Grass
Written and illustrated by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim
Translated by Janet Hong
August 27, 2019
ISBN 9781770463622
Powerful, engrossing and heart wrenching, Grass is a multi-award winning non-fiction graphic novel chronicling the life story of “Granny Lee” Ok-sun, a Korean survivor of sexual enslavement by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. In each panel of every page, the reader can feel cartoonist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s urgent call for ending all atrocities and wars through her re-telling of Ok-sun’s ordeals, from growing up poor in rural Korea to her eventual coercion into becoming a “comfort woman” (a euphemism coined by the Japanese Imperial Army). Through exquisite ink-brush drawings, insightful visual metaphors, in-depth interviews and research, the author depicts Ok-sun’s hopes, loss, grief, anger and resilience with incredible depths of empathy, compassion and beauty. For her visionary and compelling storytelling in Grass, Gendry-Kim has earned well-deserved accolades and recognition, including, most recently, the 2020 Krause Essay Prize from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing program. At over 450 pages, Grass is a groundbreaking graphic novel that depicts how adults throughout Ok-sun’s youth betrayed and exploited her for their profit. The story chronicles events that led up to agents for Japanese Imperial Army kidnapping and enslaving Ok-sun and vulnerable girls like her become “comfort women” against their wills. Needless to say, I could not put the book down once I had started reading it.
Grass starts off in the middle of Ok-sun’s journey in Longjing, China, where, after spending decades away from her homeland since World War II, she embarks upon her long-awaited return to Korea to live in the House of Sharing, a common living facility for former comfort women in Gwangju. Gendry-Kim seamlessly transports readers across time and place, chapter by chapter, masterfully capturing the holistic evolution of the protagonist from an impoverished but hopeful girl yearning to one day attend school into a wise elder standing up to the Japanese government, demanding accountability and apologies for the crimes against humanity and torture they had inflicted upon “comfort women.” Gendry-Kim includes herself in the story during scenes where she recounts her meetings with Ok-sun, whom she affectionately refers to as “Granny Lee.” During those scenes, she allows readers into her internal struggles regarding the ethical dilemmas in representing the experiences of former “comfort women,” whose stories, she notes, have already been depicted in manwha, or Korean comics, before. She critically reflects upon her intentions of embarking on this project and discloses her apprehension about whether her own documentary endeavor is equally as exploitative and degrading as the injustices Ok-sun already endured throughout her life.
The author conscientiously eschews sensationalizing or providing graphic representations of violent scenes. Instead, she infers incidences of physical and psychological violations through use of darkness and lightness in particular settings, scale and size of figures, empty spaces around characters during moments of intense emotion, isolation and silence. She displays her mastery of distilling characters’ intense emotions with detailed facial expressions, gestures, and landscapes within bold innovative line drawings and minimalist compositions. Birds and natural scenery frequently appear as witnesses to tragedy, and also serve as sites of memory and change. In her acceptance speech for the Krause award, Gendry-Kim stated that she decided on Grass as the title of her work because “comfort women” had been trampled upon like grass.
A hefty, journalistic graphic novel addressing themes of trauma, violence and injustice, Grass would be an appropriate read for mature readers, from adolescents to adults. For scholars and students in disciplines such as history, gender studies, international studies and sociology, Grass is a must-read text that allows for significant conversations about poverty, war, crimes against humanity, gender-based violence and reparations for survivors.
Review by Dawn Wing. Editing assistance by Anastasia Chiu.