Book Review: Sketching the Unseen: Kim Yu-kyung’s Unflinching Portrait of North Korean Life

“Nude Sketch,” By: Kim Yu-kyung. Haum Publishing House, 2024. 284 pp.

When an artist risks their life to sketch the naked truth of their country’s suffering, the line between art and survival blurs dangerously. In Kim Yu-kyung’s latest collection of short stories, “Nude Sketch,” readers are granted access to North Korea’s hidden realities—from pandemic-stricken households to the perilous journeys of defectors. As one of defector literature’s most compelling voices, Kim offers what satellite imagery and policy briefs cannot: authentic human stories that reveal how ordinary citizens navigate extraordinary oppression. This collection stands as a necessary contribution to our understanding of contemporary North Korean life, documenting personal experiences that would otherwise remain opaque to the outside world.[1]

Depicting North Korea’s Hidden Realities

Kim Yu-kyung is a mysterious figure in North Korean defector literature. Having escaped from North Korea to South Korea in the 2000s, she was previously part of North Korea’s Korean Writer’s Union, giving her work a unique literary foundation. She writes under a pseudonym as she still has family in North Korea, adding another layer of authenticity to her narratives. Some of her previous works include “The Song of Youth” (2012), which narrated the trials of a young North Korean woman during the 1990s famine period, and “The Place of Human Desecration” (2016), which offered disturbing insights into political prison camps through the intertwined lives of prisoners and a guard. Like the anonymous writer Bandi, Kim appears to blend personal experiences with creative storytelling.

The centerpiece of Kim’s new short story collection, “Nude Sketch,” presents a harrowing account of how COVID-19 exacerbated existing hardships in North Korea. The story follows a family whose primary income, earned by the wife through market activities, vanishes when pandemic restrictions take effect. When the husband, a state-employed artist, creates a drawing depicting an elderly woman’s emaciated body after being stripped by desperate homeless people, the artwork makes its way into international exhibitions. The regime’s violent response—hunting down the artist for revealing this uncomfortable truth—forces the family to attempt defection, with tragic consequences. This narrative illustrates how the pandemic recreated conditions reminiscent of the devastating “Arduous March” famine period of the 1990s, while simultaneously highlighting the regime’s prioritization of image control over citizens’ welfare.

Kim’s narratives extend beyond individual tragedies to document the dangerous pathways of defection and post-defection struggles. In one particularly moving story, she follows a mother and son’s perilous journey through Thailand, capturing both the physical dangers and crushing psychological weight of their escape. The collection also thoughtfully examines the complex reality of life after defection. In one standout story, “That Spring Day’s Encounter,” a North Korean restaurant worker escapes from Vietnam with a South Korean man’s help, only to create unexpected tensions by prioritizing education over family life in her new country. Through this character, Kim explores an all-too-easy-to-ignore aspect of the defector experience: how the sudden freedom to pursue long-denied opportunities can clash with the expectations of a new society. The character’s determination to obtain the education she was denied in North Korea becomes both a form of personal liberation and a source of cultural conflict, challenging simplistic narratives about defector integration.

Another compelling narrative follows a North Korean special forces officer trapped in an impossible moral dilemma when his family is held hostage in a remote region, forcing him to assassinate high-profile defectors in South Korea. The psychological depth of the story emerges as he finds himself unable to carry out these killings, instead forming an unexpected alliance with one of his intended targets. Together, they craft a desperate strategy—having him arrested as a spy—in a heart-wrenching attempt to protect his family from retribution. This tale illuminates the crushing weight of divided loyalties and the profound human connections that can form across seemingly unbridgeable political divides.

Kim also explores the political dimensions of North Korean oppression through the eyes of a woman connected to purged official Jang Song Thaek. Her dramatic fall from elite status to imprisonment, culminating in a cliff-side suicide aided by a former lover, provides insight into how political purges ripple through personal relationships and destroy lives far beyond their primary targets. This narrative offers readers a glimpse into how high-level political machinations translate into personal devastation, effectively humanizing what might otherwise remain abstract news headlines about regime purges.

Untranslated Voices

Despite its literary merit and testimonial value, defector literature occupies a peculiar position in the landscape of Korean literature. While South Korean literature in general has gained significant international recognition in recent years, with numerous works being translated into English and other languages, defector literature remains largely untranslated and underrecognized globally. [2] This absence represents a gap in the international understanding of the Korean Peninsula, as these narratives provide perspectives that are neither fully North Korean nor South Korean in their cultural orientation.

This liminal identity becomes especially pronounced in stories involving the many North Koreans who have spent years in China or were born of North Korean mothers in China. Kim’s story, “Beijosun Mama,”[3] exemplifies this complex positioning by focusing on the plight of North Korean women and their children born of Chinese fathers in modern day China. When the story’s Chinese father dies, his family seriously considers “selling” the North Korean mother away to another family, leaving her son to live with his relatives. The mother and son ultimately escape to South Korea, where the son—who had never been a citizen of either South or North Korea—becomes a South Korean citizen.

This marginalization of defector literature extends beyond market forces to institutional barriers. The promotion of Korean literature translation has become a significant cultural policy initiative in South Korea, with government funding supporting the translation of works deemed to represent Korean culture and literary achievement. However, defector literature faces implicit barriers to inclusion in these programs. While no explicit policies block North Korean defector literature from receiving translation funding, several factors influence its prospects: South Korean administrations’ approach to inter-Korean relations, their stance on highlighting human rights issues internationally, the priority given to defector voices in cultural spheres, and the broader cultural diplomacy goals of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea all play roles in determining which narratives receive support for global dissemination.

The underrepresentation of such works becomes particularly troubling given their unique contribution to understanding contemporary crises. Kim Yu-kyung’s collection explores how global events like the COVID-19 pandemic manifested in uniquely devastating ways within North Korea’s closed system. Moreover, her portrayal of defectors’ struggles to rebuild their lives after escape challenges the simplistic “rescue narratives” that dominate popular discourse about North Korean defection.

Traditional rescue narratives follow a predictable arc: oppressed individuals escape totalitarian regimes and, through the benevolence of democratic societies, find freedom and gratitude in their new lives. These stories typically end with successful integration and expressions of thankfulness, reinforcing the moral superiority of the rescuing society while obscuring the complex realities defectors face.

Kim’s work deliberately subverts this framework. In “That Spring Day’s Encounter,” the wife who escaped from Vietnam creates friction through her determination to pursue education rather than fulfill domestic expectations. The story reveals her in-laws’ calculated acceptance of the marriage in the first place: “Behind his parents’ approval of the marriage lay the calculated belief that Kyung-ah, having lived in the patriarchal society of North Korea, could be pure and submissive. They anticipated a dutiful daughter-in-law who would humbly live as their son’s wife.”[4] This expectation—that she would be grateful enough to remain subordinate—exemplifies how rescue narratives often mask new forms of control.

“White Shooting Star” similarly disrupts conventional expectations by depicting a former North Korean math professor reduced to welding work to support his son’s educational success in South Korea. The story highlights not only the profound loss of identity and status that defectors experience, but also the painful sacrifices some parents feel they must make for their children’s advancement in their new society. Rather than celebrating his “freedom,” the narrative examines the psychological toll of such dramatic social displacement, where parental love demands the abandonment of professional identity and intellectual fulfillment for the promise of the next generation’s success.

These nuanced portrayals matter precisely because they fill critical gaps in public understanding. Where academic reports and news coverage often present statistics and geopolitical analyses that fail to capture the human dimension, these literary works breathe life into otherwise dry narratives, creating emotional connections that can spur meaningful action from readers and policymakers alike.

As North Korea remains one of the world’s most opaque societies, collections like this one provide valuable windows into lived experiences that policy makers, humanitarian organizations, and general readers need to understand. The absence of such works in translation represents not just a literary gap but a significant blind spot in global understanding of one of the world’s most complex humanitarian situations.

1. [1]

   This is particularly true as recent defector numbers have dwindled during the pandemic years from 2020 to the present, leaving it to small-scale organizations such as ASIAPRESS and Daily NK with sources on the ground to bring out narratives from inside the country. From 2020 to early 2025, there were just 829 defectors who entered South Korea – many of whom stayed in China or Russia for years before defecting. Before the pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, there were more than 3,311 North Korean defectors who entered South Korea. Please see: https://www.unikorea.go.kr/eng_unikorea/relations/statistics/defectors

2. [2]

   Much of the prominent works translated into English, apart from Bandi’s collection of short stories published under the title “Firefly” in 2017, are memoirs by various North Korean defectors, including “Escape from Camp 14” and “The Girl with Seven Names.”

3. [3]

   “Beijosun” (베이초센) is the Korean pronunciation of “北朝鮮” (North Korea in Chinese characters), and “Mama” (마마) means “mother” or “mom.”

4. [4]

   p. 113.