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 l...