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

by Masaji Ishikawa

The night I escaped from North Korea?

You don’t choose to be born. You just are. And your birth is your destiny, some say. I say the hell with that. And I should know. I was born not just once but five times. And five times I learned the same lesson. Sometimes in life, you have to grab your so-called destiny by the throat and wring its neck.

These days I find more and more memories coming back to me. Sometimes, I wish they wouldn’t.

“North Korea is your country. It’s a paradise on earth. This is your chance. Go home!”

During the period of the Japanese Empire, thousands upon thousands of Koreans had been brought to Japan against their will to serve as slave laborers and, later, cannon fodder. Now, the government was afraid that these Koreans and their families, discriminated against and poverty-stricken in the postwar years, might become a source of social unrest. Sending them back to Korea was a solution to a problem. Nothing more.

So yes, the mass repatriation was great news for both governments—the perfect win-win situation for everyone except the real human beings involved.

I often got called “Japanese bastard” because I couldn’t speak Korean. In hindsight, it was probably just as well that I couldn’t answer back.

Worse still, what would happen if they got wind of the concept of free thought from us? They might question the wisdom of Kim Il-sung. And that was verboten.

When you find yourself caught in a crazy system dreamed up by dangerous lunatics, you just do what you’re told.

What was with the party’s obsession with militarizing the entire nation?

And we were “the masters of our destiny.” And if we begged to differ, we were dead.

Some people lead a painful life full of nothing but sorrow. I should know.

Even as I carried her coffin, I mulled over whether she’d been granted a single day of pure happiness. But I couldn’t think of one. Maybe she could finally be happy in death.

For five years, nothing happened to me at all. And then I turned thirty-one. And God got bored again.

In the West, I guess you’d call it corruption. In North Korea, it was just standard operating procedure.

The room fell silent. The man known as Tiger was dead.

I couldn’t help but wonder where they even got all the paper for the posters—and whether I could eat it.

That’s when the real fun began. Crippling gut pain that brought us to our knees; constipation that you wouldn’t believe. When the pain became unbearable—there’s no delicate way of putting this—you had to shove your finger up your anus and scoop out your concrete shit. I’m sorry. You didn’t need to know that. Except you did. It’s the only thing that shows how desperate we were.

We were on the verge of starvation, but the bonds of family love remained intact.

It was the evening of October 15, 1996. The plane touched down in Tokyo a short while later. I was back in Japan. It took me thirty-six years to get home, but I finally did it.

But it wasn’t his fault. He was a good man at heart. He just didn’t understand.