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A Gesture Life - Chang-Rae Lee

Description: ISBN 1862074011 / Author: Chang-Rae Lee / Genre: Fiction / A Gesture Life presents this chronic condition in two different time frames. ... more

A Gesture Life - Chang-Rae Lee ... In one, delivered via flashback, Hata is a medical officer in Japan's Imperial Army. Posted to a tiny installation in rural Burma, he's ordered to oversee a fresh detachment of Korean comfort women, i.e., victims of institutionalised gang rape. At first he maintains his professional distance, not to mention his erotic appetite: It was the notion of what lay beneath the crumpled cotton of their poor clothes that shook me like an air-raid siren. But soon enough he's drawn into a relationship with one of the women, whose bloody and horrific denouement leaves a permanent mark on the unblissed detachment of his existence.

Newest Review: ... Doc Hata is a complicated man with a complicated past. He is of Korean nationality, but was adopted at a very young age by ... more

... a Japanese couple in Japan . He had begun his training at Medical School when the war began, at which point he was taken on as a medical officer, working to a surgeon. After the war, he immigrated to the US , where he eventually adopted a small girl of Korean birth. His standing in society is very important to him and he is pleased that he is very respected in his small community as a hard-working and knowledgeable man. However, there is a feeling throughout the book that Doc Hata still doesn't feel that he belongs; ...more

Read Reviews for A Gesture Life - Chang-Rae Lee

A Gesture Life - Chang-Rae Lee: Doing the 'right' thing (1122 words)
by - written on 07/12/06 (Very useful, 198 readings)
Rating:

I've lived abroad for a good part of my life and have a love of languages, so it is perhaps for this reason that I tend to look out for foreign authors when I borrow books from my library. I liked the look of this one even more so when I realised it was about Korean comfort women (women forced to prostitute themselves for Japanese soldiers) in Japan during the Second World War. Or so I was led to believe by the blurb on the back cover anyway. What I found was a well-written book that was primarily about a Japanese man living in the US and reflecting on his status in his local community with a bit of his former life during the War thrown in for good measure. Did this make ... Read the complete review