Description

An enchanting novel based on an actual case.

„The Red Orchids of Shanghai“ is not a novel, but a love song, imbued with scents and colors, in memory of the so-called comfort women of the soldiers in Japan during World War II, forgotten by history.

Pain whispers in every tongue...

Sangmi, a beautiful young Korean woman, is kidnapped to be one of hundreds of thousands of entertainment women for the victorious Japanese army during World War II. Wrapped in a fearsome maelstrom of violence and cruelty, she encounters the most beautiful and the ugliest of human beings, from rare moments of solace to the vicious reality of brothels. Her life is guided by the perverse desires of the dangerous Major Fujiwara, who has not let her out of his sight for years, but also by the love of her one-time teacher Nagata, who has also risen in the army and wants to make her the most beautiful flower in the high society of occupied Shanghai. But Sangmi doesn't want to be the plaything of their passions; there is strength and a will to fight in her - her fickle destiny enables her to escape both the terrible fate of a cheap chossen pi and the equally humiliating role of seductress to powerful Japanese.

As the war progresses and the tide turns, the power of her captors cracks - and the Korean's astonishing adventures continue, taking her to Manchuria, Singapore and eventually to the seemingly safe haven of the Japanese city of Hiroshima...

Sangmi's tragic, moving and sadly authentic story reveals one of the almost unknown pages of the history of World War II and the atrocities the Japanese army committed in Korea and China in its quest to create its Asian empire.