From the Fatherland, with Love, page 46
In the Republic, there was only one “moral” to be garnered from any tale: unconditional reverence for the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. The obvious lesson of ‘Three-Year Mountain Pass,’ for example, was that in any age the old ways of thinking must make way for the new, and that in the present day the beloved Comrade General was the one putting everything right. But the truth was that within Jo himself, this absolute devotion to the two “Sons of Heaven” was in conflict with an analytical mind that regarded such devotion as unscientific and outmoded. To maintain his faith, he had over time constructed a formidable mental barrier. Since leaving the Republic, however, cracks had begun to appear in that barrier, offering glimpses of something he couldn’t yet identify.
“I agree,” said Hosoda quietly. Ogawa turned toward her with a supercilious frown that inquired what a young female announcer could have to say about it. She lowered her eyes, as though having read his message. “If I may be allowed to speak…” Ogawa turned his head aside, ignoring her, but Jo told her to go ahead. “I think Jo-san’s point is a good one,” she started to say, only to be interrupted by Ogawa and reminded that off-air she was to refer to her cohost by his military rank. Jo nodded, to indicate that she should humor the man. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Lieutenant Jo. What I’m thinking is that this program is watched by a lot of mothers, and mothers care about how their kids learn things. And it’s true that unless children enjoy the tales they read or hear, they soon lose interest. I remember in elementary school, we were constantly being told what the theme of a particular story was or what the writer wanted to convey. Kids don’t like that.”
Jo nodded and looked from Hosoda to Ogawa. The latter seemed miffed at what he must have interpreted as insubordination. He was frowning. It would be best to help the man save face, if only to avoid further discord. “Well, then,” he said, turning to Ogawa and adopting the manner he would have used with his elders and superior officers in the Republic, “would you be willing to accept my proposal?” Ogawa visibly relaxed and said that of course he would. “And how would it be if, once I’ve finished the story, Hosoda-san asks me what the moral might be? I’ll then say that it’s important for children just to enjoy a story and to draw their own conclusions as to what it means.” As he spoke, he looked at Hosoda as though to warn her not to say anything before Ogawa answered. “I think that’s a splendid idea,” Ogawa said, all signs of resentment gone from his face. It would be useless to ask a chameleon like this about the burial question.
Ri Seong Su was standing on guard near the entrance to the room. Ogawa urged him to join them for coffee and sandwiches, but he just shook his head without even looking their way. “Has he already eaten?” Ogawa asked Jo, who said: “He may not have had lunch yet, but he can’t eat while on duty.” Ogawa nodded but looked disgruntled. Refreshments had been prepared, and he’d gone out of his way to include the security guard, only to be rebuffed. He was probably incapable of understanding that for Ri this was enemy territory, a place where constant vigilance was required.
As they ate their sandwiches before recording the program, the three of them selected questions submitted by viewers. A bundle of postcards, emails, and faxes attested to the popularity of the program, and Ogawa selected several comments to read aloud. “Jo-san’s clear-cut way of speaking is so refreshing… Please tell the government to lift the blockade… With the arrest of so many criminals, it’s like a spring-cleaning… Watching this program, I feel I want to know and learn more about North Korea… The national and Osaka police who killed so many civilians look down on Fukuoka…” Jo knew that he was deliberately not being shown any messages critical of the KEF; at some point soon he would have to insist on seeing everything. Without a grasp of just how much anxiety and dissatisfaction there was out there, he couldn’t properly perform his job.
There were questions both trivial and serious. What kind of music do you like? What do you eat every day? What is your ideal kind of woman? How come you speak Japanese so well? How does one join the Koryo Expeditionary Force? Will we ever be able to have baseball games again? Are we going to get newly released movies? My father went to Tokyo on business just before the occupation—when will he be able to return? Aren’t you worried that Fukuoka might become a battleground? Will children here have to give up on going to school in Tokyo? When will this week’s comics be available? Is the KEF really a rebel army? When the reinforcement troops arrive, will they all study Japanese? What kind of work will the KEF now undertake? Will Hakata Harbor be reopened for exports?
“This one’s really onto something!” exclaimed Ogawa, showing Jo a postcard that asked why the program could not be broadcast nationwide. Outside of Kyushu, only segments were being shown as part of the news. Jo assumed it was a government decision not to allow KEF propaganda to be seen all over Japan. At first, however, he had been surprised that programming varied according to region; in the Republic, the idea of locally tailored content was unthinkable. “In TV programming, as with everything else in this country,” Ogawa remarked with a certain bitterness, “Tokyo has the upper hand. Broadcasting is divided into sectors: prefectural, areal, and national. This is the Kyushu area block. If some elementary-school kids go on a study trip to visit an Arita porcelain kiln, there’s a ‘pupils see the potter’s wheel’ sort of story on prefectural TV. If, on the other hand, there’s a food-poisoning outbreak at the same elementary school, it’s reported throughout Kyushu. And if one elementary-school kid kills another, then it’s nationwide news. But local news in the Tokyo area is automatically national news as well. When a weak typhoon is approaching somewhere south-east of the capital, the whole Kanto block is sure to get excited. And, of course, that then becomes national news, so we here in the most active typhoon corridor are subjected to endless coverage of some faraway fart of a storm.” As he spoke, Ogawa had his face turned toward the bay window. The trees of nearby Gokoku Shrine tinted the frosted glass-green.
Ogawa sipped at the cup of coffee Hosoda had refilled for him. “I was in the economics section of NHK’s Tokyo bureau more than thirty years ago, when the budget for the Kyushu super-express was settled. An auditor for the Ministry of Finance joked: ‘Why should Tokyo taxpayers, squeezed and squashed during rush hour, have to cough up money for a train moving air around in Kyushu?’ The implication was that there wouldn’t be any passengers. Everyone laughed except me. I was annoyed, and shot back with: ‘So are you telling people not to live in Kyushu or Shikoku or Hokkaido?’ He just looked at me like, ‘What’s got you so riled up?’ Of course, the man had a point: Tokyo-area residents pay high taxes and benefit from few public-works projects. But do they have nuclear power plants in and around the capital? No. Any industrial-waste treatment plants there? Nope. And Tokyo systematically sucks up young talent from the provinces, first for the universities and then for the bureaucracy, the financial institutions, and the corporations. Just between us, the fact is that the only people left in the provinces these days are either stupid or old.”
Hosoda Sakiko puffed out her cheeks, as though to say “Does that apply to me as well?” but after glaring surreptitiously at Ogawa, she gave Jo a quick smile. Looking past her pale, soft cheeks to the wall beyond, he could see the same poster that had caught his eye in the elevator: “The Damned: The Operatic Aesthetics of Decadence.” In the propaganda and guidance section back in the Republic, he had been told to write an essay explaining to farmers and workers the perils of decadence. He had read through Japanese novels describing bizarre sexual behavior and watched southern Korean films with overtly sexual themes, but he failed to grasp what the concept meant. He assumed there must be something alluring about it—otherwise, why would it exist? But pictures of nude women and descriptions of sexual intercourse did not in themselves have any special appeal. So what was it all about? It then occurred to him that instead of trying fully to understand the concept and explain the gravity of the threat in readily understandable terms, he would try to imagine how the upper echelons of the Party conceived it and write what would appeal to them, with frequent use of metaphor—demons and temptresses and spreading cancers, to which the only antidote was the study and practice of Juche.
For putting these thoughts to paper Jo had received the Winged Horse Badge of Honor and was given a ticket to the gigantic show known as the Arirang Festival Games. The games ostensibly commemorated the ninetieth birthday of Kim Il Sung, but in fact their purpose was to counter the soccer World Cup shared that same year between the puppet regime and Japan. Kim Jong Il himself had assumed command of the massively funded undertaking, which involved over a hundred thousand participants, including young children, secondary-school pupils, university students, People’s Army soldiers, dance troupes, massed bands, gymnasts, and circus performers.
The games were unprecedented in scale, featuring human billboard mosaics, laser beams, people’s artists performing elaborate dances, and sixty-meter-high trapezes—all beneath the colossal illuminated ceiling of the 150,000-seat May Day Stadium. It was undoubtedly the greatest show on earth, something that one would never see anywhere else. The army of performers practiced every day for six hours, receiving no pay and forbidden to engage in any other kind of activity. Jo thought of this huge endeavor as having everything—except decadence. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t something that aroused more than admiration for the work and willpower that went into it. Decadence, he assumed, had a power that was hard to resist, and human beings were swept up in it even as they became aware of its dangers. It contained within it a sense of guilt, which led invariably to disillusionment and ennui. Decadence was only consumed; on its own, it produced nothing. It was thus utterly absent from the Arirang festival.
Hosoda was looking at him as though wondering what he was thinking about. The room was well heated, and she had taken off her cardigan. Seeing her white arms and shoulders quickened his pulse; he felt a tightness in his chest. It was the same sort of feeling he’d experienced among the sweet-smelling azaleas at home. There was a sense of guilt as well. He asked if they minded him smoking, and turned to look out of the window as he lit a cigarette. He could see vague, wavering green shadows. These were presumably the trees swaying in front of the shrine. Sometimes black shapes would flit past. He thought they might be swallows. No other birds flew so quickly. “Swallows… ” Jo half-muttered the word to himself as he remembered the nests under the eaves of the apartment in his native Pyongyang. The building had originally been for groups of political advisers from the Soviet Union, and when they left, members of the judiciary, administrators, diplomats, and university professors had moved in. In spring it was nice to hear the sound the newly hatched chicks made. When Jo was small, he had seen his father pause in his work to watch the parent birds bringing them food. That was before his father had burned his entire collection of Pushkin and Gorky.
His father was a professor of languages and literature at Kim Il Sung University and one of the Republic’s leading poets. In the 1960s, at the age of thirty-nine, he had written the lyrics for ‘When My Life Ends,’ the theme song of a tremendously popular movie called The Rails of Blood. Everyone learned to sing it, young and old; and it was even taught in schools. He had written countless other songs as well, and in any country with copyright laws he might have earned huge sums of money. Yet he never made the slightest complaint about this and was fond of saying that professors did not belong in the privileged class. The family led a modest life, but in the Republic intellectuals were nonetheless respected, as Koreans were still imbued with a Confucian outlook. The Great Leader, Marshal Kim Il Sung, had purged all of his political enemies and rewritten history, but he had been unable to eradicate traditional values. Jo’s father was held in particular esteem, and in the family room was a Japanese television set. Such a costly item was beyond his professor’s salary; it had been sent directly by Kim Jong Il himself in admiration of his revolutionary poetry collection, published in 1984. On the back of the set was an inscription declaring it to be a gift from the Leader of the Workers’ Party Politburo’s Standing Committee. On the side, in larger letters, his father had written: “For Su Ryeon, on his sixth birthday.”
At the beginning of the 1990s, bad harvests and flooding, along with an extreme shortage of foreign capital, resulted in fuel shortages that in turn affected distribution. The Republic was gripped by famine. The residents of Pyongyang, unable to head for the Chinese border to buy things there, sold their electrical appliances and furniture just to obtain food. Even then, Jo’s father refused to pander to the Party. Those with connections to the upper echelons had their salaries raised and were on the receiving end of foreign aid that was being siphoned off, but he consistently distanced himself from the apparatus of government and its functionaries, and so found himself ostracized. Members of the Party elite who had been his students would secretly come with presents of rice, pork, and sesame oil, but he stubbornly refused to accept them, saying that it made him a likely target for entrapment. He sold the Sony television set, his Montblanc fountain pen, his rosewood desk, the electric refrigerator his younger sister—a special diplomatic envoy—had sent from Africa, and finally chairs, curtains, dishes, and medical supplies, so that all that was left in the home were his books, pots and pans, and some basic tableware. Among the books were forbidden works that could not be sold.
In time, Jo’s father lost his exemption from the Friday labor requirement imposed on office workers and intellectuals. He’d been excused previously in consideration of his age, but every Friday from then on he put on his laborer’s clothes and headed off to help transport bricks or clean up after the floods. It was at about this time that he stopped eating at home, saying that he would take his meals at the university dining room. Later it became clear that he’d been ashamed of not being able to provide food for his family, and in reality was eating next to nothing; he had already resigned himself to death. Jo’s mother often wept without saying why. One day when Jo was thirteen, his father took him to the vacant lot behind their apartment building, and there he burned all of his remaining books. Afterwards, turning his emaciated face toward the boy, he said: “I want you to become the sort of person who can write good poetry. You don’t have to actually compose it; you need only have the capacity to do so whenever you want to. Good poets are those able to gaze into the darkness of their own hearts. A vivid or beautiful poem is not necessarily a good poem. Poetry that doesn’t stand side by side with the reader has no real power. Do you understand, Su Ryeon? Write poems that stand side by side with the reader.”
His father had ostensibly died of tuberculosis, but the underlying cause was starvation. In the months before his death he seemed to be longing for the end, but he wasn’t at all the sort of person who would take his own life. In the Republic, suicide was a crime, in which the immediate survivors were deemed complicit and punished by being sent off to remote mountain areas. And yet it wasn’t because of official prohibition that he opted not to commit suicide. Jo had heard him say repeatedly that, to his mind, suicide was worse than murder. But accepting death was different from choosing death. Jo’s father had continued fighting for what he believed in even as he gradually resigned himself to his own demise.
Jo went on to Saman Secondary School, the capital’s best after the one attended by the Dear Leader and the children of top officials, where he excelled in literature, languages, mathematics, and taekwondo. He entered the SOF Eighth Corps after graduating from the Writers’ School. What his father had told him about poetry remained for him a mystery. Poems were subjective and autonomous. Poets didn’t stand “side by side” with anyone; their poems arose, rather, from their own feelings and values, and were shaped by their own sense of language. Surely his dying father couldn’t have been saying that the poet should compromise with his would-be reader. It was only later that Jo came to understand what he’d really meant…
Ogawa was still going on about Tokyo versus Kyushu. “More than twenty years ago,” he said, “an avalanche of soil and rocks resulting from the volcanic eruption of Mount Unzen damaged the homes of a huge number of families in the area.” He had his hands wrapped around his cup of coffee as though to keep it warm. “Mount Unzen is here in Kyushu, of course. At about the same time, there was an unusual increase in the water level of the Fuji Five Lakes, resulting in the flooding of some tourist bungalows along Lake Saiko. Well, which event do you think got more news coverage? And then there’s the Minamata-disease calamity. Those of us born and raised in Kyushu still swear that if the water pollution that caused that disease had been discovered in Tokyo Bay instead of in this area, the government would have reacted very differently. Fukuoka has now become the hub of trade with China, so things are a bit different, but not so long ago the governor of Fukuoka Prefecture—population five million—would go hat in hand to petition the Finance Ministry’s Budget Bureau, bowing and scraping like a grasshopper as he handed his calling card to the bimbo at the reception desk of the deputy director’s office. Just pitiful! When Fukuoka was blockaded, I remembered that and thought: Wouldn’t ya know it!” Ogawa looked at Jo and concluded with a comment that seemed intended to gauge his reaction: “The beginning’s bound to be difficult, but for a long time I’ve felt that independence might not be such a bad option for us.”
*
“I’m sure all of our viewers found the tale of the ‘Three-Year Mountain Pass’ very interesting. And the narrator’s comments were refreshing, weren’t they? Thinking for yourself is essential, though that’s easier said than done.” Perhaps because of the intense lighting, there were hints of sweat on Hosoda’s forehead and the tip of her nose. The surrounding area was in semi-darkness; only she and Jo were illuminated. Fanned out behind the cameras were the crew, with their lights and other equipment. Ogawa was looking on, arms folded. Shimoda wasn’t there, a replacement director having been introduced to Jo just before taping.
