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. Needless to say, I could not put the book down once I had started reading it. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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). 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. Written and illustrated by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Grass keum suk gendry kim