"She gave me a notebook," said Kimm, 68. "She wrote everything."

But there were historical details still lacking, requiring research trips to South Korea, and his full-time job at the paper company Weyerhaeuser Inc. to finish first. Now retired, Kimm finally had time to develop those notes into "Cries of the Korean Comfort Women: The Vivid Testimony of a Korean Teenage Girl during World War II" (Xlibris Corp., self-published, paper, print-on-demand, $21.24; available online, www.xlibris.com).

Based on the account by Kimm's late aunt, Agnes Hwang, the book originally was titled "The Korean Dolls," an epithet hurled at the women. Kimm later re-thought that choice.

"People told me that it's too demeaning," he said.

Agnes' fictional counterpart is named Agatha Hwang and, with the exception of some literary embellishments, Kimm said, the basic story remains intact.

Both Agnes and Agatha start off as teenagers whose families in a northern Korean province come under the scrutiny of the occupying Japanese forces. Both volunteer for the Korean Women Deishindai Corps.

The corps members, known in recent years as "comfort women," were young females of varying ethnic backgrounds and social circumstances who were pressed into sexual bondage by the Japanese army before and during World War II. It's an issue that has inspired other books, as well as campaigns aimed at winning compensation for these women.

Kimm lived in Manchuria and Korea while his father was a businessman and then a member of the diplomatic corps, emigrating to the United States in 1959. A Honolulu resident since 1968, Kimm's intent in writing his novel was to pass on a sometimes raw depiction of the reality his own aunt experienced: an added measure of honesty appended to the body of work on the subject, he said.

In this story, Agatha, a well-educated, well-spoken 16-year-old, signs up with the corps largely to appease the authorities and divert their attention from her parents and siblings. Toshiko, the hard-nosed, usually hard-hearted supervisor of the corps, makes light of their humiliation.

"Hey, Korean Dolls! Listen to me carefully ... You are all lucky to be here in the army barracks. The women's barracks lifestyle shall instill in you a practical, affordable and fruitful life methodology for your future when you receive your homecoming. Furthermore, the Imperial Army system shall teach you a useful, proficient and frugal economy before your homecoming."

The barracks, which the women dub the Rose Garden, is in northern Manchuria, not far from the Russian border. Each is given a cubicle in which to provide the soldiers with their sexual service, which Kimm describes using frank language.

There are moments of raw humor and hope sprinkled among the harsher images of disease and desperation in the book. Agatha finds her survival through the bond of friendship, especially with the cantankerous Shim Young, who has a few tangles of her own with authority. It was with Young's real-life counterpart that Agnes Hwang lived for the remainder of her life after returning from Manchuria.

Upon the war's end, the women are sent home, which is where the fictional version ends. Agnes found her family dispersed in the face of Chinese occupation of North Korea.

Within only a few years of her arrival home with Young, Kimm said, Agnes died; the family concluded that it was because of an undiagnosed female ailment. But before his aunt succumbed, he said, she got a chance to spend a little time with her then-9-year-old nephew. He can pinpoint the moment when the mission to write the book was born.

"She said, 'Sam, let it be known to all of the world,' " Kimm recalled. "I knew it would be historically more clear if I write this."