Krishna
A very very different kind of book. Initially, I was unable to make head or tail of the story but towards the end, I began to realize that this is one of the best books I have read in recent times, and that the story will stay with you long after you finished the book and closed it.
Let us dive right into the story. The book opens with the story of Jun Do in North Korea.
All Jun Do’s father would say to her about her mother was that she was a singer. Jun Do’s father was the Orphan Master. His mother, since she was beautiful was shipped over to Pyongyang (Yes, North Korea) and the father pined for her every night, especially after drinking and becoming drunk. Jun Do worked in the orphanage but was treated like any other boy by his father, sometimes even harsher. The orphans were sent off to a factory for good but anyone can take them for a day, if they fed the kids and gave a bottle to the Orphan Master to drink.
When the floods came, the boys tried to save the people being swept away and one boy Un Song, was swept off in the floods. That is the start of the famine, where the people are eating bark and sawdust to survive and not starve to death. All the time with the propaganda from Pyongyang blaring on the loudspeakers.
Jun Do is recruited by Officer So. They both, with the help of a man called Gil steal over in the night in a small boat to Japanese coast. Their mission? Kidnap a man from there and take him back to Pyongyang.
The idea is to use that man to teach Japanese to North Koreans who need it. What better way than to just kidnap one in the middle of the night?
They try to get a woman next in front of a celebration in a restaurant. She is thrown overboard but drowns in the sea. This disturbs the trio, Gil, the “Japanese” guide, Officer So and Jun Do.
It turns out that those two are just rehearsals for the real deal. Kidnapping an Opera singer from deep inside Japan! Her name is Rumina.
Jun and Gil fly with fake passports. They find and overpower the woman and take her. Gil disappears but Jun Do finds officer So and the boat.
The story has its good and the bad. First on the plus side is the setting. You do not see a lot of books where the stroy takes place in North Korea. Also the orphanage and the character of Jun Do are amusing. On the negative side, though, there does not seem to be a coherent thread of a story. Sure, there are some pieces which were described above but then the author just drops that subject and moves on. The kidnapping of the singer just fades away and now Jun Do is monitoring radio waves for communications, sitting in a boat. Huh?
Anyway, the interesting thing here is that an American ship intercepts them (for illegally being in international waters despite having no flag.) Even though they could have arrested the lot of them, they let them go but not before tearing up the photos of Dear Leaders on the wall. It is high treason to lose them and so they concoct a story of invading Americans and how they fought them off but before going they set fire to the boat which burned off parts of the ship including the two pictures. (And fabricate evidence to support their theory).
When the Second Mate, who is a hero, defects in the middle of the night using a lifeboat, they are in trouble again. They now concoct a story of shark attack that killed him and have Jun Do the hero and inflict shark bites on his hand (using a dead shark).
The interrogator tortures him to get to admit fraud. He tells Jun Do that the traitor has been captured and confessed everything. Despite all hope, Jun Do keeps repeating his story when suddenly the old man torturing him says that he believes the story and makes Jun Do the hero.
The scene changes again. Dr Song, Jun Do and a “Minister” who is really a driver, go to Texas to meet a Senator. Dr Song takes beef in a box and calls it ‘Tiger Meat’. Just to freak out the Americans who will think that they are eating an endangered animal. They stay there awhile and then return. All seems as pointless as the above vignettes.
When suddenly Jun Do drops out of the story – without any due cause and with no warning, you are jolted. In my case, not in a good way. I think back on all that happened and I am completely puzzled. What was the point of all that story so far? But read on. You will get the point of what the author means by ‘You will hear of Jun Do no more in this story’.
We now move on the Commander Ga, the real husband of the film actress whose face was tattooed on June Do’s chest (as he did not have any wife as he was not married yet). Commander Ga is first introduced when he has already been taken to the torture chamber to be worked over by two teams of interrogators. One violently physical and the other interested in facts that they can gather from him.
The torture guys claim that he is an imposter, though. The interrogator surmises that this is not Commander Ga but a prison inmate who looked like his double and had killed both Ga and his wife, Son Moon as well as their children. “Commander Ga” was brought in for the murder of his wife.
Interestingly, we soon realize that the person who is the imposter is none other than Jun Do, who does not think of himself as Jun Do anymore. Which is why he still has the tattoo of the actress Sun Moon on his chest.
At times the story gets confusing because it moves back and forth so much. The authorities come for them and Ga and Buc try to send their wives (Sun Moon and her kids in Ga’s case) away. The kind of jerky turns is completely unnatural for a lay reader like me who is not looking for surreal comparisons or indirect references to how unstable the country’s regime was.
The timeline moves back and forth as Commander Ga (the impersonator) tells his tale to the interrogators who have their own tale to tell. One young interrogator’s father and mother are blind and housebound. There is humour in how they believe that in South Korea there is a large famine and the Dear Leader is sending help. The blind father worries whether the population can hold off until the inevitable reunification occurs. (Read as North Korea taking over South Korea under Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader).
Also, he meets the Captain of the ship where he travelled as a condemned criminal and all other prisoners have to queue up and throw a stone at the condemned man. This breaks “Commander Ga’s heart”.
Actually there is a lot more shocking details. Ga and other people are asked to do crude lobotomy by poking a screwdriver behind eyelids to damage the brain – Actually this method was really followed in old times, as described in the excellent Bill Bryson’s Body : A guide to Occupants.
Meanwhile Dear Leader plans to humiliate visiting Americans and Ga foolishly tells xxx that Sun Moon, kids and he himself plan to leave with the Americans when they go back. The Commander tells him that he made a huge mistake in revealing the plan even to him but he, Comrade Buc, will help him. He advises that if he really loved Sun Moon, he would let her go but distract Dear Leader by staying behind, and take the inevitable consequences.
On what they thought was the last night, they spend the night dinner together with the kids. When Commander Ga wants more, she says ‘You don’t know me’ and a Mercedes comes for her. She says ‘Apart from my mother, there is only one person who really knows me’ and goes in the car. Ga realizes that she has been taken away from him by the Dear Leader after all.
She comes back and reveals more of herself than ever before and gets close to him – mentally and physically.
The next day Sun Moon believes that they both with the kids will be on the plane with the Americans, when Ga knows that he has to stay behind.
The interrogator who is ‘collecting stories’ is now offered a place in the torture group Pubyak, since all his friends have left and he is alone. He gets the badge and negotiates with Sarge, their leader that he will join after he has completed his current work with Ga. Sarge agrees.
However, the man feeds his parents poisoned peaches in syrup – a very common thread here in this story which I am not elaborating on – and then goes and tries to blank out the mind (almost like lobotomy but without the cutting) of both Gu and himself. He knows that the future for them both is simply to live out the rest of their lives as idiots in a farm. He does not care. This is one last rebellion against the pointless dictatorship as he sees it.
However, after he has strapped himself, he notices that Ga has changed his own setting to the maximum – which is fatal – and is unable to do anything about it since he has not the ability to go back and change it back.
What Ga really did comes out at the very end of the book and it is every bit as fascinating as the rest of the story.
If you look back at the book in totality, you see how the various strands are woven together and how the narration flows through like a unified stream. It is fascinating to read and the story stays with you for long after you finish the final pages and close the book.
9/10
— Krishna