The Japanese military “comfort women” have been a subject of transnational feminism that criticizes the patriarchy of war and talks about peace and a symbol connected to the unfinished issue, sexual violence against women.

Similar to what the researchers considered in the fourth collection of testimonies, the line placement and long pauses in Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poems would be the mimesis for the testifiers’ persistent pain, long silence, faltering, and hesitation that are manifested through poetic deviation.

Film researcher Hwang Miyojo sheds light on the documentary film “The Silence” produced by female director Park Su-nam, a second-generation Korean-Japanese. Director Park documented the struggle of Lee Ok-sun, who demanded that the Japanese government apologize and provide compensation, together with 14 colleagues.

The author – an ethnomusicologist – invites us to listen to “Comfort Women” survivors’ songs as a way to understand their lives and to remember them.

Written by Son Hee-jung, Yonsei University Institute of Gender Studies

This achievement of historical research will serve as a basis for listening to testimonies in depth beyond the narrow standard of “fact verification.”

the blanks in written language can connect us to the past more powerfully than the original voice, depending on how we relate to the testimonies.

Kim Soom’s novel  “One Left”(Hyundae Munhak) is a work that announces a new turning point in the era of testimony. worldview formed ahead of these final moments, and can it present us with meaningful realistic possibilities not only in literary terms but also social and historical ones?

In some way or another, testimony literature must provide its own answer to the question of what to represent and how. So what was the answer found by Kim Soom's novel "One Left" (Hyundae Munhak, 2016)?

Kim Dae-wol, Head Curator of the House of Sharing