Sad Peninsula

by Mark Sampson

A Canadian ex-pat and a Korean former "comfort woman," each scarred by their pasts, seek redemption.

Two separate lives become connected in South traumatized former Korean "comfort woman" Eun-young, who struggles with her past of rape and violence; and Michael, a troubled young Canadian arriving in Korea to teach ESL, whose principles and humanity are tested by Seoul’s seedy expatriate underbelly. A world away and two generations apart, their lives collide through the fiery Jin, who challenges stereotypes of her race and gender as well as Michael’s morality.



Through meticulously crafted and heart-wrenching prose,  Sad Peninsula takes the reader across oceans and decades, outlining the boundaries between seduction and coercion, between love and destruction, between a past that can’t be undone and a future that seems just out of reach.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Historical Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Mark Sampson is a fiction writer, poet, book reviewer, and literary critic, originally from Prince Edward Island and now living and writing in Toronto. He is the author of eight books: the novels Lowfield (Now or Never Publishing, 2025), All the Animals on Earth (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020), The Slip (Dundurn, 2017), Sad Peninsula (Dundurn, 2014) and Off Book (Norwood Publishing, 2007); the short story collection The Secrets Men Keep (Now or Never Publishing, 2015); the poetry collection Weathervane (Palimpsest Press, 2016); and the poetry chapbook Big Wilson (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023).

Reviews

[Rebecca Rosenblum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I truly believe this is an exceptional, complex, moving, intelligent and sometimes very funny book. But I'm also married to the author so, just you know, fyi...

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

** I received an advance copy of this title in exchange for a fair review **

Two tales of Korea run parallel in this book - Eun-young's life as a comfort woman in WWII, and Michael, a Canadian ex-pat teaching English to schoolchildren. Eun-young's sections were evidently well-researched and the writing fluid and beautiful, even when describing atrocities. I couldn't wait to get on to the next of her chapters!

Michael's sections felt more uneven, and while there were interesting characters and ideas - I'm thinking here of Justin and of the cultural differences Jin and Michael experienced - it seemed that there were too many characters and they were more roughly sketched. This could just be in contrast to the finely-nuanced character of Eun-young.

Overall an enjoyable and educational read.

[Maria Meindl · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Sad Peninsula Mark Sampson interweaves the stories of a Korean “comfort woman” (the term for young girls who were kidnapped to act as sex slaves for the Japanese army during World War Two) and a Canadian expatriate living in Seoul to – in his own words – “sling English like hamburgers” and distance himself from a painful past.

The sense of place in this novel is unforgettable, and not just because of Sampson’s scrupulously unexpected images. (They are great, though; check this out: “You don’t so much see Seoul’s neon as you taste it, like bright, hard Christmas candy, reds and greens sprayed out across the city as if fired from a cannon. As our cab races northward towards the lugubrious Han River, I figure I’ll never get used to this non-stop showcase of luminance.) Sad Peninsula reads like the work of someone haunted by a place. It is Korea which gives rise to the characters, drives the story forward and eventually comes to haunt the reader, too.

The book is also dense with issues. At first, the connection between the stories is not explicit, yet the juxtaposition tingles with irony. Michael, seeking to restore his lost pride in a foreign environment, is unaware of the violence unfolding in the rest of the story – and in his host country’s past. The result is a chilling meditation on sex and violence, oppression and love. When the characters finally meet, there are questions about the aftermath of trauma: when and how to talk about it – and ultimately who has the obligation, or right, to tell the story.

With his less-than-dependable narrator, Sampson manages to leave a lot of these questions open, without copping out. In the end, though, he appears to be more optimistic than me when it comes to the possibility of a genuine relationship between an oppressor and a victim – at least in the time frame he sets out. With characters this nuanced, though, Sad Peninsula could never become sentimental or trite. It’s a really fine book.

[Lee Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spoiler alerts. Sampson's novel is well constructed and the story moves along quickly. The settings, the details are impeccably done and the language is clean, casual throughout (some style risks are taken during a scene of binge drinking). I admire his willingness to take on and not shy away from the brutality of the organized rape of Korean women by Japanese soldiers/government. In fact, the darker passages, the scenes set in the compound with the 'comfort women', were the most effective in the book and I would have preferred the book remain in this difficult territory with the present-day narrative remaining secondary. The novel's conceit, however, that the narrator is writing this history (this book) after encountering the comfort woman in question (she's the great aunt of his current girlfriend), shone too bright a light on the author's hand at work. This all sounds like a postmodern touch, but it's really not presented that way and feels more like a desire to join two separate narratives. The story of the narrator and his Korean girlfriend is admittedly nicely done - they're well-drawn characters - but its dramas and romances felt frivolous in comparison. Likely that's Sampson's intention, to compare and contrast,and to permit the narrator entrance to a darker story, but the weight of the novel's back story demands so much. Simply: that story, the present-day setting, the lost man in Korea, the culture clash, the rogue friends, is not one I would have sought out and read. All in all, the book is surprisingly a bit too safe for me to be excited about it, but the risks it does take will haunt me.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This powerful and accomplished novel from Mark Sampson tells the harrowing story of Eun-Young, a Japanese comfort woman, snatched from her home in Korea during the Second World War and forced to endure years of abuse at the hands of her Japanese captors. Alongside her story runs a second narrative concerning young Canadian Michael, a disgraced journalist who goes to Korea to teach English and make sense of his own shameful past. The two stories intersect when Michael meets a Korean woman Jin, who bridges the two eras as she is Eun-Young’s niece and thus Michael is introduced to the horrifying story of these comfort women.
On one level this is a straightforward tale of what happens to two individuals but it goes much deeper than that and covers some broad issues: sex and attitudes of westerners to Asian women, power and colonialism, and the long-lasting effects of war and violence. Sampson has meticulously researched his subject and relates the plight of the comfort women with compassion and sensitivity but without shirking descriptions of the atrocities they endured. Michael’s experience in Korea is based on the author’s own experience there and this makes for an authentic portrait of the ex-pat community in contemporary Korea. The chapters alternate between past and present and are expertly paced.
It’s a compelling and moving novel, with vivid descriptions, realistic dialogue and characterisation, well-written, thought-provoking and thoroughly enjoyable.

[Kelly Greenwood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of local Halifax references in this tale set in Seoul, Korea. Told from the perspective of a disgraced journalist and an elderly Korean who had been forced into "comfort woman" services.

[Michael Bryson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I participated in a literary reading series in 2010, and Mark read from his manuscript in progress, which later became Sad Peninsula (Dundurn, 2014).

It was impressive in progress, and it remains impressive in final form.

The sad peninsula is Korea, and the story cleverly riffs on John Donne's famous line, "No man is an island," noting on a peninsula you are always connected to something larger.

Connection and its challenges is a theme deeply engrained in the two main stories that alternate chapters in the novel. In one, the first-person narrator, Michael, tells of his two plus years in Korea as an English teacher. He eschews the dance clubs and fast sex chased by many of his North American colleagues and instead recounts his slow moving romance with a young professional Korean woman, Jin. They bond initially over a common admiration for the work of Milan Kundera.

The second story reaches back in history to tell the story of a teenaged girl taken from Korea by the Japanese military during the Second World War. She becomes one of many "comfort women," who exist in stalls in compounds to be raped by Japanese soldiers upwards of 35 times a day, day after day. According to Wikipedia, "Estimates vary as to how many women were involved, with numbers ranging from as low as 20,000 to as high as 360,000 to 410,000."

Spoiler alert. Ultimately, the two stories converge. It is Jin's great aunt who was forced into sex slavery.

But there's more than this neat narrative hookup that connects the parallel stories. For one thing, the entire novel is saturated with sex, from the extreme torture of multiple rape, to the casual pickup culture of the dance clubs, to the slow burn sexuality of Jin and Michael as they date for months and months before consumating their forbidden love.

Forbidden? Not really, but the tension between the modern and the traditional is never far away. And here, of course, is where Korea is struggling with its soul. What to be? Which is the second thing that connects the two narratives. Before WWII, Korea was a colony of Imperial Japan, and its identity was weak. Following WWII, Korea was divided between the West and the Communists. After the Korean War, the South is strongly aligned with the USA and implements a ferocious capitalism. The modern and the traditional, at the macro and micro levels, struggle to co-exist, caught in an endless feedback loop.

As narrator, how much of this does Michael understand? He is smart, sensitive, caring, alert, but also sometimes in over his head. Jin brings him into her life, into her family, tells him things she has told no other, but - spoiler alert - ultimately decides she cannot stay with him: "I need to be Korean."

The reader can only wonder what she means by this. She is approaching thirty, and she tells Michael she will never marry because she has had relations with too many men. She is laden with shame. This is the third thing that connects the two stories, because shame is what burden's Jin's great aunt, though - it must be noted - she does find a husband following the war, and she has a complicated marriage that fails. Eun-young's experience is extreme, yet Jin says she is caught in the same tide of cultural expectation and control ... a control she chooses to remain tied to (she decides not to go to Canada with Michael when he returns home).

Sad? For Michael, yes. For the reader, sure. For Jin, who knows. One wonders what will become of her. Will her retrenchment into a cultural nationalism make her life happier, more meaningful? Or is she just repeating the errors of her family, her mother in particular?

Interestingly, it is Eun-young, the one who is most broken, most alienated, who moves farthest to reconciliation at the end of the novel. She visits, finally, the institution set up in Seoul to house aging comfort women, a place that includes a museum and the thing that Eun-young had been lacking all of her adult life, community. On a peninsula, you are always connected to something larger than yourself.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mark Sampson’s novel Sad Peninsula is a painful read, not because of any failings on his part, but because of the subject the novel deals with: rape and sexual violence. The chapters alternate between past and present. In the past, we follow the story of a Korean girl, Eun-young, abducted by the Japanese to serve as a “comfort woman” during World War II. In the present we move among the community of expatriate ESL teachers in Korea. Within this (primarily male) community status is accorded based on sexual conquests—who can seduce and sleep with the most Korean women? There are exceptions, one of whom is Michael, who falls in love with a Korean woman and is committed to understanding and learning to function in Korean society.

While this is a painful novel to read, it is also a very worthwhile read. The history of the “comfort women” needs to be told and retold precisely because it is a painful history, the sort that societies attempt to wish away through forgetting. Eun-young, the former comfort woman, describes her experience tersely: she was raped thirty-five times a day for two years. At the war’s end, she finds herself on the periphery of society because of what’s perceived as her participation in sexual activity, never mind that Eun-young never consented to this endless barrage of abuse.

The author, who lived in Seoul from 2003 to 2005 describes in the foreword the “many young men in the expatriate teaching community who behaved in ways they wouldn’t back in their home countries…. While most of these [sexual] interactions were, technically, consensual, there was an aspect to the way these young women were seen and treated by the teachers, that awakened something in my imagination.” That something was the parallels between this predatory present-day activity and the story of the comfort women, whom he didn’t begin to learn about until after his return to his home country, Canada.

In many ways it seems audacious for a man—and a Canadian man at that—to try to represent the experiences of the comfort women. On the other hand, this kind of cross-cultural understanding, the placing of one’s self into the experiences of others, is essential to a world in which sexual violence may someday be eradicated. Within the novel, Sampson seems to be acknowledging the freighted nature of the task he is undertaking by showing his central present-day character, Michael, researching the comfort women’s lives despite objections from Koreans. Michael’s behavior is seen as both genuine and insensitive, which is just how readers might view Sampson’s fiction.

As I said at the start, this book is a painful read; however, the pain of this reading is what makes the reading necessary. If the reader feels uneasy about this fictionalized treatment of the subject, there are a number of non-fictional resources to turn to, many of which Sampson lists in a substantial afterword. By reading both fiction and non-fiction accounts the reader will have an opportunity to understand this horrible moment in history (and horrible moments in the present day) both intellectually and emotionally.

[DubaiReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard hitting.

This powerful novel has two fascinating stories to tell. The recent-time narrative relates the experiences of Michael, a teacher of English, who leaves Canada under a cloud, to work in Korea. He encounters a culture where sex is readily available, but at what cost to the young women who are offering themselves?
This is interspersed with the harrowing WWII story of Eun-Young, a Japanese comfort woman who was raped thirty to forty times each day, in order to keep the invading Japanese invading forces 'happy'.

I remember watching a Korean woman talking about her experiences as a comfort woman back in the nineties, when the full horror of this treatment came out into the open. Her unbelievable life-story has stayed with me, yet this is the first time I have come across a novel that has tackled the subject.

The parallel with modern prostitution in Korea makes for some interesting comparisons. I really related to the character of Michael, who didn't just accept that he was entitled to whatever was available. He considered the women themselves and decided he couldn't accept the proposed 'norm'. Michael has a somewhat rocky relationship with Jin, who is understandably suspicious of all Western men.
The two threads of the narrative are linked by Jin's great aunt, who we meet at the end of the book.

Like Michael, Mark Sampson also spent several years teaching English in Korea, so he writes first-hand about the behaviour and views of the ex-pat community in today's Korea.

I would highly recommend this well researched and powerful book.

[Koom Kankesan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like the other book I've read by Sampson (The Secrets Men Keep), the style in this book is very down to earth and readable, which helps make the experience of the difficult subject matter a little easier to take. It's preoccupied with subject matter that is frankly horrendous and difficult to navigate, especially because both the narrator and writer are male. In some of the other reviews I've read on here, people have said that they'd have preferred Sampson not switch back and forth between the war time account of Eun-young who is captured and forced to serve as a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers and the story of Michael Barrett during his contemporary sojourn in Seoul. All I can say is that I find the Barrett character and his story fairly engaging - like his other book, that sensibility keeps the material engaging and readable for those of us of a Western persuasion and I'm glad it's there. The last chapter where Eun-young visits the House of Sharing in the modern day - I found this especially powerful and moving.

[Kathleen McRae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sad Peninsula is one of those difficult to read books because the subject matter is a trauma…..even reading it feels traumatic. It stuns me that we are still fighting, in this world to see women and particularly young women as something other than a victim to be victimized.The fight over whether women should have equal rights has been a long and vicious fight. It has been fought by an insanity that demonizes women as the cause of their own victimization. Many Korean " comfort women " endured further trauma when returning from "the Camps " their own families would have nothing to do with them as they were 'whores' Unfortunately this is still happening in places in the world and rape as a weapon of war is still endemic

[Tracy · Rating 4 out of 5]

An very emotional book that includes scenes of extreme violence and explicit rape scenes. There were times this book was very difficult to read, and more than once I considered not finishing it. Civilians victimized by war are always difficult to read about, but the ages of the girls and how they were tricked to be used by the enemy. Once you got past all the violence, there was a love story and some better endings than many of those involved could have hoped for and some sad endings.

[Steven Buechler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sampson has written a brilliant yet bittersweet novel here. He has basically two protagonists – Eun-young, a former Korean ‘comfort woman’ who is trying hard to come to terms with her past of rape and violence during World War II and Michael, a Canadian who arrives in Korea to teach English in 2003. Their paths cross through Jin, who is challenging the norms and mores around her as well as Michael’s morality.

http://tinyurl.com/p7l6j8g

[THE TORONTO QUARTERLY]

Hi, Everyone! Please check out my interview with novelist Mark Sampson as we discuss comfort women and his latest novel, Sad Peninsula (Dundurn Books, 2014). Read the interview now on my TTQ Blog. http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great read loved this one it is a book that I'm would Be more than happy to read more than once.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow...great book. a piece of history I knew nothing about. incredible women.

[Margaret Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful contemporary and historical mix. Believable characters with neatly parallel stories.