The tales of the surviving Korean “comfort women,” women who experienced organized sexual slavery under the Japanese military during the Asia-Pacific War (1930–45), have attracted the attention of scholars and activists, as well as politicians for the past three decades. The narratives of sexual violation and victimization, over-determined with geopolitics and nationalist concerns, have been told and retold thus presenting a false sense of a self-same national victim. Joshua Pilzer's Hearts of Pine: Songs in the Lives of Three Korean Survivors of the Japanese “Comfort Women” is a refreshing and much-needed departure from such over burdened narratives focusing on the details of violence during the war.

Pilzer takes readers through a poignant ethnographical journey with vivid imagery and smooth prose style. His writing pulls in readers to experience the sounds, images and the human interactions along with the author, and through his text, readers meet and “hear” three survivors of the “comfort women” system, Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui. In an attempt to “study another, neglected aspect of the women's lives,” Pilzer focuses on the role that songs and singing play in these women's “ongoing postwar work of survival, self-making, and performances of selfhood and sociality” (p. xi).

This is a relatively short volume, organized entirely around these three women with the three main chapters dedicated to their respective tales. Rather than belaboring the theoretical or ideological issues surrounding the topic (he only devotes a few pages of the introduction to laying out larger theoretical concerns that he promises to address in future publications), Pilzer presents Pak, Mun, and Bae as the central figures of their own tales and songs. Although more theoretically layered discussion—particularly on the role of music and music performance in general, and especially in relation to trauma therapy—would have contextualized the women's songs and performances, Pilzer has other goals in mind.

This book, as Pilzer notes, “is about listening—to singing, to people's voices, and to what they have to say” (p. xix). As such, the companion website through the publisher (www.oup.com/us/heartsofpine) is a crucial and indispensible component of the listening project. The website contains sound recordings of women's songs (along with photo images in color, as the book only contains black-and-white photographs) to be “listened to” along with the text. Hearing and listening to women's voices and songs makes the written texts more vibrant and poignant, challenging readers to partake in the women's lives and the author's journey in a more proactive manner. The website itself, though, is unwieldy and not ideal for those who read away from and without an Internet connection (which may not be a problem for many). This is the perfect book to be published in an e-book format that can support embedded music files for a seamless reading/listening experience. Until academic publishers catch up with their commercial counterparts, this companion website will have to suffice.

One of the most admirable aspects of Pilzer's enterprise is his focus on the women as people, people with their own stories, voices, and songs. Hearts of Pine does not portray these women merely as victims—the only identity ascribed to them by South Korean media or student and feminist activists. At each turn, Pilzer is acutely aware of the ways in which performance is already inscribed into these women's lives (posing for television crews, telling and retelling their tales of trauma in interviews) among the daily onslaught of visitors to their communal home called the House of Sharing (Nanumŭi jip). He shows gentle restraint not to speak for the women, a common trap for many scholars and activists alike. Instead, he lets the women speak for themselves and show “their courage and creativity” (p. 142). Pilzer is fully cognizant of his own positionality as a researcher and the gap between him and the women, the subjects, in language, culture, gender, age, and class.

This is a welcome addition to the growing number of books on comfort women issues and the Asia-Pacific War. Because of Pilzer's narrative ability to recreate detailed, vivid images of these women, this volume will be easily accessible to many readers. Hearts of Pine is a product of love and respect, cultivated over a decade of intimate interactions and friendship. These women's songs, as well as the stories of Pilzer's own journey, are both moving and heart felt. Through the pages and the recordings, these three survivors of the “comfort women” system, Pak Duri, Mun Pilgi, and Bae Chunhui, take center stage.