Masaji Ishikawa's family moved to North Korea around 1960, to escape prejudice in Japan. Immediately, it became obvious that this was not the communist paradise they had been promised: far from enjoying good lodging and free education, people were fighting for basic needs like food and shelter.
Ishikawa's memoir is short but powerful, giving one person's glimpse of life in the last Stalinist totalitarian regime from the 1960s through the 1990s. The style is plain and direct, with frequent interjections of opinion, which give the impression that we are hearing him tell his story in a bar somewhere.
By the same token, this is not a scholarly book: it doesn't talk much about how North Korean society works, what the different classes or castes are, how it came to be this way, or how such a regime manages to continue to exist without collapsing. And to be honest, some of the anecdotes, like the government executing successful innovators for fear that they might challenge Kim's grip on power, seem cartoonishly evil; the sort of thing I might have dismissed if I hadn't grown up hearing similar things about Stalin's regime.
Likewise, a lot of what Ishikawa tells us about how society operates is hearsay: "everyone knew that" you couldn't get cabbage unless you knew someone in the party, for instance. But he's not trying to be fair or impartial; he's trying to tell his story and that of his family.
In the end, I feel I understand North Korea better. But I'll want to read a different book to complement this one.