Book Review: The Comfort Station

Anyone who has young kids knows that your book reading goes to damn near nil.  But I’m making an exception and writing and posting this book review because Kelly Crigger is a long time friend of the blog, and it’s worth your time to read it.

Once in a while a book comes along that’s educational and entertaining. Kelly Crigger’s The Comfort Station is that book. The culmination of twelve years of work, this is Crigger’s eighth book, but first foray into fiction and he wrote a winner. Crigger (a retired Lieutenant Colonel) first learned about the hot button issue of comfort women, who were abducted and forced into prostitution for the Japanese Army, while stationed in Korea in 2004 and decided to write about it.

The Comfort Station starts out in 1942 during the Japanese occupation of Korea when tens of thousands of young women were mysteriously disappearing from the peninsula. Our heroine, a teenage farm girl named Ki-Hwa, ignores her parents and brothers pleas to stay in hiding and befriends a Japanese officer. Before she knows it, she’s forced into sexual slavery as a comfort woman for the Japanese Army and is shipped to the South Pacific island fortress of Rabaul to be the mistress of a legendary Cavalry Officer.

“I wanted to shed light on the issue of comfort women,” Crigger says, “But there had to be a good fictional storyline too. So the main premise here is, what happens when you take the wrong girl? Up to 200,000 women were abducted from Korea. There had to be several with enough strength and defiance within them to fight back.”

That singular storyline is compelling enough, but what Crigger does that makes this a great read is take real history and bend it just a little so it’s believable and captivating. Rabaul was a massive Japanese garrison that MacArthur simply bombed the everloving crap out of and then went around, cutting it off and letting it die from inside. Including the comfort stations.

From the book’s summary: “Allied Forces pummel the island in preparation for an inevitable invasion. Paranoia grips the garrison when Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is killed in an Allied ambush shortly after leaving Rabaul and fingers are pointed in every direction. Within this chaos, life for Ki-Hwa and hundreds of others in the comfort stations is survival of the fittest. Once a farm girl afraid of her own shadow, Ki-Hwa discovers people are callous, sadistic, and deceitful and must find the strength to resist the mighty and unforgiving Empire along with her one true friend. But when an imposter threatens to unravel the group’s carefully laid plans she is forced to make an impossible choice between guaranteed security and a shaky promise of freedom.”

Just like the main character who decides to fight back, Crigger also developed an intriguing Japanese Imperial Soldier who questions the authority of the Empire and decides to do something about it. “I can’t imagine everyone had blind devotion to the Emperor so I decided to ask the question ‘what happens when you defy him?’ So then I crossed the paths of these two rebels and this story fell out.”

The Comfort Station is a great page turner with a few massive twists that leave you wanting more. The best books provide the reader with an escape from reality and The Comfort Station does just that.

Category: Book Review