Last fall, I picked up Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s Waiting, a graphic novel, loosely based on Gendry-Kim’s mother, as sisters, separated from one another during the Korean War, reunite during one of the family reunions between North and South Korea. Gendry-Kim’s writing and illustrations powerfully depict the emotions of the sisters, and her use of the graphic medium, through black and white illustrations, conveys the pain and suffering of the individuals in the narrative. After reading Waiting, I knew I wanted to read more of Gendry-Kim’s work, and as I constructed the syllabus for “The Reverberations of World War II,” I knew I wanted to add her graphic novel Grass to the list of texts that students could choose from for their final project.

Grass takes a similar narrative strategy to Waiting, with Gendry-Kim placing herself within the narrative as she interviews Okseon Lee, a woman forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese during World War II. Lee details her childhood and her experiences as a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers during the war, ending with her activism seeking reparations and recognition of Japanese atrocities against Lee and others. Just as she does in Waiting, Gendry-Kim’s juxtaposition of words and images conveys the pain and suffering that Lee endured at the hands of countless individuals, and specifically at the hands of Japanese soldiers who frequented the comfort station where her oppressors held her. Nowhere does Gendry-Kim convey these emotions more than a scene where Lee and others long for escape and when the soldiers rape Lee for the first time.

After being at the East Yanji Airport for a while, Lee and two other girls attempt to escape. The lack of food, constant illness, and seeing individuals die while in captivity lead them to run away in the middle of the night. However, they don’t get far because when the reach the edge of the airport they come across an electrified, barbed wire fence and a dead body lying on the ground next to it. Gendry-Kim depicts the girls’ approach to the fence and their reaction to the hopeless they feel in three splash pages. On the first page, narrates, “They had put up an electric fence all around the airport to stop people from escpaing.” We see the girls approach the fence, with a mountain in the distance on the other side, as Lee looks down and tells her companions about the dead body. One of the girls covers her mouth as if she is about to vomit.

The next page switches perspective, placing the reader on the other side of the fence, outisde of the airport. This perspective allows us to view the girls returning to the camp as Lee narrates, “We had no choice but to work till we dropped dead. There was no way out.” While the first page shows freedom outside of the camp, when the girls encounter the fence, they know they will not be free and must endure the horrendous violence against them in the camp. Looking through the barbed wire fence, we see the girls’ backs and downtrodden heads as they walk back to a building in the distance.

The final page of this sequence changes perspective yet again. Here, we look at the girls headon as Lee looks up at the sky, one girl looks at the ground, and the other holds a hand over her face. The night sky and the stars make up the majority of the image as Lee looks up, hoping for freedom beyond the walls of the comfort station. No fence or building appears on the page; instead, the vast expanse of the sky appears. Gendry-Kim depolys similar images throughout Grass to express Lee’s and other victims’ desire for freedom and to signify the world outside of the confines of the comfort station. Even though they are physically confined, their spirits roam free, beyond the buildings and over the fence, leaving behind the torment they endure.

The sexual violence Lee and the other girls endured was horrific, and Gendry-Kim does not shy away from it; however, she does limit what we see as readers, and Gendry-Kim’s decision to do this causes the scenes where Lee describes Japanese soldiers raping her to be even more powerful than they would be if Gendry-Kim showed everything. In the afterward, Gendry-Kim writes, “I avoided sensationalizing the violence, pain, and suffering of the characters. I also refrained from provocative expressions to give lighteness to a story burdened with such brutality.” How does Gendry-Kim do this? And, how does the medium of comics provide Gendry-Kim with the tools to not sensationalize the violence but to also convey it in a powerful way to the reader?

I won’t discuss the entire section where the soldiers rape Lee for the first time because that would be an entire post in and off itself. For eight pages, Gendry-Kim uses the same page layout of six panels per page, two on each line. On teh first page, as Lee begins to describe what happened, Gendry-Kim depicts Lee’s face, gazing downwards, on the left of each panel, aging backwards from her older self to herself as a girl. Over the panels, she narrates, “Just like that, in front of my friends . . . I was raped. Like an animal.” The next page has another six panels, but Lee’s face appears in the middle of the page, overlapping the black panels. Ink oozes from her head, cascading across the page, severing herself from her body in a manner and also severing her mind from the physical pain she endured.

The next three pages each contain six panels each, all blank and black. No words or images appear. We know what is happening, Lee told us, but by leaving the pages blank in this manner, Gendry-Kim calls upon us, as readers, to imagine what occurs. We must fill in the images and sounds, and in this manner, Gendry-Kim makes us participants in the assault, as Lee experiencing the assault but also as the perpetrators executing it because we envision what that assault looks like. On the fourth page, narration begins to appear over the black panels. Lee says, “Girls have a thing called a hymen. Imagine how I felt when mine ripped before I could get married or see the face of my husband. It was awful.” With that, the sequence returns to the present with Gendry-Kim interviewing Lee.

In the present, Lee talks about how she bled, how she wanted to kill herself, and how she couldn’t commit suicide. With her hand to her chin, Lee’s face looses detail as the page progresses, moving from a detailed rendering of her features to a more sketch-like image at the end, her identity disappearing as she details the emotional trauma of the sexual violence against her. The next page focuses on Lee’s hands, as if we are Lee gazing at her hands as she turns them over. Lee talks about feeling she could never return to her parents after the sexual assault, and the page ends with two panels, one black showing her right hand upturned toward the reader and the other white showing her left hand upturned. This act, one of supplication but one also of witness, if we think about Christ showing his nail-scarred hands to the disciples after his resurrection, presents the reader with the truth of what happened and the physical connection to Lee.

Grass is traumatic. It is powerful. It is important. In it, Gendry-Kim uses the comics’ medium to convey all of this, to lay bare the history she depicts. Through the medium, she calls upon us to be active participants in the construction of the meaning and events, to participate in what happened to Lee. She does this powerfully through the absence of images and texts, calling upon us to slow down and fill in the pages then leading us back to the narrative she wants us to see.

There is so much more I could write, but I want to leave it here. What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below, and make sure to follow me on Twitter at @silaslapham.