A River in Darkness
For World Book Day, Amazon gave away nine books in translation. Not one to turn my nose up at free books, I quickly downloaded all of them. It's a diverse group of books, each of the nine being from a different genre and a different country. The truth is that I probably won't get around to reading most of them. But A River in Darkness caught my eye immediately, and I knew I had to read it.
This is a short, harrowing memoir about one man's escape from North Korea. Ishikawa's father was born in Korea and brought to Japan to work in the war effort. But at the conclusion of WWII, he was basically abandoned, with no country to return to and no help to be found in Japan.
In 1960, when Kim Il Sung formed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and worked with the Japanese government to move millions of stranded Koreans back from Japan. Ishikawa's father jumped at the chance to move himself and his family home. But though they were promised paradise on Earth, a land of plenty and free education for all, the reality was much different.
Ishikawa was old enough and smart enough to not succumb completely to the brainwashing he was subjected to on a daily basis. He details the extreme poverty his family lived in, the prejudice they faced being seen as Japanese. The book is short, and it honestly glosses over most of the thirty-six years Ishikawa spent in North Korea before he finally decided to escape back to Japan. But the details he does include are harrowing. This is poverty on a level I could scarcely imagine, and the fact that he and his family retained any hope at all is miraculous.
This memoir sheds some much needed light on a dark corner of our globe, and I can only hope that it sparks real change for those living in that horrible dictatorship.
This is a short, harrowing memoir about one man's escape from North Korea. Ishikawa's father was born in Korea and brought to Japan to work in the war effort. But at the conclusion of WWII, he was basically abandoned, with no country to return to and no help to be found in Japan.
In 1960, when Kim Il Sung formed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and worked with the Japanese government to move millions of stranded Koreans back from Japan. Ishikawa's father jumped at the chance to move himself and his family home. But though they were promised paradise on Earth, a land of plenty and free education for all, the reality was much different.
Ishikawa was old enough and smart enough to not succumb completely to the brainwashing he was subjected to on a daily basis. He details the extreme poverty his family lived in, the prejudice they faced being seen as Japanese. The book is short, and it honestly glosses over most of the thirty-six years Ishikawa spent in North Korea before he finally decided to escape back to Japan. But the details he does include are harrowing. This is poverty on a level I could scarcely imagine, and the fact that he and his family retained any hope at all is miraculous.
This memoir sheds some much needed light on a dark corner of our globe, and I can only hope that it sparks real change for those living in that horrible dictatorship.
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