Or, you could read Masagi Ishikawa's "A River in Darkness" and understand North Korea in a deeper, more intimate way than any traditional history book could offer.
In "A River in Darkness," Ishikawa tells his heartbreaking life story that began in 1947 in Japan. His father was Korean (from what is now South Korea), his mother Japanese.
When Ishikawa was 13, his father was won over by North Korean propaganda promising a "paradise on Earth" in Kim Il-Sung's newly formed Communist state. Despite the objections of everyone else in the family, the father insisted on moving them all to North Korea.
Immediately, they knew they had made a disastrous mistake, but there was no turning back. Their first meal in North Korea was dog meat. Their new home was a shack. While they had been poor in Japan, they were much, much worse off in North Korea.
Food was always short in their North Korean village and Ishikawa's family often survived by eating weeds, acorns and tree bark. Around him, Ishikawa saw people starve to death.
"When you're starving to death, you lose all the fat from your lips and nose," writes Ishikawa. "Once your lips disappear, your teeth are bared all the time, like a snarling dog. Your nose is reduced to a pair of nostrils. I wish desperately that I didn't know these things, but I do."
After Ishikawa, the most prominent character in the book is his father. In Japan, his father was a violent alcoholic who repeatedly beat his wife. Oddly, the beatings stopped once they reached North Korea, and Ishikawa reports that how his father belatedly transformed into a compassionate man.
As much as I like the book, I do have some issues with it.
First, while the author carefully describes his father and mother, he does little to bring his sisters to life in the narrative. They pop in and out of the story, but we never learn much about their personalities..
Seconds, late in the book, Ishikawa reports that after years of terrible jobs, he gets a relatively good position delivering supplies of soybean paste and soy sauce. This was a good job, he explained, because it would give him the chance to use the items to bribe officials in exchange for highly valued goods like a refrigerator or television. But then he drops the subject and never mentions it again.
(Warning: Spoiler alert ahead!)
Finally, I was troubled at the end when Ishikawa has made his way back to Japan. He says that his greatest desire is to get his family out of North Korea, but when he meets with Japanese officials, he passively listens to them and never asks for help get his family out. Huh? There must be something missing in his telling here -- he's not a professional writer, after all -- but it did trouble me.
Still, those are minor quibbles. Overall, after reading this book, I feel I understand the anguish of the North Korean people more than ever. There are no simple solutions, though. As Ishikawa makes clear, the North Korean people have been beaten down for so long, they simply don't understand what living free would mean.
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