The story goes something like this: nearly thirty years ago, a talented North Korean propagandist secretly began writing fiction critical of the North Korean regime. When a catastrophic famine beset North Korea in the mid-nineties, the propagandist’s misgivings about his country’s leadership deepened. Over the next several years, he chronicled the deprivation and disillusionment of his countrymen in a series of stories that he shared with no one. Roughly two decades later, a close relative defected to South Korea, and the writer saw an opportunity to get his work across the border. In 2014, a book of his stories was published in South Korea under the pen name Bandi, which means “firefly.” It is believed to be the first work of dissident fiction by a living North Korean writer ever smuggled out of that country.
Earlier this year, an English translation was published by Grove Atlantic, with the title “The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea.” In an afterword, the writer Kim Seong-dong chronicles the journey of Bandi’s seven-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript. According to Kim, Bandi is a member of the official North Korean writer’s league, and wrote the stories between 1989 and 1995. Bandi’s defector relative alerted the South Korean human-rights activist Do Hee Yun to the existence of the secret manuscript, and it was Do who took up the task of getting the work out of North Korea. He enlisted a friend based in China, who had relatives in the town where Bandi lived. The manuscript travelled hidden inside a copy of “The Selected Works of Kim Il-sung.”
“What I first felt when I saw the manuscript, which was old”—and handwritten, in pencil—“was just a thought of amazement,” Do told me recently. Still, the book attracted little attention when it was first published. South Koreans, he said, are “largely unconcerned” with the ongoing humanitarian crisis and deep geopolitical instability next door, a disinterest that Do attributes to what he describes as South Koreans’ “over-democratization”—a kind of somnambulant indifference. “Most people I know, Korean writers, and friends, had either never heard of it or, if they had, they hadn’t read it,” the literary agent Barbara Zitwer, who specializes in Korean literature and who brokered the book’s sale to Grove, told me.
The seven stories in “The Accusation” are tightly constructed and closely observed; together, they paint a devastating portrait of life in North Korea in the late days of Kim Il-sung’s reign, which ended in 1994. “His stories reminded me of the Soviet era—a lot of satirical fiction that was published by samizdat, the underground publishing venues there,” Heinz Insu Fenkl, a Korean translator and a professor of English and Asian Studies at SUNY New Paltz, told me. “The tone of those stories—there’s a kind of pessimism. It’s like a world view.” Bandi’s stories are not about outright rebellion but about the slow onset of despair; their protagonists are, for the most part, hopeful strivers struggling to keep their spirits from shattering in the face of mounting evidence that their government has betrayed them. In “Record of a Defection,” a devoted wife disguises her near-starvation and hides the sexual harassment she endures from a Party boss so that her husband, who is talented but comes from a disgraced family, might advance in his career. Another story, “Life of a Swift Steed,” finds an aging Party stalwart confronting the ugly fact that his lifelong service to Party and country has been squandered—that the prosperity and security he thought he was building will never materialize.
“The prose is full of rhetorical questions and exclamations, which give this very visceral, urgent sense of someone trying to reach out and directly address their readers,” its translator, Deborah Smith, told me. “Bandi chose to write fiction when he could have done otherwise,” she added, “and that’s what interests me—the details of fictional treatment, what it achieves that nonfiction couldn’t, and how. Not just, ‘My God, isn’t North Korea awful!’ ”
Fiction invites readers into a shared imaginative experience—one might argue that it presents an opportunity for greater intimacy than even the most compelling factual testimonial can offer. In “City of Specters,” one of Bandi’s most arresting stories, a young mother looks after a sickly son who is terrified of a huge portrait of Marx that hangs in the city square, just outside the family’s apartment window. The boy’s father is a supervisor in the propaganda department, so “having a tantrum at the sight of Marx’s portrait had serious implications.” As the National Day celebrations approach, the mother is too consumed with the demands of her high-level job and feverish child to understand the gravity of her family’s situation. And then it is too late: for the crime of “neglecting to educate their son in the proper revolutionary principles,” the family is banished from Pyongyang. “Fear swelled inside her—fear, something which had to be instilled in you from birth if you were to survive life in this country,” Bandi writes.
North Korea was once home to some of the region’s best writers. During the Korean War, a number of idealistic artists and intellectuals went North; many felt that socialism was the future. (Whether all of them went entirely willingly is still debated.) “It was pretty well understood that Syngman Rhee, who was sort of set up as the President of the South Korean Republic, was an American puppet,” Fenkl said. “You can see why, if you were an intellectual and a writer or poet with a social conscience, the North would have been much more appealing to you.” While Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, Kim Jong-il, was famously a cinephile—he went as far as kidnapping his favorite South Korean actress and director—and his grandson, Kim Jong-un, is known to have a taste for modern pop music, North Korea’s first dictator held literary fiction in particularly high regard. “During Kim Il-sung’s time, the most elevated propaganda form was the novel,” Fenkl said. “It was considered of the appropriate magnitude to convey the great achievements of the great Great Leader.”
But very few works of North Korean literature are available in English. There’s Han Sorya’s 1951 novella, “Jackals,” which is often cited as the epitome of juche literature—propaganda promoting a uniquely North Korean brand of ethnic-nationalist self-reliance. More contemporary work is hard to come by. A smattering of stories from North Korea’s official state magazine, Chosun Munhak, and its state-run publishing house have been translated into English in recent years, but most writing about life in North Korea that is accessible to non-Korean readers is built around defector testimony.
Fenkl is quick to note that much of what is presented to Western audiences by North Korean defectors has a complicated relationship with fact. Anyone living under the regime, Fenkl said, is “forced to have a life of deception,” and that can become “ingrained in your storytelling.” In 2015, three years after the veteran Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden published “Escape from Camp 14,” an acclaimed biography of the North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk, Shin confessed that much of what he had told Harden about his life was untrue. Do Hee Yun has been careful to withhold or obscure biographical details about Bandi to protect his identity; he fears that the North Korean government might retaliate against the writer and his family if his identity is revealed. (Do himself has been the target of cyberattacks since the book was published.) Do will definitively confirm only the year of Bandi’s birth, 1950. Even that detail could expose Bandi to danger, Fenkl told me, adding that he hopes “his birth year was fictionalized.” (It has been almost a year since Do and Bandi have had any contact.)
For the Grove Atlantic editor Peter Blackstock, Bandi’s complete inaccessibility was a source of real concern. “Publishing a book whose author is unable to take part in the publishing process”—at either an editorial level or a publicity level—is a “challenge,” Blackstock said. There would be no one to O.K. final galleys; no one to approve cover art or jacket copy; no one to sit on panels at book fairs; no one to offer up for magazine interviews. Managing revenue generated by the book would be complicated, too. (Happy Unification Road, Do’s organization, jointly owns the copyright, with Bandi, and controls fifty per cent of the royalties.) Most unusual, Grove would be moving forward on the project without possessing any kind of concrete proof that its author was who he claimed to be—or that he was even alive.
Blackstock first read the French translation of the manuscript, at Zitwer’s urging, and he was immediately impressed. “I felt there was an aesthetic argument towards authenticity,” he told me. He received other reassurances as well. At the 2016 London Book Fair, the publisher Philippe Picquier told him that, before the French translation of “The Accusation” was released, his publishing house carried out a detailed analysis of the composition of the paper and the style of the handwriting, and it all checked out. Blackstock was also assuaged by the fact that Do, who played a central role in securing the manuscript, had previously assisted the journalist Barbara Demick in her reporting for “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.” (Blackstock sent a galley of “The Accusation” to Demick but never heard back.)
I asked Demick recently what she thought about Bandi’s backstory. “If I were to put my money on it, I would say the story is not exactly what it seems,” she said. “It doesn’t mean it’s completely forgery,” she added. Perhaps, she speculated, the stories could be the work of a defector—in her experience, most North Koreans have trouble recognizing the regime’s internal contradictions until they’ve spent a significant amount of time outside its borders. “I find it hard to believe that this was written by somebody in North Korea,” she said.
Others feel differently. “Not just any defector could have produced these stories,” Lydia Lim, a student of Korean literature, told me. Before Grove acquired rights to “The Accusation,” Lim, who was born in Korea and raised in Canada, read the stories in the original Korean and decided to translate four of them for her senior thesis at Princeton University. “My grandparents on my dad’s side defected to the South during the Korean War, so there is some personal connection there,” she said. As part of the project, Lim got in touch with several North Korean defectors living in Seoul. Based on their assessments of the “somewhat obscure locations” referenced in the work, and the idiosyncrasies of Bandi’s word choices—the long separation has created a slight linguistic rift between the North and South—she concluded that the stories had indeed been written by an official state writer living in North Korea. Before Grove published “The Accusation,” she told Blackstock she was quite confident that the book was what it presented itself to be. Still, “There’s no way to know for sure,” she admitted. “I took a leap of faith, as have many other people involved in this project.”
The faith of the book’s champions was on dramatic display in late March, when a group of writers, translators, and human-rights activists gathered on the Freedom Bridge in the Korean Demilitarized Zone for a group reading. “We all stood close together and read all together, as if we were a choir singing,” Zitwer told me by e-mail. (In June, Zitwer optioned the opera rights for “The Accusation.”) She added, “On the bridge, we all felt that the book itself had ‘lifted off’ and become almost human. . . . It was the most remarkable experience of my life, I think.” CNN was there to capture the scene. Behind the copies of the book stacked on the bridge, ribbons bearing messages from South Koreans to their long lost North Korean relatives fluttered in the wind.
