#180
Title: Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
Author: Richard E. Kim
Publisher: University of California
Year: 1998
Country: North Korea
204 pages

A fictionalized memoir, by which I assume the author means what Lucy Grealy did in Autobiography of a Face--the people and events are real, but the conversations and other aspects of the text are not. Kim describes the events of World War II from the perspective of a North Korean family under Japanese occupation. This includes the gradual erosion of Korean culture, including the mandate to discard Korean names. In the contemporary U.S., we do not tend to remember the perceptions of the Japanese held by the generation that came of age during the war; Kim reminds us of those images. Kim writes well and the narrative flows easily. I'd like to read Kang Chol Hwan's Aquariums of Pyongyang to extend my knowledge of North Korea with a more contemporary account.