[GlenBarrington]

Set in North Korea, of all places. I've just started it. Bought it at Amazon

What a miserable place! Apparently beautiful women don't stand much chance there. A beautiful married woman catches the eye of some official and is arrested and her husband is fired from his job. To make ends meet he takes a job running an orphanage. Where people who expect to be arrested or disappear place their children. Their son comes with him and he is raised in the orphanage.

At the orphanage, there is no heat, no electricity, no real food in a town with no heat, no electricity, and no real food. Orphans are despised and are hired out by the system on a day basis to do the most dangerous, menial and humiliating jobs.

Factories come and 'adopt' the children for cheap labor. Groups of Chinese men come and 'adopt' children for reasons no one investigates too closely. No matter who adopts them, the ones who get 'adopted' are never heard from again.

The Orphan Master's son, Jun Do, grows up in this environment, in effect as an orphan, but not really. Because his dad is the Orphan Master, he is sort of the chief of the boys, he gets to decide who eats, who goes hungry, who does the most menial or easiest jobs. He even gets to name the boys as they come into the orphanage.

Because their parents are either enemies of the state or just got noticed by the state, the orphans must change their names upon entry to the orphanage to that of a 'Martyr of the Revolution' in the hopes that a new name will prevent whatever behavior that their parents did to get noticed. Jun Do takes no pleasure in this cruelty, he even likes many of the boys, but that's the way it is, his survival depends on their victimization.

Boy orphans (the girls aren't' mentioned, I don't think they count for very much in N. Korea) who don't starve to death or worked to death, or 'adopted' and manage to make it to maturity have only ONE option at adulthood. Join an orphans battalion in the army. They get the worst, most dangerous assignments. Digging, maintaining, and defending underground tunnels that lead to Seoul, clearing land mines, that sort of thing.

The protagonist joins an orphans battalion because everyone assumes he is an orphan having been raised in the system. He is assigned to a tunnel maintenance group where he become very adept at fighting S Korean Soldiers in the dark.

His fighting skills come to the attention of Officer So who is putting together a group to resume kidnapping Japanese civilians. His job is being 'the muscle'. On his first kidnapping, the victim (though the N. Koreans don't think of them that way) wears glasses. On the beach where they find him, his glasses fly off in the sand and out of curiosity our protagonist looks through them, he is astonished to realize he can see better with the glasses and keeps them. He also notices that the Japanese don't live in large impersonal barracks but seem to live in smaller detached barracks.

Over the course of several kidnappings at random, it becomes obvious to the unit that this is all a rehearsal to kidnap a popular opera singer who some big shot wants for his own personal 'comfort woman'. I've stopped at the point where the young woman is kidnapped but not yet returned to N Korea. It's only about 20% of the way into the book, so I don't think it's a romance or about him and her exactly.

But the writing is very powerful. The daily and hourly indignities and compromises with common human decency seems relentless. This is a book of great power and of great tragedy so profound that the characters trapped inside the story don't even understand the tragedy completely and many don't even see the tragedy at all. What's amazing, is just how free the N. Koreans are of ANY sort of moral judgement. NOTHING is good or bad, unless the state says it is good or bad.

I can't put it down and I can't stop thinking about it. And I pray that this is a work of fiction.