The graphic novel is written in a very direct style, much like a documentary. Haunting and stark, yet gorgeously depicted through Gendry-Kim’s black and white ink artwork, Grass is an important testimony to the lives of these 200,000 women who had their lives forever altered.
Grass was created from interviews the author did with Lee Ok-sun and is in part a response to when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied “comfort women” were coerced, walking back a 1993 statement of admission by the government. They were referred to as “comfort women,” a euphemism that downplays the horrors and misogyny of their forced captivity. Grass from author and illustrator Keum Suk Gendry-Kim (also wrote and illustrated The Waiting) examines the lives of Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army during their occupation between 1910-1945. I have found graphic novels to be an excellent medium for memoirs and depictions of history, allowing a personal narrative to come alive in moving artwork that creates a powerful and engaging read. Grass is a landmark graphic novel that makes personal the desperate cost of war and the importance of peace. The cartoonist Gendry-Kim’s interviews with Lee become an integral part of Grass, forming the heart and architecture of this powerful nonfiction graphic novel and offering a holistic view of how Lee’s wartime suffering changed her. Grass is painted in a black ink that flows with lavish details of the beautiful fields and farmland of Korea and uses heavy brushwork on the somber interiors of Lee’s memories. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim emphasizes Lee’s strength in overcoming the many forms of adversity she experienced. Grass is a powerful antiwar graphic novel, telling the life story of a Korean girl named Okseon Lee who was forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War-a disputed chapter in twentieth-century Asian history.īeginning in Lee’s childhood, Grass shows the lead-up to the war from a child’s vulnerable perspective, detailing how one person experienced the Japanese occupation and the widespread suffering it entailed for ordinary Koreans. This true story of a Korean comfort woman documents how the atrocity of war devastates women’s lives
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