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

Heartbreaking

Astonishingly well written chronicle of one man and his family's life in Japan and their move to North Korea in 1960. I couldn't get enough and read the whole thing ins one sitting.

I'm going to need a few days to process what I've just read.

We're often prone to looking upon North Korea through the lens of our perspective of Kim-Jong Un (i.e. a brat - albeit a dangerous one - with small man syndrome).

Not after this.

I knew that North Korea's citizens lived in poverty, but not like this.

Masaji Ishikawa's recounting of his daily toil is mentally exhausting. His bleak non-existence genuinely hurts to read. Death, starvation, brainwashing - it's desperately oppressive.

I hope, sincerely, that since writing this, he has been able to find some sort of peace.

I haven't felt this unsettled reading a book since Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

Here's the thing though. This isn't fiction.

I'm not sure I'll be able to bring myself to pick this one up again for a long time, but I'm tremendously glad that I did read it.

I can't give this less than 5 stars. It's an eye-opening account I'll never forget. Not necessarily for the right reasons, but I don't think Ishikawa would have it any other way.

Thought provoking. This book will make you thank for every single aspect of your life. The book is short and a concentrated depiction of people's lives in North Korea.

As Chapter One closes, thirteen-year-old Ishikawa is boarding a train with his family; it is impossible not to be reminded of other mid-twentieth-century trains, European ones, the difference being that everyone in the latter cases had a fair idea of what lay ahead.

This book is tragedy beyond anything you or I have ever experienced or can imagine, compounded by the knowledge that it is happening in the present day. Ishikawa's narrow personal focus gives the reader perspective that no amount of newspaper coverage could; we are slammed on every page with nonstop daily suffering. And even though there's nothing we can do to help - not the author, not his family, not North Koreans - we can learn much from this book: about compassion, gratitude, and perhaps even about how to be skeptical of empty promises by narcissistic tyrants; how to avoid taking our own children onto those trains.

i don't want to call this amazing or excellent because i feel like i'd be calling masaji's life that as this is a memoir after all and his life has been full of nothing but sadness and starvation... this was very well written, and masaji paints a very, very vivid and horrendous picture of north korea. i really hope that north korea will be free of the government one day. nobody should be that restricted by their government. but i have to say that i find it selfish of masaji to have had 3 children.