Sorcerer of Pyongyang

by Marcel Theroux

Genres: Coming of Age; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of the “sublime” (The New York Times) Far North, a finalist for the National Book Award, returns with a mesmerizing novel about a North Korean boy whose life is irrevocably changed when he stumbles across a mysterious Western book—a guide to Dungeons & Dragons.

Ten-year-old Jun-su is a bright and obedient boy whose only desire is to be a credit to his family, his nation, and most importantly, his Dear Leader. However, when he discovers a copy of The Dungeon Master’s Guide, left behind in a hotel room by a rare foreign visitor, a new and colorful world opens up to him.

With the help of an English-speaking teacher, Jun-su deciphers the rules of the famous role-playing game and his imaginary adventures sweep him away from the harsh reality of a famine-stricken North Korea. Over time, the game leads Jun-su on a spellbinding and unexpected journey through the hidden layers of his country, toward precocious success, glory, love, betrayal, prison, a spell at the pinnacle of the North Korean elite, and an extraordinary kind of redemption.

A vivid, uplifting, and deeply researched novel, The Sorcerer of Pyongyang is a love story and a tale of survival against the odds. Inspired by the testimony of North Korean refugees and drawing on the author’s personal experience of North Korea, it explores the power of empathy and imagination in a society where they are dangerous liabilities.

Release date: November 29, 2022

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 240

Sample

1. The Mysterious Book

THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK
One Sunday afternoon towards the end of September 1991, a heavyset forty-seven-year-old man with thick glasses and unruly dark hair took his seat on an Ilyushin jet painted in the handsome red and white livery of the North Korean state airline, Choson Minhang.

The man’s name was David Kapsberger, and he was about to fly to North Korea as part of a twenty-strong delegation of radical academics and trade unionists.

As a haze of dirty smoke obscured the skyline of Beijing visible through his window, Kapsberger removed his spectacles and dabbed his face with the warm towel offered by one of the eerily composed female flight attendants. The long hours of travel from his home in London had left Kapsberger feeling worn out. His clothes had suffered too. His lightweight summer suit was crumpled and bore stains from a coffee he’d spilled on himself in the transit lounge at Sheremetyevo Airport.

Across the aisle of the plane, luxuriating in the novelty of an entirely empty row, sat his son, fourteen-year-old Fidel Olatunji-Kapsberger. Fidel had been forced to accompany his father on the trip, which he was fully expecting to find pointless and dull. For the first forty minutes of the two-hour flight, he buried himself in a book, but as the plane crossed into the airspace of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Fidel glanced out of the window and found himself bewitched. The mountainous landscape that broke through the clouds beneath him seemed somehow prehistoric and mysterious, like a version of the imaginary world in the fantasy novel that he was reading.

After a sudden descent and an abrupt landing that left the tour party shaken, the passengers made their way down the boarding ramp and towards the boxy Soviet-style terminal.

From the roof of this building an enormous floodlit portrait of the country’s Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, smiled lovingly out across the concrete airstrip, which still radiated warmth after a day of autumn sunshine.

Dusk was falling on the low wooded hills that surrounded the airport. The stillness was strangely oppressive. An unsettling silence enveloped the visitors as they shuffled into the arrivals hall, which was austere and cavernous, and smelled faintly of detergent.

The elder Kapsberger was an American citizen who had emigrated in the sixties to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. He’d begun a new life in England as a graduate student in the political science department at the London School of Economics. Now he was a full professor and the world’s leading English-speaking expert on Juche thought, Kim Il-sung’s unique philosophy of Marxist self-reliance. However, the professor’s expertise was wholly theoretical; this was his first visit to North Korea. And, like all foreign visitors entering the country for the first time, he felt a thrilling combination of fear and curiosity as he handed over his US passport for inspection.

The fluorescent lighting inside the glass booth was tinged an unearthly shade of orange. It made the immigration officer look like a waxwork in a vitrine. Only his eyes moved, as he lowered and raised them repeatedly in order to compare the photograph in the passport with the reality of the rumpled man in front of him. Behind his impassive face, he was calculating whether Kapsberger was what the government euphemistically called “an impure element.” The professor’s unruly hair, dirty suit, and US citizenship tipped the scales in favor of further investigation.

As the officer waved Kapsberger through, he pressed a concealed button under his desk to ensure that the customs men would search the professor’s luggage with extraordinary care.

The customs men were looking for anything that might confirm the immigration officer’s hunch: including, but not limited to, drugs, precious metals, fissile or radioactive material, pornography, Bibles, subversive literature, weapons or bladed articles, and financial instruments of a value above ten thousand dollars. Needless to say, the professor had none of these things. Finally satisfied, the inspectors left him to repack his ransacked suitcase and join the tour group, to the relief of Fidel, who had been waiting anxiously, having been waved through customs with his own bag unsearched.

Over the subsequent week and a half, the delegation was shown around model farms, a granite quarry, a sewing-machine factory, a youth center containing many preternaturally talented child performers, the Pyongyang Children’s Foodstuffs Factory, and Kim Il-sung University.

Although they were all broadly sympathetic towards the tiny nation’s eccentric experiment with socialism, none of the visitors was comfortable with the ubiquitous propaganda that claimed virtually divine status for the Great Leader. At the same time, they understood that airing these doubts or betraying any hint of mockery would only make life difficult for their North Korean hosts, all of whom wore tiny gold badges over their hearts bearing the Great Leader’s image.

The visitors attended the Mass Games in Kim Il-sung Stadium, climbed the Tower of the Juche Idea from whose viewing platform Pyongyang resembled a diorama of gray matchboxes, spent two days at a beach resort in the seaside town of Wonsan, and were treated to a series of long drunken meals by their hosts. Apart from an argument one evening with the minders when a representative from the National Union of Mineworkers finally ventured a criticism about the cult of personality that surrounded the Great Leader, the tour was uneventful.

However, in an act of forgetfulness that was to have enormous repercussions, Fidel left one of his belongings in the room at the Songdowon Hotel in Wonsan that he had shared with his father.

This was a hardback copy of the Dungeon Masters Guide, the core rule book for a popular role-playing game called Dungeons & Dragons that was one of Fidel’s passions. The cover depicted a giant red troll abducting an almost naked blond woman. This image would certainly have resulted in the book’s confiscation on arrival in Pyongyang, had the customs officials not been preoccupied with the moral degeneracy implied by David Kapsberger’s grubby suit and shaggy hair.

A maid, Kim Bok-mi, who found the rule book under the bed when she was preparing the hotel room for a visiting Soviet astrophysicist, was alarmed by the cover. She assumed it to be some form of American propaganda and handed it in to the hotel manager, with many words of apology.

For several days the hotel manager, a man in his late forties called Jon Chol-ju, kept the book in the bottom drawer of his desk. From time to time he would take it out and leaf through its pages while smoking the strong mentholated foreign cigarettes that were one of the perks of his job. Mr. Jon was an educated man who spoke a number of languages, including English, but the book must have been a puzzle to him. It wasn’t a genre he recognized. Some of the illustrations were clearly decadent, but they weren’t explicit enough to be usefully pornographic. Eventually he consigned it to his lost property collection.

In fairness, the book and the activity it described baffled many of its readers, even outside the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. It contained the rules for a complex game of make-believe set in a world of medieval technology, monsters, and magical powers.

When Jon Chol-ju died of a heart attack a short time later after a drinking binge, the new hotel manager, in an act of largesse, allowed the staff to choose one memento each from among the objects in the late manager’s lost property cupboard.

The choices were made in order of seniority. The hotel employees quickly cleared the cupboard of anything edible, wearable, or of obvious value. One of the kitchen staff, a junior chef named Cho So-dok who had recently joined the hotel after ten years of military service, was the last to pick. He was left with two possibilities: a pennant from the 1980 Moscow Olympics or the mysterious book.

It took him a while to make up his mind.

His eyes kept stealing enviously towards the half-empty bottle of Japanese perfume in the hand of the chambermaid who had chosen before him.

On the walk home, he began to have misgivings about his choice. Flipping through the book’s incomprehensible pages, he chided himself for not having taken the pennant. When he got back to the apartment he shared with his wife and young son, he dumped the book in a closet containing bedding and more or less forgot about it.

This is how it turned out that, sometime during the summer of 1995, Cho So-dok’s eleven-year-old son, Cho Jun-su, stumbled across the book while he was fetching a mattress for a visiting relative.

It was a moment that Cho Jun-su would replay in his imagination for the rest of his life. In years to come, he would joke that it was like a celestial object falling from the sky to be discovered by some bewildered nomad and made the centerpiece of a new religion.

First, a heavy thunk drew his eye to the sight of the book on the floor. As he picked it up, he was immediately arrested by the extraordinary scene depicted on its cover. An enormous horned red giant was holding a naked woman in one hand and a massive sword in the other. The woman fought vainly to break free, but her tiny sword was useless against her supernatural foe. In the foreground of the picture with their backs to the viewer, a knight and a sorcerer, dwarfed by the red giant, also struggled to overpower him. The odds seemed overwhelmingly stacked against them. The knight had already lost his balance and was staggering. But even as defeat seemed almost certain, there was an unearthly light gathering in the sorcerer’s raised left hand. It was a magic spell. In that terrible moment of jeopardy, it promised at least a small hope of victory.

Opening the book, Jun-su stared uncomprehendingly at the name of Fidel Olatunji-Kapsberger inscribed on the flyleaf in both an elaborate cursive script and Elvish runes. He touched the smooth pages with an awestruck hand. Only volumes of The Life of Kim Il-sung were printed on such fine white paper. Over the subsequent weeks he would puzzle in secret over the cover, calculating and recalculating the adventurers’ chances of victory. He would lose himself in the book’s illustrations: scenes of combat, alluring heaps of treasure, scaly dragons, lovingly rendered weapons, the cozy bonhomie of taverns. And he would stare hopelessly at the incomprehensible print on its pages for a clue to its meaning. Despite not understanding a word of it, he felt mysteriously blessed by the book’s arrival.

The book’s closest equivalents in Jun-su’s world were the graphic novels printed by the state publishing house. These could be found on a handcart that was usually parked outside Wonsan Station, arranged in a spectrum of desirability from the tattiest to the most pristine.

The comic books’ hand-drawn frames told dramatic stories of space exploration, the strife between feudal monarchs, man-made climatic disasters, and beehives menaced by hostile wasps. They had exciting titles like General Mighty Wing, The Crystal Key, and The Blizzard in the Jungle. And yet, whatever its outward form, each of these stories was essentially the same, a variation on a theme that every citizen knew only too well. The drifting spaceship, beleaguered kingdom, beehive, and jungle research station were all recognizably North Korea, a small country threatened by outside forces and facing a severe economic crisis after the breakup of its biggest ally, the Soviet Union. Just like the North Korean people, the cosmonauts, leaderless knights, scientists, or worker bees were compelled to fall back on their own courage and resourcefulness. Somehow, in every case, the recipe for achieving success against the odds turned out to be identical: self-sacrifice, teamwork, and obedience. The message of each story was to adhere to the ideal of Juche, the philosophy of self-reliance that had been discovered by the brilliant leader, the savior of the nation, Kim Il-sung, whose death a year earlier had been followed by two weeks of national mourning.

In case the parables weren’t clear enough, there were mottos written into the margins of the comic books: “Be sure to build a strong fence when there are jackals outside”; “One’s honor is harder to keep than it is to earn”; “An old enemy is still an enemy.”

The political messages might have been ham-fisted, but the stories were engaging and the illustrations lively. The owner of the cart did good business, lending the comic books for a few chon per half hour to be read on the spot by customers of all ages.

People were eager for diversion of any kind. The nineties were years of famine in North Korea. It was a period of collective suffering that would come to be known as the Arduous March.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea had faced enormous hardship. Things had got worse after Kim Il-sung died and his son, Kim Jong-il, began leading the country. Torrential rains in June 1995 destroyed the rice crop. The system through which most citizens received their food rations collapsed. Coupons were handed out as usual for rice, cooking oil, meat, and the occasional gray slab of frozen pollock, but when citizens turned up to exchange the vouchers for food at the state-run distribution centers, they were told the shelves were empty. No explanation was given. Government propaganda urged people to conserve food by eating only twice a day—but even that, for many, became impossible.

At school, Jun-su’s classmates began to starve. The first signs of it were listlessness and inattention during lessons. A few pupils fell asleep at their desks and were chided by the teachers. Malnutrition lightened the hair of the poorer students and swelled their feet and ankles. People with glassy eyes moved slowly through the streets of Wonsan. Starving workers dismantled the machinery in their factories and tried to exchange it for something to eat. Rice, the staple crop, had disappeared entirely. Outside the city, groups of foragers searched for edible roots and weeds. Children dropped out of school to help their parents scavenge. Scant meals of ground corn porridge were bulked out with traditional famine foods: bentonite clay, poplar buds, acorns, sawdust, elm bark, and thistles. But while these might fool the stomach for a while, they couldn’t supply enough calories for survival. Corpses began to appear in the streets and in the entryways of apartment buildings. Some families starved to death together in their homes; singletons gravitated to the railway station to die. There were so many bodies that they had to be stored in piles and collected by truck for disposal in unmarked graves. Rumors abounded of women and children being sold into servitude across the Chinese border, and even of cannibalism.

Jun-su understood that he was lucky. He wasn’t part of the country’s elite, who were insulated from the suffering. But his parents, Cho So-dok and Kang Han-na, were resourceful. His mother had taken advantage of a government scheme that encouraged citizens to raise pigs. Han-na had to give a few pigs in each litter to the government, but was allowed to keep or sell the remainder. When the time came to butcher the animals, the neighbors formed a queue around the block to buy meat, head, trotters, brain, fat, organs, and congealing blood.

Jun-su’s father was also in a privileged position. As a source of vital foreign currency, the hotel where he worked not only remained open, but was guaranteed a supply of food. So-dok would have been risking his life to take anything from the hotel kitchen, but because he was fed at work, there was more food to go round for Jun-su and his mother. Most days Jun-su ate two dispiritingly bland meals of soup, maize porridge, and the occasional fish. He was often hungry, but he didn’t starve, unlike many of those around him. At night, the distant cries of hungry children broke the still air like a chorus of frogs.

The teachers suffered too. During a math class one day, Kang Yeong-nam, a dapper man in his fifties with a reputation as a disciplinarian, sat down suddenly in the middle of the room and turned pale. He gazed stupidly around him until the lesson ended and the baffled pupils filed out of class. Later, Jun-su saw Teacher Kang being helped to the sanatorium.

That evening, seated under the precious single bulb that had been a personal gift from the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, Jun-su asked his mother if he could bring some extra food to school for Kang Yeong-nam. “Teacher Kang is hungry,” he said.

Jun-su’s mother exchanged a glance with his father and told Jun-su to finish his food. Talk of hunger made her uncomfortable. It implied criticism of the government. Citizens were careful to speak of pain instead of hunger. The official causes of death on medical certificates attributed fatalities to food poisoning rather than starvation. The state-run media referred obliquely to a “food ration downturn.”

Han-na asked So-dok to switch on the radio. The announcer was reporting on the visit of the Dear Leader to a new ostrich farm outside Pyongyang. The Dear Leader had spent several hours touring the site and giving its managers some on-the-spot guidance. The announcer explained that it was an unprecedented and visionary application of the Juche philosophy: a single ostrich egg was the equivalent of twenty-four hen’s eggs and could easily feed eight people.

A few minutes later, a truck with a loudspeaker passed the apartment building and instructed its inhabitants to turn off their lights.

Daily life was strictly timetabled. A bell woke the inhabitants of Jun-su’s building every morning at five. The noise of its clapper was echoed by a variety of rings and clanks sounding out across the city. Jun-su and his classmates mustered at the assembly point at 7:45 a.m. and were walked to school by their teacher. School lasted from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. There was school on Saturday mornings too, followed by political instruction and the Daily Life Unity Critique, where the pupils were encouraged to point out each other’s shortcomings in order that they might all become better citizens.

Everyone’s life was organized around the same significant events. Each April 15, the country celebrated the Day of the Sun that marked the birth of the Great Leader in 1912. Every September 9 was the Founding of the Republic Day. Each autumn, at the festival of Chuseok, Jun-su’s family held a feast of thanksgiving before the ashes of their ancestors. And then, a few weeks later, the government would deliver a big ration of cabbages for each family to preserve for the winter. Every October was tree-planting month. The twenty-seventh of December was Constitution Day. And on February 16, the nation celebrated the Day of the Shining Star, the birthday of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il.

It never occurred to Jun-su that life could be any different or better than what it was. He was proud to be a member of the virtuous Korean people. He felt lucky not to be a citizen of South Korea, where the people were much hungrier and their ancient culture was held in contempt by the brutal Yankee occupiers. He mourned the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, who had worked so hard and cared so deeply for his people; he loved his parents, and felt that he loved the Great Leader’s son, Kim Jong-il, the Dear Leader, slightly more. In all respects, he considered himself a loyal and lucky citizen of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

On the walls of Jun-su’s living room, as in every household, hung two portraits: one of the Great Leader and one of the Dear Leader. Han-na dusted them every day with a special white cloth.

The only real free time Jun-su had was on Sundays. Often, when Jun-su’s father wasn’t working, he took his son fishing from one of the curving concrete breakwaters that lined Wonsan Harbor. Many families fished there, sending their children to gather shellfish and crabs from the shallows, either to eat or to use as bait. Casting with a rod from the shore, it was possible at various times of the year to catch mackerel, whiting, and bream. One memorable August morning, Jun-su’s father cast off with pellets of boiled maize, caught two fat bream, and let Jun-su cast again. Jun-su immediately felt the line go tense and the rod buck in his hand. In all, they caught half a dozen fish before they set off home.

As an adult, despite the terrible things he lived through, Jun-su would retain the air of confidence and self-sufficiency that is characteristic of well-loved only children. It makes it easy to picture him, aged eleven, walking beside his father on one of their excursions to the waterfront. Jun-su is carrying the segments of the rod in a bundle over his shoulder, as though he’s a soldier marching with a rifle. He’s chatting happily about his life at school, sports, military aircraft—one of his passions—and asking Cho So-dok questions about his work at the hotel, and his impressions of the various nationalities who visited it.

“What are the French like, Dad?” he asked as they walked slowly home, their record catch still twitching in the pair of plastic bags that his father was holding.

Cho So-dok was smoking a cigarette—he favored the Chollima brand, named after the famous mythological horse—with the satisfied air of a successful huntsman. “The French had a revolution of their own,” he said, “so although they’re capitalist pigs, they’re not the worst.”

The sound of a lorry grew louder as it approached them from behind. Cho So-dok glanced towards it and watched as it passed, on its way to a nearby collective farm. Rations in the countryside had been cut so low that many farmworkers were too weak to bring in the harvest unassisted. The bed of the truck was packed with soldiers, all standing because there was no room for them to sit down. The soldiers who were visible at the rear were wearing full-face gas masks to protect them from the exhaust fumes that billowed behind the vehicle. The masks gave them a sinister and skeletal appearance.

“Who are the worst?” asked Jun-su. He sensed his father was distracted so he asked it again. In truth, it wasn’t a sincere question: every school-age child in North Korea knew the answer. The worst were the Yankee imperialists who had waged war on North Korea, who had divided the North from the South, and who had been defeated by the courage of the North Korean people inspired by the Juche idea. Like children around the world, Jun-su just enjoyed hearing the same stories told over and over, and he was priming his father for this one.

Cho So-dok’s eyes followed the lorry as the noise of the engine faded into the distance. He pinched the cigarette and put it back into its red packet to smoke later. “Let’s not talk about all that shit,” he said.

His father’s words hit Jun-su with the force of a blow. So-dok was an undemonstrative man and this behavior was deeply out of character. It would never have occurred to Jun-su that his father might be angry for his own private reasons. Jun-su assumed that he had done something wrong. They walked along in silence for a little while. For a moment Jun-su thought he might burst into tears.

Beside the road, a long banner declared: WE WILL SAFEGUARD WITH OUR LIVES THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE WORKERS’ PARTY OF KOREA.

“I’m sorry, son,” said So-dok. “Last week they sent a truck to the hotel and took us out to the fields to help with the harvest. We spent three days bringing in potatoes. Your father’s not a young man anymore and when he’s tired, he gets short-tempered. It’s not your fault.”

A few hundred meters farther on, as they passed a red-brick complex of apartment buildings, So-dok nudged his son. “Hey, doesn’t your teacher Kang live in there?”

Jun-su stared in puzzlement at his father. He had no idea where his teacher lived. He’d never considered the possibility that any of his teachers had a life outside school. In fact, he found it hard to imagine any of them as fully human.

“In that one at the end,” his father said. He made a gesture to identify the building he meant. Then, as though the notion had just struck him, he scratched his head and added, “I tell you what: I bet he’d like one of these fish.” He looked at Jun-su. Nodding as though approving his own idea, he continued his train of thought: “In fact, you know what would be better than a fish? Let’s give him two.” So-dok crouched on his haunches and examined their catch. The silver fish-scales gleamed in his sunburned hands as he picked up the fish to inspect them. He chose two of the biggest bream and transferred them to a single plastic bag, which he exchanged for Jun-su’s rod. Jun-su felt the weight of the bag tug on his arm.

“Just go in and give it to him,” said So-dok. “And then hurry home.”

Jun-su was surprised. It was an odd thing to do. Not that his father wasn’t generous, but food was desperately short. He hesitated and looked at his father. His father nodded to confirm the instruction, then paused, as though struck by another thought.

“Hey,” said So-dok, hunkering down again and reaching into the pocket of his windcheater. “Take him this as well.” He held out the thin plastic bag containing the two or three hundred grams of cornmeal mush left over from the bait balls.

Jun-su took it and set off towards the complex of apartments. He felt excited as he approached the unfamiliar building. He imagined that he was a spy entrusted with an important mission for the Fatherland. Two children were hanging laundry on a line suspended between two spindly trees. One of them called out to ask him where he was going. Jun-su proudly ignored him.

In the foyer of the building—just as in Jun-su’s building—was a glassed-in booth where the chief of the building’s People’s Unit stood guard. In Jun-su’s building, this was nosy Kim Song-hwa, a slight yet formidable woman in her fifties with an impressive coiffure, who observed all the comings and goings of the residents and also gleaned information from a network of informants—mainly people who were too old and infirm to do anything but spy on their neighbors.

Here the chief of the People’s Unit was a man who was studying an old copy of the Rodong Sinmun through a pair of reading glasses held together with old tape. When Jun-su hailed him as “Comrade Superintendent,” he raised his watery eyes. Jun-su explained why he had come and the man waved him up to the third floor.

Jun-su climbed the echoing stairwell. The door of Teacher Kang’s apartment was open. Jun-su peered inside. He glimpsed a skinny shirtless figure lying at full stretch on a thin mattress. Jun-su coughed. There was no response. He tapped on the opened door and said: “Teacher, I’ve brought you something.” Still no reply. He slipped off his shoes and boldly entered the apartment.

The floor plan of Teacher Kang’s apartment was identical to Jun-su’s, but the whole place was messier, darker, and suffused with an unpleasant sickly-sweet aroma. Jun-su stood for a minute watching the rise and fall of Teacher Kang’s scrawny chest. Once his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he looked around at his surroundings. There were shelves of books in glass-fronted bookcases, many of them volumes of the Great Leader’s writings. Jun-su moved towards them, vaguely hoping that among all these volumes there might be one of the comics he loved. But all he saw was row after row of boring-looking paperback books whose titles he couldn’t even understand.

There was a noise behind him and he turned his head. Teacher Kang had opened his eyes and said in a confused and croaky voice: “Plum blossom, is that you?” He sat up and reached beside him for a glass with some murky liquid inside. He swallowed it, belched lightly, and gazed in perplexity at Jun-su.

Jun-su was so nervous that he forgot to bow or apologize for the interruption. He just stuck out a hand with the bag in it and said: “My dad caught you some fish, sir.”

“You can tell your father I don’t need his fish,” said Teacher Kang grumpily, settling back down onto his mattress. “You keep your fish. Now go away, I need to rest.”

When Jun-su got home with the fish and did his best to explain to his parents