A River of Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

I am writing this review at 6 in the morning. My girlfriend will viciously bitch at me come tomorrow because of how late I’m staying up, but this is the price I pay to bring top quality reviews to a blog that no one fucking reads.

Don't be fooled by the title: there's very few mentions of rivers in this book

A River of Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea is, yes, yet another damn escape from North Korea book. The topic of escaping from North Korea is wildly interesting, but these days literally everyone who escapes from North Korea writes a book about it. Apparently they thinking making an incredible journey of danger to escape from an oppressive police state makes them special or something, I dunno. Anyways, A River of Darkness is pretty good. It’s not really even so much a book about escaping from North Korea so much as it is, uniquely, a book about the first generation of North Koreans.

The book is quite short. Only 150-some pages. Literally 130 or so of those pages are all about the author’s, Masaji Ishikawa, early childhood growing up in Japan before his father moved his family to North Korea under the promise of a good life and free education for children (talk about hindsight being 20/20, holy shit) and, thus, his family’s struggles while living in North Korea. Before I cover the book, I let’s go over some of its negative aspects quick.

First, the book was originally written in Japanese and was translated to English, so the book’s language is incredibly basic, with almost novice-level writing at points. Second, the book is too damn short. There’s an unbelievably tragic story that doesn’t even have a happy ending told within the pages, and yet it leaves you wanting to know more.

As I mentioned before, most ‘Escape from North Korea’ books are about people who are second or third generation North Koreans, people born into North Korea and who usually escape pretty young. This book is about a man who, at the age of 13, moved to North Korea with his family back in 1960.

This makes it a much more unique perspective to read from. I know quite a bit about North Korea, but this book taught me a lot of interesting things about early-era North Korean propaganda strategies. For instance, I didn’t know (or didn’t consider) that there were some 2.4 million kidnapped Koreans left in Japan at the end of World War 2. The Japanese took the Koreans for labor slaves to work in Japanese factories, and after the war ended, these slaves were basically just left in Japan with nowhere to go.

Japanese society was notoriously racist to these Koreans even after the war ended, and most had no way of really going back to Korea. Until North Korea happened. The North Korean regime sent public delegates to Japan, basically luring many of these ‘trapped’ Koreans back to North Korea with promises of a great future. The author describes how his father, a Korean man who was brought to Japan as a labor slave, would beat his mother- a Japanese woman. It starts off fairly typical, with the drunk abusive father who beats his wife and terrorizes his children. The story that the author’s life takes- and all of its moral turns and complexities- is so beautifully human, though, that you almost feel like you’re reading a god damn novel. It’s hard to believe, and yet not hard to believe at all, that the story is 100% an authentic human experience that someone actually lived through.

The book goes into details primarily of the family’s time in Japan and what living as half-Korean-half-Japanese was like, before the author’s father elects for the family to relocate to North Korea. The author makes a point of saying that as a kid, he was confused by his father’s desire to go ‘back’ to North Korea, as his father had been born and had lived in what was now South Korea. The story tells of the family's shocking realization that the promises of ‘a great life’ in North Korea were all a lie, the surrealness of North Korean poverty and social brainwashing and the struggles of surviving multiple famines.

Like I said, most of the book isn’t about escaping North Korea, and the part that covers the actual escape is actually, against all expectations, kind of mundane. It’s primarily the author’s life growing up in the new country of North Korea. A lot of other 'Escape from North Korea' books speak of living in the country’s larger cities, where life is slightly better and social propaganda much more powerful. The author of this book, however, lived his entire North Korean life as a peasant farmer in small rural areas, where the law and reach of the Regime was considerably less powerful in every day life. This adds to the book’s already unique perspective, as it covers North Korea’s earliest failed attempts at mass-scale rice farming that ended up beginning the country’s long recurring problem with famines.

Again, the biggest issue with the book is that the translation isn’t very good. The language does very little to paint a worthy picture of the experiences suffered by the author. If I could read Japanese, I’d read the book’s native printing in a heartbeat. There’s a lot of ‘liberties’ taken on the part of the translator; they add lots of very pointless and minor events that the author couldn’t have possibly recalled- or would've put in his book. In fact, until I learned the book was a translation work, I had kind of started to doubt its authenticity, or at least doubted that the author wasn’t embellishing his retelling a little. There’s so many moments that don’t make sense or couldn’t possibly have really happened. Several times the book mentions how the author was apparently walking barefoot in the snow all night, or how the author managed to walk 40 miles in a single afternoon, or how the author remembers some incredibly trivial detail such as someone’s off-hand comment during a mundane breakfast.

Still, despite the shoddy translation work the book isn’t outright poorly written. No typos or noticable grammar errors that I found, aside from two moments where periods weren’t added at the end of sentences, though I assume that was probably due to formatting errors when the book was published as an e-book. The book is wonderfully interesting, giving a very intimate and unique take at life in Japan after the end of the second world war and the earliest days of the North Korean regime. If you’re looking for a suspenseful escape story, you’re not in luck. The escape is basically 10-ish pages of “author jumped a train when no guards were looking, author crossed the Yalu river from North Korea to China, author meets a nice guy who helps him get to the Japanese embassy in Beijing, author is taken back to Tokyo, author never sees his family in North Korea again”.

The book needed to be longer. There’s so many details and experiences that could have been better explored, or explored in greater detail (like I dunno, maybe the dude's escape from god damn North Korea could've been longer than 2 minutes?). I have a good feeling the native Japanese version of the book is probably far more beautifully written than the stale translation. It’d make a great movie. If you’re curious about the issue and history of North Korea and you want a sort of 101 on North Korea’s earliest days and how its regime found a seed population of Koreans stranded in Japan, this a really lightweight and good book to pick up. It takes only a single sitting to read through, doesn't require much pre-knowledge of World War 2 or Korea to understand and is, for as shitty and cliche as this is to say, a literal rollercoaster of human story and experiences.

There's no real glimmer of hope through the story. It's just kind of a procession of touch-and-go human experiences and light human drama. By the end of the book, it's pretty much just a laundry list of how fucking shitty life had gotten and how much everyone was starving, to the point that the author one day literally just decides "I have to get out of here and get back to Japan and get my family out of here". He makes it back to Japan, but can't manage to find work due to his age (he's around 60 years old when he finally escapes from North Korea- he moved to the police state when he was 13) along with his total lack of work history and the fact that the Japanese government- to this very day- denies he even exists or lives in Japan for fear of causing an international issue with the North Korean regime. The author pretty much outright says the book is a retelling of human suffering, the harsh unfairness of life and the crippling reality of being unable to save or help his family, or indeed to ever see them again, as he lives in a pointless freedom in Japan. holy fuck lmao

FINAL POINTLESS NUMERICAL SCORE:

9/10

I seriously only dock it a point for the English version being a poor translation.