To Korean readers

prolog
Ivanovskaya village
Witch's Lair
Operation Uranus
There is no land beyond the Volga River
Days leading up to the final battle
The Fortress City of Königsberg - About Love
Epilogue

Acknowledgements
Key References
Translator's Note

Amazing results achieved just five months after debuting as an author
Best-selling novels in Japan in 2022

On April 6, 2022, an unusual event occurred in the Japanese publishing world.
A unique debut work by an office worker has won first place at the Bookstore Awards, beating out strong competition from established writers.
Author Aisaka Toma was a company employee in charge of human resources and had been debuting as a novelist for five months.

The symptoms were already lurking.
"Comrade Girl, Shoot the Enemy" was the first work to receive the highest score from all judges at the Agatha Christie Award and was also awarded the grand prize. It also ranked first in "Kinobesu! 2022," a contest held by Kinokuniya, Tokyo's largest bookstore, in which the staff personally selected the best recommended books published that year.
It was also a finalist for the Naoki Prize and had already earned a spot on the bestseller list.


Nevertheless, the shock of this thick debut novel with over 500 pages and an unusual title taking first place at the bookstore awards was enormous, and it brought about an even bigger issue because it was set in the land where the novel was set, and the Russo-Ukrainian War had just broken out.
Afterwards, the book sold over 500,000 copies in Japan, widening the gap by about twice that of Keigo Higashino's new work, which came in second place with about half that number sold, and became the 'Best-Selling Novel in Japan in 2022'. It was also named the only novel that Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida personally purchased from an offline bookstore and took with him on his summer vacation.


"Comrade Girl, Shoot the Enemy" is the debut work of Aisaka Toma, the hottest newcomer in the Japanese literary world right now. It is a war novel and anti-war novel based on the German-Soviet War that took place 80 years ago in Russia and Ukraine, where hell has been unfolding for over 500 days.
The author, who has declared that she hates war more than anything in the world, decided to write a novel about the misery of war after reading the testimonies of over 500 female soldiers in “The Unwomanly Face of War” by Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The author's aversion to violence led him not to turn a blind eye to violence, but rather to confront it.
For modern readers living in a time of violence where 240,000 people die each year from war, this book will provide the timely emotion and entertainment that only war novels can provide.

The most devastating war in history
A life-or-death crossroads for an eighteen-year-old girl

Although it is impossible to discuss the severity of the tragedy of war, there is no disagreement that the German-Soviet War was the worst war in human history.
In the Soviet Union, 27 million people, including civilians, died, accounting for half of the total deaths in World War II.
In Germany, the number of deaths, including civilians, is also estimated to be 7 million.
Behind these overwhelming figures lies the unique nature of the German-Soviet War, in which the two countries thoroughly carried out horrific massacres based on an ideology that regarded each other as enemies destined for annihilation.
"Comrade Girl, Shoot the Enemy" is a work that depicts the lives of Soviet female snipers and the horrors of war, especially the cruelty inflicted on vulnerable women, against the backdrop of the most horrific war in history.

The protagonist, Seraphima, loses her mother and hometown overnight in 1942, when the German army raided her village during the height of the Nazi-Soviet War.
Just before he is about to be shot by the Nazis, he is rescued by Irina, a Red Army commander with a sniper background, but his mother's body is desecrated by Irina, who believes he is an ally.
“Fight or die?” Seraphima accepts the dichotomy presented by Irina and decides to become his disciple and a sniper.
To kill the German sniper who shot his mother, and to kill Marshal Irina who desecrated his mother's body.

At the women's sniper training school where Irina is an instructor, Seraphima meets girls in similar situations as herself.
They all lost their families and loved ones to the Germans, and when Irina presented them with the choice between fight and death, they chose to fight.
After completing training while sharing warm camaraderie, Seraphima is reborn as a proper sniper and forms a sniper platoon with her comrades.
And the sniper platoon that received the mission heads to a city for the purpose of being deployed in urban warfare, and the name of the place they arrive at is 'Stalingrad'.
It was a fiercely contested battlefield where the average survival time for a Soviet soldier was 24 hours, and a German soldier died every 7 seconds.

While war-related content written by Japanese authors can easily be dismissed as a remnant of militarism, the author also incorporated the thematic consciousness of "War Has No Woman's Face," which served as the motif for the novel, into this book.
As a member of the Red Army, the protagonist achieves a feat of killing over 100 enemy soldiers, but gradually comes to a realization as he encounters the horrors of war and the violence against women.
This war is ultimately nothing more than a grotesque massacre between dictatorships, and it is women who suffer the greatest violence under the war.
And Seraphima discovers her true motivation for fighting beyond revenge.
It is to protect women.

The reason why the spectacular war novel, "Comrade Girl, Shoot the Enemy," received such support from young women in Japan is because it went beyond simply featuring a female sniper as the protagonist and created the novel itself as a proper female narrative.
The author confesses that she very consciously brought the solidarity between female snipers to the forefront, which clarified the novel's theme and ending.
He also criticizes the way images of women carrying weapons are often misused in comics and games, saying, “Young women fighting with guns should never be the object of fetishism,” clearly indicating that this novel is at odds with such provocative popular culture.

Why I Had to Tell the Story of a Female Sniper

During World War II, Germany was also facing a shortage of troops, but they used women as auxiliary personnel.
In the US military, women were limited to serving as cheerleaders for male soldiers.
But why did the Soviet Union alone mobilize so many women to serve on the front lines as soldiers during World War II? "Comrade Girls, Shoot the Enemy" stems from this age-old question, posed by the author during her college years.


Although they clearly existed as historically very rare cases, women who participated in the war were erased as an inconvenience in the post-war fantasy that 'men fought bravely on the battlefield and women waited at home for the men's return.'
Despite having fought just like men in the face of discrimination and suffering from the psychological aftereffects of war after the war, they lost their identity.
Following Alexievich's non-fiction work, "War's Unwomanly Face," the author sought to portray in fiction the oppressed during the war and the marginalized after the war.
Talking about the unspoken.
It was precisely this will that gave birth to a war novel that had never existed before.

Another new aspect is the focus on the special nature of the sniper branch.
Advances in technology have allowed soldiers in modern warfare to carry out the process of killing people more indirectly.
But snipers are not like that.
You must see the enemy with your own eyes, confirm, aim, shoot, kill, and return.
It is also impossible to rely on the anonymity guaranteed by group nature, like in regular infantry.
The author points out that in this respect, snipers are the branch of military most directly connected to the essence of war, which is 'killing', and that it is against this backdrop that he chose a female sniper as the protagonist of his war novel.


"Comrade Girl, Shoot the Enemy" was published in Japan in November 2021 and received greater attention immediately after its publication due to the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian War in late February 2022.
Afterwards, Toma Aisaka clearly stated that this work was a reversal novel and expressed great regret, saying, “It achieved contemporaneity in the worst possible way.”
In an NHK interview after winning the Bookstore Award, the author said that we must think about the lives of each and every person sacrificed in war.
Reading this novel, which portrays the extreme state of war by thoroughly projecting it onto the individual human beings, will be an excellent means of realizing that the war of 80 years ago and the war currently raging thousands of kilometers away from Korea are not unrelated to us.