Defining herself as an “ethnologist of North Korea who has yet to conduct ethnographic fieldwork there” (p. 3), Sonia Ryang explains her innovative goal, which applies “the conventional criteria of ethnography to make a break with overly politicized positions” (p. 4). However, “to examine the connection between individuals and the Leader” (p. 4), she recognizes the “political domain as the target of this study” (p. 4). Aiming to explain North Korea's culture from a distance “to (re)anthropo-ize the faceless Koreans” (p. 8), Ryang uses literary sources of the 1970s and 1980s and discusses the difficulty of defining a particular text as “key to a society's cultural logic” (p. 12). The introduction enthusiastically describes her non-literary intentions and hybrid ethnographic-ethnologic strategy (p. 3), to obtain “a certain glimpse of North Korean society” through a literary “textual and archival . . . body of [field] data” based on her own “interpretive manner, rather than an empirical or factual one” (p. 13).

Given her North Korean-Japanese biographic and North American academic background and publications,Footnote ¹¹ her main area of research seems to be more Korean diaspora rather than North Korea itself. In fact, her de facto fieldwork was her 1985 visit to North Korea.

Can the decades of her selected literary sources validate the present-day political circumstances considering four decades of changes? How can the political domain be treated without admitting its overly politicized position? The “glimpse” might have been enriched with more effective literary analysis to captivate global readers' interest in North Korean literature for its artistic value, such as South Korean literary critics have produced.Footnote ¹²

Reading North Korea consists of three potentially attractive themes: “Love,” “War,” and “Self.” The first theme explains how love “forms an eternal triangle” (p. 77) in North Korean narratives, because the state-controlled literature created a new human being by relating the individual's love to their affectionate, luminous, and perfect Leader. Men and women subordinate their personal love to each other's love for the Great Charismatic Leader, who personifies love “for the people and our people's history and strength …” (p. 49). In the literary sources selected, unconditional love “constitutes an all-consuming form of dedication while the Great Leader does not have to reciprocate. Paradoxically, however, [he] is perceived as a most benevolent leader” (p. 62).

The second theme portrays North Korea in a constant state of emergency due to its revolutionary tradition and historically sustained discourse of “being at war against the United States ever since 1950” (p. 134). Although North Koreans, like people everywhere in the world, lead ordinary daily lives of “pleasure, pain, achievement, disillusionment, suffering, hope, distress, pride, rage, and success . . . today the emergency continues, in large measure, to underpin its cultural logic” (p. 139). Ryang's fiction and film sources entertainingly blame “American Wretches” for North Korea's facing constant wartime tension and emergency because of “economic sanctions due to its incompliance regarding its nuclear weapons program” and “shortages in food and energy” (p. 135). Could the sense of emergency also be attributed to North Korea's unaccomplished ultimate goal of its long-awaited unification of the Korean peninsula on its own terms, that is, eliminating the Americans? If so, North Korea must feel in constant crisis.

The third theme traces the logical and emotional evolution of the individual self in North Korean literature as “an entity that needs to be killed through sacrifice for the Great Leader but it first needs to be identified before it can be killed” (p. 140). State-controlled fictional selves are and need to be politicized because literature provides forms of appropriate public language, through which individuals can demonstrate their loyalty and dedication to the Great Leader and the nation. Self-criticism comes from official literary output used over years of “self-criticism exercising in public in a format deemed process … turning private contemplation into public presentation” (p. 185). Such self-criticism is clearly intended to subordinate all human endeavors to the political priority of becoming the new human mode. As Han and Jeong argued, “a passionate revolutionary and an authentic communist . . . possesses the purest and cleanest [sense of] loyalty and sincerity toward [the Leader, Kim Il Sung] and the Party.”Footnote ¹³

Reading North Korea not only gives the impression of being another political approach to North Korea; in fact, it is. Although the subtitle, An Ethnological Inquiry, encourages expectations of different perspectives from those of recent publications on this region,Footnote ¹⁴ the author interprets her texts to show the state's educational goal in literature. The repetitive message seems to reveal her respect for the sacred politicized connection developed between individuals and the Great Leader, despite her original ethnological intention to break away from politicized positions. Therefore, the syncretism between Marxist-Leninist ideology and North Korean cultural logic also emerges. After extensive explanations and quotations of the works themselves, readers expect more significant interpretation and conclusions to be extracted from such texts that are not easily accessible.

Despite some contradictions in text selection criteria, use of genre terms, and the questionable “DPRK International Copyright Protection Treaty,” the author provides interesting glimpses of the mysterious and elusive studies about the Korea on the other side of the DMZ. Ryang tries to focus on a humanistic understanding of North Korea's highly politicized and undeniably militarized social reality.

This book may be recommended to general readers interested in North Korea. Ryang undoubtedly intended to stimulate the mass of uninformed readers to make “a Journey to [the North Korean] Abyss” (p. 1), focusing on fundamentally political rather than literary interpretations of daily life, which have received scant attention. However, readers cannot ignore some of Reading North Korea's limitations without falling into a real abyss. But they can enjoy the thought-provoking introduction.