So Far From the Bamboo Grove is a very neat story. I had some trouble at first getting my mind set around the right time period of the book. After I read the first couple of chapter I was able to picture the time period more and I was able to create a better mental image of the characters that had been introduced. One great aspects about the story is that it is told from the view point of a Japanese girl that is dealing with many aspects of World War II that any girl her age would have a very difficult time dealing with. Some of the harsh things that the characters such as Yoko had to deal are very hard for me to imagine. I felt a lot of sympathy for Yoko through the whole book. The many crazy situations that she encounters makes her a very strong and smart individual which I gained a lot of respect for as I read the book. The main theme that I gathered from this book was family. Family played a large role in this book. Family is what kept everyone together through all of their hardships. The family had to pull together for survival. I have some heard some debate about whether or not this book should be in classroom. There are people who believe that this book is too harsh from children and other people who think that students will create wrongful images about Korean and Japan. I think this is a great book to have in a classroom. It has a great story and I think the author is very honest and expresses her thoughts with a lot of heart through the whole book. This is a book that I would read again and a book that I would want in my classroom.
This book is not worth reading because it was made for international political purposes, not for education. Most of the facts are distorted in this book:
ReplyDeleteThere were no North-Korean soldiers in 1945 (they existed after 3 years), and the location of where the author claims to have been when she was young did not have the right condition for bamboo trees to grow back then (Nanam). She also claims to have seen and heard bombs explode due to US air-force planes, but B-29s did not have fuel tanks large enough to fly all the way to Korea (nor were there ANY records of bombing in Korea at that time). Also, the United States ORDERED the Japanese soldiers occupying in Korea to be left ARMED until every Japanese civilians were escorted back to their homeland. Thus if Japanese civilians were REALLY raped, chances are, they were raped by their own people.
So what do we have left from this novel? Just a fictional book that distorts history in a very ironic way (Considering the fact that the Japanese soldiers RAPED and MURDERED Korean women at wartime for pleasure. They actually had the nerves to call these women 'Comfort Girls'). The book title should be renamed as "So Far from History and the Truth"
It's like Hitler claiming that he was tortured by the Jews in the Holocaust. Sounds like a nice book for young kids and adults eh?