A River in Darkness

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not all refugee stories can be inspiring. Just as there are those who cannot overcome other traumas, not all refugees are going to be happy survivors. Masaji Ishikawa is bitter. He says so himself in the epilouge: "My only true possession...is bitterness. Bitterness at the cruelty of life." It is easy to pick up on that even before he says it. To be fair, his life has been full of cruel disappointments, brutality, and hopelessness. His family was persuaded to go to North Korea where the propaganda turned out to be nothing but false promises. The fact that he survived and made his way back to Japan is small consolation when he has lost everything and has little to hope for or work towards. It is not an uplifting memoir, but it is important. It is important to know and understand the atrocities that are happening in closed countries and that escaping them is only the beginning of healing for these refugees.

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This was laughable , of course, but that's always the ways with totalitarian regimes.  Language gets turned on its head. Serfdom is freedom.  Repression is liberation.  A police state is a democratic republic.  And we were "the masters of our destiny."  And if we begged to differ, we were dead.