Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson is on a mission. He hopes to give Korean culture, particularly North Korean culture, a chance to exercise its lungs, give it a voice after being muzzled for a century.
"The tie to literature was cut in 1910," said the 46-year-old author, citing an invasion by Japan that short-circuited the peninsula’s cultural legacy. "So, for 35 years they were totally divorced from their own literature. Then came World War II, then came the Korean War, then came a totalitarian dictatorship. So in the North no one has read a novel in 100 years. And we don’t have evidence of a literary underground. No one’s sneaking anything out."
Johnson hopes his novel "The Orphan Master’s Son" will encourage Korean writers to "restore something to this weird void of art and literature on the face of the earth."
The book captured the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013, earning praise as a "daring and remarkable novel" from The New York Times and for taking "implausible fact and turning it into entirely believable fiction."
Johnson, a professor of creative writing at Stanford University, will appear at the Ninth Annual Hawaii Book and Music Festival, May 3 and 4, to talk about his book.
The protagonist, Jun Do, begins life in an orphanage and goes on to various careers achievable only in the byzantine world of totalitarian North Korea: a tunnel soldier able to fight in total darkness; a kidnapper who snatches Japanese citizens for North Korean politicians, who used them for sex, language instruction and other purposes; a monitor of Western radio broadcasts aboard a fishing vessel; an aide on a diplomatic trip to Texas; an organ harvester; a "replacement husband" for a movie star; and a prisoner in a gulag, where he experiences stomach-churning brutality.
The novel was initially sparked by "The Aquariums of Pyongyang," by Chol-hwan Kang about his 10 years in a North Korean gulag. Johnson often has his students read memoirs as a way to "learn how to fake the fictional lives of imagined people," and Kang’s "just dumbfounded" the class, Johnson said by phone.
"We couldn’t talk about anything but the contents, and what this man had gone through and what North Korea was like. We just had to kind of like debrief together."
That launched Johnson, who originally trained as a journalist, on a six-year quest for information about North Korea. Some of it was gut-wrenching, such as his interviews with defectors, which in part is reflected in the storytelling style of "The Orphan Master’s Son." The author jumps between third-person to first-person narration and presents disjointed chronological sequences.
"Defectors would tell their stories in all these strange ways, which is very organic to how a story is told," Johnson said. "After engaging the stories of defectors, it would be kind of a lie to tell the narrative of someone who’d been in a gulag in a beginning, middle and end kind of Western way. I tried to capture how real people told their stories about North Korea."
Johnson visited the country as part of his research, under the watchful eye of government minders who made sure he didn’t get to see anything he was truly interested in.
"I saw tens of thousands of people in a huge bustling capital — and they walked. There were no bicycles, almost no cars at all. They had triple-car electric buses and a subway that I couldn’t tell whether it was really used or not. But they walked, and they walked with great purpose. And when the sun set, they walked in the dark."
As dark as "The Orphan Master’s Son" is, there is also a good deal of humor, particularly in sections told in propagandist lingo where nearly every sentence ends in an exclamation point. Johnson modeled those passages, sometimes lifting entire sentences, from Rodung Sinmun, the North Korean Workers’ Newspaper.
"It was quite fun to play with their national story," he said.
The research gave him a disturbing portrait of a society where virtually everyone is at the whim of a leadership that imprints its power through its stories, true or not.
As it says in his novel, "If a farmer is declared a music virtuoso by the state, everyone had better start calling him maestro. And secretly, he’d be wise to start practicing the piano. For us, if a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change."
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Adam Johnson will give a free talk at the Hawaii Book and Music Festival at 2:15 p.m. May 3 in the Mission Memorial Auditorium.
