Elizabeth Son's Embodied Reckoning: “Comfort Women,” Performance, and Transpacific Redress is a multifaceted book. It is a work of political advocacy for “comfort women” survivors, the women from across the Asia–Pacific region who, between the ages of 11 and 27, were forced into sex slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s and 1940s. It is also a disciplinary intervention and an indispensable methodological offering that recognizes the need for a serious analysis of performance among the existing studies of wartime atrocities on gendered bodies. Finally, its transpacific focus decenters Euro-American perspectives and provides a much-needed intellectual vocabulary for articulating the role of performance in researching gender-based wartime violence in the transnational context. Son's book feels more valuable and necessary than ever amid the ongoing tension between South Korea and Japan, which is shaped primarily by mediating US politicians from MacArthur's chief advisor William J. Sebald to former Secretary of State John Kerry, all of whom opted for quick resolutions and diplomatic convenience rather than proper redress for affected survivors.

This history of messy, top-down, state-led, and often patriarchal transpacific mediation sets the background for Embodied Reckoning, where performance figures centrally. Son invites readers to consider survivors’, activists’, and scholars’ social and stage performances of a “transpacific redressive repertoire” (4) that dislodges “the state as the main arbiter of redress” (19). Survivors and their supporters engage in what Son calls “embodied reckonings,” which demand a reexamination of existing biases viewing comfort women as passive victims whose voices emerge only after the official recognition of state-centric diplomacy and monumentalization of the past. Son's consideration of reckoning, therefore, compels readers to reorient their understanding of comfort women toward a more flexible and “elastic conceptualization of victimhood” (18) and the resilient, corporeal, kinesthetic force of redressive acts and remembrance beyond hegemonic forms of reconciliation and truth seeking. In Embodied Reckoning, redressive acts manifest in the form of protests, international tribunals, stage productions, and performances of care around memorials and statues in South Korea, Japan, and the United States. The first two chapters highlight survivors’ and activists’ uses of performance as a strategy to demand redress; the latter two focus more specifically on staged theatre and performance.

Chapter 1 explores the protest form of suyo siwi (Wednesday Demonstrations) held just outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul since 1992. It perhaps attends most to the kinesthetic potency of redressive acts in a public space. Son pays attention to details of women survivors’ and activists’ tactical appropriation of yellow vests, placards, signs, paintings, and slogans, which have become durational choreographies responding, persistently yet with agility, to different framings of their demands over the decades. Through suyo siwi, women survivors insert their bodies to create a space of “somatic disruptions” (48) in Gwanghwamun, the center of Seoul, where nationalistic statues of historical male figures stand to symbolize patriarchal memorialization of the past.

Whereas Chapter 1 deals with deliberately public space, Chapter 2 reclaims the publicness of the Women's International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan's Military Sexual Slavery in Tokyo, 2000. Drawing from works on the performance of law by Catherine Cole and the like, as well as concepts by Jacques Rancière, Son looks at survivors’ staging of “scenes of dissensus,” where the women “put their bodies on the line to make differences visible and felt” (67). Through personal testimonies of rape trauma and bodily evidence of physical scars, Son argues, the survivors’ collective performance of dissensus at the tribunal questions the legitimacy and legal protocols that the justice system takes for granted but that often fail to recognize the survivor's personhood. It is in this moment that the tribunal moves beyond the courtroom to a more transnational stage as a public, collective social movement.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on cultural and aesthetic productions of redressive acts. Chapter 3 critically examines Chungmi Kim's Comfort Women (2004) and its Korean translation, Nabi (2005–9), Aida Karic's The Trojan Women: An Asian Story (2007), and Yoon Jung-mo's Bongseonhwa (2013, 2014). What emerges from the four productions is “transpacific affinity,” connecting women across different locations based on a sense of shared identity and experiences (111). Each production uniquely and compellingly addresses comfort women narratives through the Korean traditional vocal performance known as pansori, flashbacks, minimalist set and lighting designs, and audience participation. Nevertheless, Son's meticulous and careful reading across these four productions points out that shared identity and understanding of historical violence may also be complicated by the location of performance viewership (Korea or America) as well as how wartime violence and gendered bodies are depicted onstage. The result is Son's thoughtful analysis questioning the ethics of representing survivors onstage and what is at stake in the larger cultural work of theatrical productions.

Finally, Chapter 4 presents a fascinating reading of the “performances of care” around public memorials in Seoul, New Jersey, and California. Drawing on Robin Bernstein's concept of “scriptive things,” Son illustrates how public memorials, such as sonyeosang, the “bronze girl” symbolizing the youth and innocence of the survivors, activate “live variations” of the performance of individual and collective engagement in remembering historical violence (149). Public memorials invite a performance of care in which visitors dress up and give gifts to the bronze girl, or tend the landscape around the memorial stone and plaque. More than inanimate art objects, these memorials activate strong attachment of feelings and everyday performances of tenderness, through which disparate individuals come together to form a community to commemorate survivors and their bravery.

As readers follow Son into her epilogue, where she recalls her visit to the museum at the House of Sharing for survivors, they will find themselves constantly returning to “the desire to keep present and kindle the memory of those who are no longer here and to pass on their histories” (178). The survivors’ personal belongings on display, written and verbal accounts, and steadfast determination in embodied protest acts ultimately gather us for a collective performance of social justice in the present continuous tense. Toward this collective performance of redress, Son's book serves as much-needed connective tissue linking personal and social memories; the past, the present, and the future; and intellectual and activist works surrounding survivors of gender-based wartime violence.