Zoe Kim is a Canadian journalist with Korean roots, who is in Seoul, Korea for her work. She is investigating a local sex-trafficking ring that lures innocent young women with promises of good jobs into brothels. She finds out that this human trafficking ring is operating also in Los Angeles, Korea and other Asian countries and is operating from Japan and is led by a criminal and dangerous and powerful gang, but whose actions apparently seem to be tolerated by the authorities.
Meanwhile, she gets the news that her aunt Meera is passing away. After her death, she gets an old diary of Meera. Meera wrote in this diary during the occupation of large parts of Asia by Japan. The Japanese government started 'comfort stations' in these countries, and young women from all over Asia were brutally taken from their homes and families to work at these comfort stations as sex slaves. In her diary, Meera writes the horrific atrocities she and thousands of other girls had to endure during the war and the trauma she had to live with the rest of her life because of this, and the fact that Japan never acknowledged these horrors or officially apologized for it and for many decades acted like it never happened. And this is for Zoe just one more reason to try to investigate the Japanese trafficking ring, and to try to bring it into the news, this all against the orders of her boss.
When Zoe gets more involved in the investigation, more danger for her starts to rise. The Japanese gang is not happy at all by what she is doing, and she is followed and threatened by them, and it even get's so far she is caught by them and they try to let her work as a prostitute and lock her up in a small room with only a mattress, the same kind of room her aunt Meera found herself in decades ago. She manages to escape, and is then accused falsely of having killed a Korean girl who was killed by them. They bring it into the national news, and Zoe and her partner are being searched for by the police. After trying to hide, even disguised as a nun and a priest in a local hotel, Zoe and her boyfriend who traveled to Asia to save her, are caught by the police and after the first court hearing, have to stay in jail for eight months, but then, after the public is very offended by their ordeal, and who are nationally pleading for justice for them and for the wider fact of human trafficking and for the comfort women, an old friend and an old lover of Meera, Masuki, who she lost contact with during the war, come into their life to help them escape, and a very dangerous escape route by sea starts, will they reach the shore of Korea safe and will Zoe manage to speak out against human trafficking and for justice for the comfort women without treats from the Japanese gang?
I was truly blown away by Butterflies. Authors Sylvia Yu and Matthew Friedman did a tremendous job by writing this book, and by researching this, sadly still actual, topic, which is shown at the end of the book where we see pictures of Sylvia interviewing women around the world, who were comfort women during the Japanese occupation, for example, with activist Ellen van der Ploeg in The Hague. (As a matter of fact, this year was the first time ever a Japanese ambassador visited an paid respect to the fallen victims who where forced to work on the Burma railway during the war in 1940-1945, during a remembrance in Arnhem, The Netherlands, this past August, which shows how long Japan refused to acknowledge the horrors of the past and stayed silent.) The story of the comfort women during the Japanese occupation of Asia still needs to be told today, but unfortunately, human trafficking still happens.
The storyline of the book is absolutely brilliant. I loved how the authors connected the past and present in Zoe's storyline, and how the story of Meera was told through her diary entries. What she had to endure during the war was truly heartbreaking and horrific. But it is very important that real life stories like this keep being told. There is also a small love story in this part between Meera and good-hearted Masuki, whose father is an important man in the army and who is clashing with Masuki over seeing Meera). The Japanese trafficking ring which Zoe investigates..it truly gave me the cold chills at many parts, they where so threatening and evil, especially in the end when Zoe tries to escape and after that there where some very horrifying scenes where Zoe had confrontations with them where they made threats at her when she wanted to escape on the boat and later on speak out publicly about human trafficking. How the local authorities turned a blind eye and where on the side of them was even more scary. But these scenes also made this a thrilling novel, as this keeps you at the edge of your seat as a reader. The story is set in different countries who had a past with the war: Korea, a village in China, and Japan, which just shows how wide and far the atrocities of the Japanese army was during the war. The investigation what strong minded Zoe did was absolutely great, and she didn't stop because her aunt's diary really gave her the inspiration and drive to pull through no matter what, for justice for the victims of human trafficking, which is the red line of this fantastic book.
Butterflies by Sylvia Yu and Matthew Friedman is truly one of the very best books of 2026, and I highly recommend reading it!
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