A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea(2)

But I didn’t even know I had a father until I started elementary school. I have no earlier memories of him whatsoever. In fact, I first became conscious of my father’s existence when my mother took me to a strange place, which I later discovered was a prison, to visit a man I didn’t recognize. That’s the day my mother told me who my father was. Eventually the man I’d seen through the window in the visitors’ room showed up at our house. He was notorious in the area for being a rough fellow, and our relatives shunned him.

He was hardly ever at home, but whenever he was there, he spent the better part of his time slugging back strong-smelling liquor. He could polish off a couple liters of sake in short order. What was worse, drunk or not, he’d hit my mother whenever he was at home. My sisters were so frightened, they used to cower in the corner. I tried to stop him by clinging to his leg, but he always kicked me away. My mother tried not to cry out, so she bore the pain with clenched teeth. I felt helpless and scared for her but could do nothing. As time went on, I just did my best to stay out of his way—which wasn’t hard since he never paid much attention to me. But it crossed my mind more than once that I’d come after him when I grew up.

My mother’s name was Miyoko Ishikawa. She was born in 1925. Her parents ran a shop on the corner of the ancient shopping street, where they sold chickens. My grandmother, Hatsu, ran the shop, and her work was difficult and dirty. The chicken meat wasn’t neatly cut up and packaged as it is today—nothing like that. Cages were strewn higgledy-piggledy in front of the shop, and when a customer appeared, my grandmother would remove a squawking chicken from its cage and slaughter it on the spot.

My grandmother suffered from asthma, so she often had coughing fits. Whenever she spotted me coming home from school or from playing somewhere, she’d arch her back and say, “Mabo, can you rub my back?” So I’d stroke and massage her small back for a few minutes. During those times together, she always said to me, “You’re a kind boy. You mustn’t be like your father. I just can’t understand why your mother made the mistake of marrying him.”

I could see why she used the word “mistake.” The Ishikawa family was respected and went back a long way in the area. There were many branches of the Ishikawa family in Mizonokuchi. They and the rest of the local people formed a close-knit community. My grandfather, Shoukichi, died before I was born, but I was always told he was a good and gentle man who looked after his family and others in his community. He sent my mother to a girls’ high school and encouraged her to learn how to sew. Though the family couldn’t be called wealthy, he did his best to provide his children with an education of sorts.

My mother was a woman of strong character. She had an oval face that was beautiful in its way. My father, on the other hand, had sharp, razorlike eyes, a well-built body, and muscular shoulders. I don’t know what my mother saw in him—perhaps she was attracted to his confidence and survival instincts. I do know that the local community was stunned when they started living together. Behind their backs, people called them “Beauty and the Beast” and wondered why she’d married such a terrible man.

My grandmother once said to me, “Koreans are barbarians.” I loved her, but I resented her remark. Though I felt Japanese—and felt it with complete conviction—I was half-Korean, as she knew perfectly well. My mother’s elder brothers, Shiro and Tatsukichi, occasionally made similar remarks. They’d been conscripted to serve in the Japanese army in Manchuria and always described Koreans as poor and unkempt, like a bunch of gorillas. They never had the guts to say anything like that in front of my father, of course. But when my father wasn’t around, Shiro would often say, “Miyoko had better divorce him as soon as possible. Koreans are just rotten to the core.” Though I always felt a twinge of discomfort when he said such things, I couldn’t help but agree with them. I had a strong sense of revulsion toward my father, who certainly lived up to the barbaric reputation of Koreans whenever he beat my mother. Given that we watched him torment her day after day—and that he frightened me and my sisters to death in the process—it was hardly surprising that I, like my grandmother, grew to dislike Koreans.

My father used to strut about the neighborhood with twenty or thirty Korean followers in tow. He was one of the top dogs in the Korean community, and he enjoyed picking a fight with any Japanese who got on his nerves. He didn’t care who it was. Special policeman? Sure. Military policeman? Bring it on. Koreans could depend on him for protection, but he scared the daylights out of Japanese people.

My father always insisted on doing things his own way. After the end of the Second World War, he opened a black-market street-side stall with several of his cronies. They sold canned food produced in the munitions factory where my father used to work, and sugar, flour, ship’s biscuits, clothes, and other items procured illegally from American GIs. One day my dad and his buddies got into a huge brawl with American soldiers over the merchandise he was selling. He was notorious for a reason.

Not that my father had many options. The Japanese defeat in World War II left 2.4 million Koreans stranded in Japan. They belonged to neither the winning nor the losing side, and they had no place to go. Once freed, they were simply thrown onto the streets. Desperate and impoverished, with no way to make a living, they attacked the trucks containing food intended for members of the imperial Japanese armed forces and sold the booty on the black market. Even those who’d never been violent before had little choice but to turn into outlaws.