With her spindly arms and her head that seemed overly large for her thin neck and scrawny body, she looked more like a ten-year-old as an adult than she had when she was really ten. When we were both ten, she seemed so big, her power as Toots’s “right-hand man” larger than life.

I meant to look away when she walked near me, but I was caught staring. She smiled at me and sailed over to my cubicle. “Rebeccah!” she said as she bent over to hug me. She smacked the air near my ear. “You look exactly the same!”

I must have appeared dubious, because she leaned back and said, “Don’t you remember me? Tiffany Sugimoto. Remember, me and Janice were always following you around, trying to be your friend?”

“Uh, yes, Tiffi,” I mumbled.

Tiffi giggled, high-pitched and girlish, and as the men in the newsroom—including Sanford, who back then always seemed to be nearby and ready with encouragement and advice—looked up, she batted her lashes. “What a wonderful place to work,” she cooed. “How stimulating! How exciting to be the first to know the news!”

I grunted. “What I do is not glamorous,” I said. Then, throwing a glance, a challenge, toward Sanford, I added, “At least not yet it’s not.”

“No, really, Rebeccah,” Tiffi said, frowning her sincerity. “Wait till I tell Janice and the others what you are doing now. Now that Janice is back from California, learning how to be an EST instructor, I know she‘d, like, love to see you! We always wondered what happened when you moved away—you went to the Mainland to live with your dad, right?”

She patted my head. “We really missed you. You always had such presence, an individualistic sense of style and color, and what a wit! Remember when Vice Principal Pili ordered you to sing”Hawai’i Pono’i“ and you made up your own words? I thought he would, like, flip!”

Tiffi laughed and added how great it was to see me, that we should keep in touch, and maybe the “old Ala Wai gang” could get together for a mini-reunion. Hey—would I be willing to, like, put together a newsletter?

As I smiled and nodded whenever she took a breath, all I could think was: Is this the way she really remembers it? Her sincerity made me doubt my own version of events. Perhaps what I thought was true had been colored by the insecurities of a ten-year-old girl. At any rate, at that moment, looking at Tiffi chatting at me like we were the best of friends, I realized that not only could I not trust my mother’s stories; I could not trust my own.

I was strapped down when my daughter was born too. My hands cuffed to the bed, flat on my back with my knees up, I heard the low keening of a wounded animal in the etherized darkness. Surrounded by doctors, unable to move, I felt my mind slip back into the camps. You’re a doctor, I screamed, help me, help me get home. But he only laughed and pushed himself on top of me, using my body as the other soldiers had done. Afterward, as he wiped himself on my shift, he opened the screen partition and let others watch him examine me. This one is still good, he called over his shoulder. He pried the lips of my vagina open with his fingers. See? he said. Still firm and moist.

I tried to protect my daughter from the doctors, from their dirty hands and eyes. I scissored my legs closed, wanting to keep my child cradled within me, safe. But they roped my legs, stretching them open into the Japanese character for “man.” One doctor pushed on my stomach, another widened me with a double-pronged stick, and this time my baby came into the world fully formed and alive.

We caught her, someone said—and when I heard that woman’s voice in the roomful of men, I knew Induk was there. Slipping into the body of a doctor, she stood beside me, shadowed by mask, gown, and a halo of light. And though I could not see her face, though it had been some time since she last came to me, I knew it was her, just as I’ve always known. Even the first time.

She comes in singing, entering with full voice, filling me so that there is no me except for her, Induk.

That first time, she found me sprawled next to an unnamed stream above the Yalu, the place where I had discarded my empty body, and invited herself in.

I saw her with my eyes closed, though how I knew she was Induk I do not know, for she looked like my mother, standing there next to the river with her arms outstretched, long strips of hair coming undone from the married woman’s bun at the back of her neck. It was as if without their earthly bodies, the boundaries between them melted, blending their features, merging their spirits. Now I cannot remember what either my mother or Induk looked like when she was alive and a separate person.

Here, baby, here, Induk said, her voice creaking like a hundred thousand frogs. She shuffled closer, hands cupping her breasts, which turned into an offering of freshly unearthed ginseng.

It is not myokkuk, Induk said as I gnawed on a raw root. She stroked my head, combing out the tangles with her fingers just as I did for her when she was alive, then she said: But the seaweed soup is mostly good for making milk anyway. You don’t need that now.

My stomach cramped, and I threw up what I had eaten. I rinsed my mouth with water from the stream, and my stomach rebelled at even the taste of water. Yet I could not stop my mouth from sucking at the root.

Secretly, I think that is why I could not have a baby for so long after the Japanese recreation camp. Though the camp doctors said my insides were ruined from so many men, so many times, I think that the real reason I could not conceive for almost twenty years is because I ate so much ginseng. I became unbalanced with male energy. Finally the effects wore off enough to give me a baby girl.

I make seaweed soup for myself now, for milk for my living daughter. Induk says my body is weakest after birth, but also at its most flexible. Our bones are as soft and changeable as those of the fetus we carried for nine months. This is the time we are most female, she says. Myokkuk is for women, for life.

My breasts tingle at my daughter’s cry. I pick her up before she fully wakes, so that even before she reaches consciousness, she knows that her mother is here for her.

Her father says, Leave her to cry for a while. You’re spoiling her. She needs to learn independence. ‘

He tells me, parroting the doctor, Give her the bottle, better than breast.

But I cannot. I have heard what the doctor says, but I also remember my own mother shaking her small, limp breasts at each of her daughters, laughing as we bathed together. Look, girls! See what you did to me? she teased. See what will happen to you, too, one day when you give all of yourself to your own children?

All I know is that I do not want my baby to experience even a moment of insecurity, of want. I cannot take the time to prepare and heat a bottle while she screams with hunger. And if she drinks from the bottle, how will she know her mother’s heart?