
A River in Darkness
One Man's Escape from North Korea
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Narrated by:
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Brian Nishii
About this listen
A New York Times bestseller and Amazon Charts Most Read and Most Sold book.
A Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Memoir & Autobiography.
The harrowing true story of one man’s life in - and subsequent escape from - North Korea, one of the world’s most brutal totalitarian regimes.
Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.
In this memoir translated from the original Japanese, Ishikawa candidly recounts his tumultuous upbringing and the brutal thirty-six years he spent living under a crushing totalitarian regime, as well as the challenges he faced repatriating to Japan after barely escaping North Korea with his life. A River in Darkness is not only a shocking portrait of life inside the country but a testament to the dignity - and indomitable nature - of the human spirit.
©2000 by Masaji Ishikawa. (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2017 by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields - except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST).
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The King and I meets Mary Poppins
- By Michael on 02-22-15
By: Suki Kim
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Dear Leader
- Poet, Spy, Escapee - A Look inside North Korea
- By: Jang Jin-sung
- Narrated by: Daniel York
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life.
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Outstanding! A life-changing listen.
- By Gotta Tellya on 09-29-14
By: Jang Jin-sung
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In Order to Live
- A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom
- By: Yeonmi Park
- Narrated by: Eji Kim
- Length: 9 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In In Order to Live, Yeonmi Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea - and to freedom.
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Wow. What a story!
- By Jfm on 02-01-16
By: Yeonmi Park
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A Thousand Miles to Freedom
- My Escape from North Korea
- By: Sebastien Falletti, Eunsun Kim
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child, Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the countrywide famine escalated. By the time she was 11 years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun too was in danger of starving. Finally her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister.
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Not Much New Here, but Courage and Hope to Spare
- By Gillian on 03-25-16
By: Sebastien Falletti, and others
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Stars Between the Sun and Moon
- One Woman's Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom
- By: Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland
- Narrated by: Janet Song
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in 1970s North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household - her parents worked in the factories, and the family scraped by on rations. Nightly she bowed to her photo of Kim Il-Sung. It was the beginning of a chaotic period with a decade-long famine. Jang married an abusive man who sold their baby. She left him and went home to help her family by illegally crossing the river to China to trade goods. She was caught and imprisoned twice.
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Fantastic story. Well read.
- By Jfm on 02-20-16
By: Lucia Jang, and others
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Nothing to Envy
- Ordinary Lives in North Korea
- By: Barbara Demick
- Narrated by: Karen White
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years - a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung and the unchallenged rise to power of his son, Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape never before seen, Demick brings to life what it means to be an average Korean citizen, living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today.
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The man who wants to be GOD
- By Gohar on 05-08-10
By: Barbara Demick
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Every Falling Star
- The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea
- By: Sungju Lee, Susan McClelland
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Every Falling Star, the first book to portray contemporary North Korea to a young audience, is the intense memoir of a North Korean boy named Sungju who is forced at age 12 to live on the streets and fend for himself. To survive, Sungju creates a gang and lives by thieving, fighting, begging, and stealing rides on cargo trains. Sungju richly recreates his scabrous story, depicting what it was like for a boy alone to create a new family with his gang, his "brothers".
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Riveting, sad, and inspirational
- By Janis Creason on 09-17-16
By: Sungju Lee, and others
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The Last Girl
- My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State
- By: Nadia Murad
- Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin
- Length: 12 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Nadia Murad was born and raised in Kocho, a small village of farmers and shepherds in Northern Iraq. A member of the Yazidi community, she and her brothers and sisters lived a quiet life. Nadia had dreams of becoming a history teacher or opening her own beauty salon. On August 15, 2014, when Nadia was just 21 years old, this life ended. Islamic State militants massacred the people of her village, executing men who refused to convert to Islam and women too old to become sex slaves.
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A Heartbreaking Tale of Survival and Hope
- By Leahmgordon on 11-08-17
By: Nadia Murad
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North Korea Undercover
- Inside the World's Most Secret State
- By: John Sweeney
- Narrated by: Gildart Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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North Korea is like no other tyranny on Earth. Its citizens are told their home is the greatest nation in the world, and Big Brother is always watching. It is Orwell's 1984 made reality. Huge factories with no staff or electricity, hospitals with no patients, uniformed child soldiers, and the world-famous and eerily empty DMZ - the Demilitarized Zone, where North Korea ends and South Korea begins - are all framed by a relentless flow of regime propaganda from omnipresent loudspeakers. Free speech is an illusion: one word out of line, and the gulag awaits.
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Highly listenable, humorous and enlightening
- By Kevin Stokes on 09-09-15
By: John Sweeney
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North Korea Confidential
- Private Markets, Fashion Trends, Prison Camps, Dissenters and Defectors
- By: Daniel Tudor, James Pearson
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 4 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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North Korea is one of the most troubled societies on earth. The country's 24 million people live under a violent dictatorship led by a single family, which relentlessly pursues the development of nuclear arms, which periodically incites risky military clashes with the larger, richer, liberal South, and which forces each and every person to play a role in the "theater state" even as it pays little more than lip service to the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority.
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Interesting portrait of North Korea marred by awful pronunciation
- By Amazon Customer on 08-03-21
By: Daniel Tudor, and others
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The Hard Road Out
- One Woman’s Escape from North Korea
- By: Jihyun Park, Seh-Lynn Chai, Sarah Baldwin - translator
- Narrated by: Rosa Escoda
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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North Korea is an open-air prison from which there is no escape. Only a handful of men and women have succeeded. Jihyun Park is one of these rare survivors. Twice she left the land of the ‘socialist miracle’ to flee famine and dictatorship. By the age of 29, she had already witnessed a lifetime of suffering. Family members had died of starvation; her brother was beaten nearly to death by soldiers. Even smiling and laughing was discouraged.
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The window to North Korea
- By Anonymous User on 02-25-25
By: Jihyun Park, and others
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The Broken Circle
- A Memoir of Escaping Afghanistan
- By: Enjeela Ahmadi-Miller
- Narrated by: Lameece Issaq
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home - Kabul, Afghanistan - as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.
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Take heed
- By Pam Pearson on 07-13-19
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Dead Mountain
- The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
- By: Donnie Eichar
- Narrated by: Donnie Eichar
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In February 1959, a group of nine experienced hikers in the Russian Ural Mountains died mysteriously on an elevation known as Dead Mountain. Eerie aspects of the incident—unexplained violent injuries, signs that they cut open and fled the tent without proper clothing or shoes, a strange final photograph taken by one of the hikers, and elevated levels of radiation found on some of their clothes—have led to decades of speculation over what really happened.
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Mystery & Intrigue In The Ural Mountains
- By Sara on 06-30-15
By: Donnie Eichar
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A Book of Five Rings
- The Strategy of Musashi
- By: Miyamoto Musashi
- Narrated by: Alec Sand
- Length: 1 hr and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Legendary 17th century swordsman Miyamoto Musashi’s exposition of sword fighting, strategy and Zen philosophy. Required reading for any martial artist, business person or student of strategy. Includes the one hour Zen inspired soundtrack The Mysterious Sound of Wind in the Bamboo. Performed on authentic Japanese instruments.
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Read all of it in one day, then read it once a day forever
- By Luis Roman on 08-08-17
By: Miyamoto Musashi
What listeners say about A River in Darkness
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Overall
- J. Manuel Elias
- 07-31-18
Cruel reality of humanity.
Read it none stop, as a father I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to be in a situation like that. It's so sad. It served me to look at my life and remember that I have so much more than I deserve. I hope someday people that have gone through horrible things will be somehow compensated. recommended if you would like to get a lil perspective on life.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Carter Hooper
- 02-01-19
Riveting, Heartbreaking and Inspiring
When I rate this 5 stars, an "I Love It" box pops up. It should say "I'm 5-Star Horrified by This". Incredibly shocking to think people still have to un-live like this. What a story and what a man. Utmost respect for the author and his family. Read it and weep, though his unwavering hope for a better life is truly inspiring,
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2 people found this helpful
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- Little Willow
- 08-08-18
Haunting and humbling
Whether your first book on an NK defector's life or like me the 12th it makes you want to weep for what you have and what they never did.
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- Cynthia R. Connolly
- 09-02-18
A River in Darkness
This was a sad book, a heart breaker. It makes you feel like you should do something but what. I feel so blessed to have the life I have.
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- Christopher
- 08-09-18
An amazing story of survival and family!
This book was full of gut wrenching moments and painful heartaches. Though everything this man went through was true you can't help but wish and wonder what life would be for him if he could have been with his family in Japan after escaping that dreadful place. Regardless I was relieved he and many others have escaped to freedom and can live their lives. This book really opened my eyes as to what goes on in North Korea then and even now. I have watched videos and read stories online, but nothing compared to Mr. Ishikawa's journey through hell and back. (Much respect to you Sir!)
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- Willm
- 08-07-18
A Man's Tale of Hell on Earth
An extraordinary tale of a man's struggles in life. A hell on Earth. An unfortunate tale of how many struggle through life today.
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- April
- 08-06-18
Truly horrifying.
Reminds you to appreciate the good things you have in life. Also to not trust Kim Jung Un!
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- David Lambert
- 10-09-18
Fantastic story
A very interesting look into the life of a person that has truly suffered. How the class system works in Japan and Korea. Snd how it brands a person for no reason at all but for where they are from.
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- Ma Asuncion Mercado
- 08-16-18
Can’t Stop
So riveting!
Its such a personal story on the NorthKorea no one knew about. Sad that such a situation may still exist.
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- Anonymous User
- 04-27-18
Overwhelming
The devastating cruelty of communist dictatorships is born by simple people. As a political refugee from communist Cuba I can relate to the anguish and desire to escape. I too left Cuba when I was 13. However I was lucky to leave with my family so the author's story is too me overwhelming.
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