Butterfly (Comfort Women)

Decades of anger, grief and wounds, through the conflict of three former “comfort women”

Butterfly deals with one of the most painful truths of modern history: the Japanese military’s system of sexual slavery. From 1937 to 1945, Japan deceived and abducted girls and young women to serve as sex slaves for its soldiers; an estimated 200,000 women across Asia were brutalised. However loudly the survivors testify, Japan stubbornly denies it ever happened — as if waiting for the truth to fade as the grandmothers pass away one by one.

Kim Yun-i, one of these survivors, lives in New York with her memories sealed away. Ten years after emigrating with her daughter’s family, her seemingly peaceful life is disturbed by unwelcome guests: her granddaughter Jin-a has invited two former comfort women, Park Sun-ja and Lee Bok-hee, who have come to New York to tell the world about Japan’s atrocities. Kim resents them for reopening wounds she has bound so tightly. “Sometimes it’s better to bury things. Holding on to old pain only makes it worse. Forgive and forget” — words aimed as much at herself. Yet the harder she denies, the more her memories seep out: the vivid memory of “Hanako” collides with her mother’s insistence that it was only a nightmare.

Terrible memories don’t disappear. People will do anything to forget memories that could rob them of their whole lives — but just when they seem forgotten, such memories resurface, confusing the mind and eating away at life. At last Kim recalls the past and accepts how distorted her life has been. Persuaded by the two women that what cannot be forgotten must be acknowledged and overcome, she opens her heart — understanding that, like a wound that heals only once exposed and cleaned, memory too must be brought out to heal.

The play is by Korean-American playwright Kim Jeong-mi and was well received at its premiere in New York.