Honey in the Wound: The Inspiration - by Jiyoung Han

How would you go on if your home was taken from you? Your family? Your language? Honey in the Wound follows a lineage of Korean women as they resist Japanese colonialism and its legacies throughout the twentieth century. It blends historical fiction with magical realism and folkloric storytelling to show how ordinary women can draw on extraordinary strengths to withstand the crushing weight of tyranny.

Honey in the Wound is my debut novel, though I’d never really considered myself a writer before it came to be. It’d been at least two decades since I’d last dabbled with fiction writing as a bookish teen, but one moment of fury changed everything. This book spilled from me in 2023 after I read that there were only nine surviving comfort women left in Korea, all in their nineties.

“Comfort women” is the euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of girls and women forced into state-endorsed sexual slavery by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Hundreds of thousands. And in 2023, there were only nine.

Nine is something I can count on my fingers. Nine women in their nineties, facing the possibility of death without even a sincere apology from the Japanese government whose far-right ruling party goes so far as to deny this history altogether. Nine propelled me into urgency. I was desperate to have more people engage with this issue, to join the call for justice and remembrance. But I was just a run-of-the-mill, anonymous person with no platform or expertise.

I do, however, love stories. I thought of the countless times novels introduced me to pockets of history I never learned in school. Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko taught me about the experience of zainichi Koreans in Japan. Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees taught me about intracommunal conflict in Cyprus. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing taught me about the Ashanti Uprising and the bloody legacies of the Gold Coast. Their example made me think about storytelling as an apt means to inform and understand. So I began typing.

Not having had much formal training, I didn’t know where to start other than to think about what I enjoyed most as a reader. Although my primary goal was to inform others about the Korean experience under Japanese colonial rule, I knew I wouldn’t get far if it wasn’t done through an interesting plot with emotionally resonant characters that readers could root for. When the image of twins roaming the mountains of rural Korea emerged in my mind, I grasped at its threads and kept pulling to unravel a whole lineage of women imbued with special gifts. There was a tiger shapeshifter, a voice that can compel the truth from anyone, the infusion of emotions into cooking, the ability to see into others’ dreams. I used these touches of magical realism to amplify the agency of women who had to navigate the many savage turns of colonial oppression. And while I did not want to dilute the truth of this history’s darker currents, the magical realism helped to balance out the brutality with a throughline of hope and resilience. The resulting novel is something that I hope honors our past while offering an engaging path forward.

As of April 2026, there are five comfort women survivors left in Korea: four fewer than when this novel was first inspired. Writing this book and now ushering it out into the world has given me clarity of purpose. Through this work I process my frustrated grief for comfort women and strive to have more of the world learn about them. I will continue to add to the growing chorus that demands formal governmental accountability, that demands memorialization of this history so we can prevent such atrocities from occurring ever again.

As Audre Lorde writes in Sister Outsider: “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it.”