Just when I thought it couldn’t get any weirder…
A Loyal Reader sent me an Amazon.com link to “Pyongyang #*$%: Deep Inside North Korea” by Mhari Yi. (I can’t even write out the title—this is a family-oriented blog, after all.) I’m not sure which surprised me more: that Amazon was selling porn (my sheltered life) or that someone had gone to the trouble of producing English-language North Korea-themed porn. How baroque is that? Talk about narrow-casting. Anyway, for three bucks I decided to take one for the team, download it to my Kindle, and close out this year’s summer reading series…
To start, I should acknowledge that I am probably not the most qualified reviewer for this tome. I am not a connoisseur of erotica; my relationship to it is sort of analogous to my relationship to food: I am not a foodie, but I know how to cook.
Anyway, here goes: Park Min Dae, born in Koyto (sic) Japan, moves to North Korea with her parents. (Mhari, it’s a bad sign when there is a typo in the first sentence.) Our heroine is endowed with breasts "like grapefruit" and a bottom "like two luscious juicy melons placed perfectly together."After her first day on the job at the Pyongyang Times, she accompanies her boss back to his flat, she seduces him, the police burst in and arrest him, she collapses in front of portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il begging for forgiveness, and the police let her go. When she makes it home she informs her parents that her boss quit that day—but “the new one may even give me a promotion!” Shades of Scarlet O'Hara. Tomorrow is another day.
So what to make of it? Some of the sex is physiologically improbable, some of the writing is hackneyed, and some of the North Korean color is off the mark. But…give it a thumb half up.
The author is reputedly half-Korean (dad) and half-Scots (mom). Maybe she should hook up with James Church. Inspector O surely could make use of a oversexed curvaceous female photographer working for a newspaper. The possibilities are endless.
At least “Pyongyang….” is not outselling Witness to Transformation.
