A River in the Dark in Portugal

A Kathartika The book will be published on January 11th in Portugal A River in the Dark – A man’s escape from North Korea in Masaji Ishikawa. You can buy here with discount.

Because he was half-Korean and half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa often felt stateless. This feeling worsened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when he was just thirteen years old. His father, a Korean national, was attracted to the new communist country by the promises of abundant work, access to education for his children and a better social position. But life in the vaunted “paradise on earth” turned out to be anything but paradisiacal…

In his memoir, Ishikawa recounts in detail his tumultuous upbringing and the thirty-six terrible years he lived under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced when he was repatriated to Japan after escaping at great cost. , from North Korea. A River in the Dark is not only a shocking portrait of life in the interior of that autocratic country, but it is also an inspiring and valuable testimony to the dignity and indomitable nature of the human spirit.

About Masaji Ishikawa

Masaji Ishikawa was born in 1947 in Kawasaki, Japan. His father, a Korean national, lived in Japanese territory. His mother was Japanese. In 1960, when he was thirteen, he emigrated with his family to North Korea, the “Promised Land”, where he lived until 1996, when he began his desperate attempt to escape what he considered to be hell on earth. He currently resides in Japan.