Miss Gone-overseas: Karayuki-san

In the sparse, lyrical style of a classic pillow book, Miss Gone-overseas chronicles a wartime life that doesn’t focus on guns, bombs or military depredations, but on the pedestrian life of a lower-class Japanese woman as she reflects on the turmoil around her. Meiko, a mountain village girl in an unfortunate marriage, is sold to brokers who resell her to a big city brothel. One commercial brothel then sells her to another and she finds herself on an island in one of Japan’s distant colonies. Not an untypical fate of a Karayuki-san, or a Miss Gone-overseas, a victim of that culture’s legal sex-trafficking. In this small book, she has been given a voice to tell about her life on a tropical Pacific island during the later part of World War II, a book that begins and ends with separations that are also beginnings.