Taking place in Korea, White Chrysanthemum is about two sisters named Hana and Emi that are separated by World War II.
[3] The novel focuses on the experiences of comfort women and how the war impacted different hierarchies of individuals from multiple perspectives.
The novel begins with the two sisters on the beach of Jeju Island; Hana is with her mother as she dives for abalone and Emi is waiting on the sand.
Hana is brought to a police station where she maintains the lie that she told Corporal Morimoto, that her family is dead, by giving a false last name so they cannot locate them.
Hana is separated from the group and is brought to a ferry with other comfort women who were stored inside and being transported to an undisclosed location.
The next morning, the local soldiers learn of the arrival of new comfort women, prompting them to visit Hana.
Corporal Morimoto leaves for a period of time, and Hana begins to learn terms in Mongolian and about the people she is staying with.
Emi talks about a dream she often has where she is standing on a cliff and hears a girl's voice calling for her that is familiar but strange.
She takes a taxi and then an airplane to Seoul to visit her daughter YoonHui, her son Hyoung, and her grandson YoungSook.
She remembers how in 1948, before the Korean War had begun, her father had his throat slit by a policeman in front of her and her mother.
When her husband was on his deathbed, he thanked her for their children, he said he always loved her in his own way, asked that she not hate him so much after he dies, that she light incense for his ancestors, and that she forgive him for everything.
It was from the daughter of a woman who was captured by Russian soldiers during World War II and had donated it to the Museum of Sexual Slavery.
Mary Lynn Bract said in an interview that the authors she either had previously read or read while working on this novel were Toni Morrison, Kyung-Sook Shin, Annie Proulx, Muriel Barbery, Marilynne Robinson, Maya Angelou, Michael Ondaatje, George Orwell, Helen Dunmore, Kimiko Hahn, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
Kirkus Reviews attributes the author with writing the novel in a "lyrical" manner while integrating historical events, however, it is "relentlessly and explicitly brutal [that] it runs the risk of numbing, or perhaps exhausting, the reader".
[5] The Guardian comments on how the author demonstrates pain through her characters, and how the novel "forces us to confront the inescapability of these traumas".
The Asian Review of Books considers the novel to be "thought-provoking" for its incorporation of politics, "the personal and familial", and the "horrific" that may contribute to the remembrance of comfort women so that they are not forgotten.
[7] The Irish Times characterizes the novel as having "the starkness of witness literature" yet encounters moments of "awkwardness" in the author's style when authorial tone takes the place of voices of the characters.