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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIn the dark, the four men hear her voice. Every night it comes to them from a loudspeaker on the other side, reciting American sports scores or offering cars, money and love to anyone who comes over. The woman is the only thing out here that sounds warm.\n\nIt's the job of these men to walk the line, to search out infiltrators, to keep the dominoes from falling. Night after night, year after year, they steal through this strange, shallow cup of earth that runs bare and booby-trapped between North and South, between Communist and capitalist, between foe and friend. In daylight the red-starred flag of the North stands a mile from the yin-yang flag of the South. The men gaze across the line and see the Communist enemy in olive-drab uniform, standing with guns at the ready. Through binoculars they can actually see their expressions, impassive, unsmiling. Were they to open their mouths, the American soldiers joke, they'd show fangs.\n\nAt night the real standoff begins. Sometimes the voice on the other side of the line is that of a man, counting down, in English: You will die in thirty minutes. You will die in twenty...ten, nine, eight...all the way to zero, when suddenly bright floodlights are switched on to reveal no one at all\u2014nothing\u2014then switched off, leaving a ghostly afterburn on the retina.\n\nThese four American soldiers live on the line. And slowly the line is undoing one of them. His name is Charles Robert Jenkins; he's a sergeant in the First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division. He's 24, a man of small stature with jug ears and inordinate strength, regarded as a good soldier. He should be. He's been one for nearly ten years already\u2014and his whole life has led to this.\n\nAnd now, six miles south of a village named Panmunjeom, in a part of the demilitarized zone where, according to intelligence reports, North Korean spies have been operating with plans to kidnap their counterparts, Charles Robert Jenkins has heard a strange sound. It's 2:30 A.M. He tells the other men to lie low and wait while he investigates.\n\nA girl lives on an island off the coast of Japan. If a line were drawn directly west from her village, across the Sea of Japan, it would pass near the spot where Charles Robert Jenkins has gone to investigate. But here, a world away, in the blue saltwater air, in the shadow of mountains that plunge to the sea, there's no war, just this garden. It's August, and the island\u2014named Sado\u2014is in full bloom. The scent of pine and blossom carries in an almost tropical breeze. The beaches brim with activity, then empty of people at day's end. It's now day's end.\n\nThe girl lives near the sea in a red clapboard house with her parents and younger sister. If the roof sags with disappointment, then the roof is her father, Shigeru, who drinks, and burns through various odd jobs to full-time unemployment. And the walls are her mother, Miyoshi, who literally pours cement to support the family, bearing the weight of her responsibility with optimism. The girl's name is Hitomi Soga, and she's a 19-year-old nursing student who may as well be 13 for her innocence. She likes to write poetry. She's not one to complain, for what is there to complain about?\n\nOn this day, the girl and her mother decide to walk to the store, which is but 400 yards from the house, for groceries. The road is a mostly straight stretch between the two points, passing before a few homes and the Buddhist temple, with its thatched roof and the huge tree in the yard. To the west of the pavement, down through fifty meters of thick brush and bamboo, is the water, and the water stretches as far as the eye can see, though the eye cannot see North Korea, and the eye doesn't think to look.\n\nThey're walking and talking, mother and daughter. They have the same slightly duck-footed way of perambulating. On their own, they can be a little raucous together. They have the same contagious laugh. They may be holding hands. They are holding hands. They are two halves of the same person.\n\nIn five minutes, they will never see each other again.\n\nThe soldiers wait\u2014and then wait some more. The hell if they're going to wait all night for Charles Robert Jenkins. It's dark and frigid, and now there are three soldiers left, and whatever fanged creature is out there, it has already taken one of them. Why volunteer to be next? They head back to base, the voice of the woman drifting from the other side.\n\nAn investigation is undertaken: His field rations, socks and underwear are picked through. In broad daylight, soldiers return to the spot where he disappeared. Others begin to interview anyone who had contact with the vanished man. In all, over a hundred are questioned: Did you like him? Did you trust him?\n\nHe doesn't strike many as the kind who would just up and walk away, though someone says he owed some money and someone else says he didn't get along too well with the other soldiers. No one can really say what was moving inside the man. What no one admits is that this existence, this sitting in a no-man's-land waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen, is as close to physical entropy as a person can come on this earth. The only glimmer of his thoughts comes in a letter left in his footlocker and addressed to his mother. \"I am sorry for the trouble I will cause you,\" it begins. \"I know what I have to do.\"\n\nThe men jump her in front of the temple and drag her into the yard, beneath the huge tree there, its leaves fluttering in the warm breeze like prayer flags. The captors are oddly gentle; say in accented Japanese, \"Please, be quiet.\" They bind her with what seem to be cheap toy handcuffs; they put an elastic gag in her mouth; they cover her head with a cloth.\n\nNo one hears a sound as Hitomi Soga is dragged to the sea. No one knows if she struggles, or what other scenarios play in her head. Maybe she's unconscious, or thinks she is, for this must be a dream, one that will end when she can open her eyes again. And what have they done to her mother? The land is replaced by a rocking boat whose wooden hull groans beneath the new weight of those clambering on board. Another language is spoken\u2014hurry, go!\u2014the engine chuffs, and then the boat starts moving from shore, chopping steadily through waves into the bay.\n\nSomewhere at sea, Hitomi Soga is transferred to a bigger boat. The journey will last a day. There's dinner to make and her father to care for. She's a 19-year-old nursing student with classes to attend and a sister seven years younger than she, who needs her for all the things a sister needs a sister for. Her mother pours cement for a living and has hands just like hers. And where is she now when her daughter needs her most?\n\nBobbing on a swell of green water, the boat moves inexorably west. And left behind, on the cusp of this earth coldly turning away, lies Japan.\n\nHe's heard a sound\u2014or has he? He's been ambushed\u2014or has he? He's plotted\u2014or has he?\n\nIt's unthinkable that he's crossed the line. The line has a magnetizing power that holds these troops in place. Even so, the area is so heavily mined that just stepping from the road could mean your life. And if you were to be taken prisoner, a pair of pliers, applied to your most vulnerable parts, are the North Korean equivalent of a lie-detector test.\n\nIt's 1965. Even though full-fledged fighting ceased twelve years ago, the two countries are technically still at war. And though this war, like every American war, is supposedly about freedom, no one on this thirty-eighth parallel knows what real freedom tastes like. The soldier's world is defined by tension, boredom, trench mouth, C rations and lugging his M-2 carbine to the latrine, where he shrivels in the cold.\n\nIn the early morning hours of January 5, Charles Robert Jenkins hears a sound, six miles south of the village of Panmunjeom. He tells the others to lie low while he investigates. Perhaps he starts through some imaginary door that has suddenly opened before him. Once over the threshold, his feet start moving. Heart thrumming, he will either live or die; it's no longer his decision. Live or die. The past recedes; he surrenders his substance; this new man is born. And the woman's voice sounds so warm, promising him an exalted life as a state hero in the modern-day utopia, in this heaven on earth that exists on the other side of the line. His spirit lifts from beneath some long-settled sediment\u2014hurry, go! And then he's out across the shallow cup of denuded land, soaring, compass in hand, headed north.\n\nThe townspeople solemnly gather and divide into search parties. Some go to the mountains, some to the beaches, some to the river. Her cousin goes to check the ferry records to see if the two went to Niigata, on the mainland. But there's no record of a Hitomi Soga and her mother boarding a ferry on August 12, 1978.\n\nEarlier, on the day of their disappearance, her father has had an argument with relatives about his drinking, how alcohol has replaced his wife and children, who would never complain, whose DNA does not code for complaint. At first, some believe that the mother and daughter have run away to escape his drinking. He becomes one possible culprit. But then other theories abound: the Mafia, random foul play, a dual drowning.\n\nDays turn to weeks, and still there's nothing. A deep unease creeps into the village, the island, this garden, Sado. Now people recall the presence of several strange boats, ill made and shabby, with weird bows. They came into the bay, then trolled upriver. And after the women vanished, so did they. The girl, Hitomi, embodies the innocence of them all. Whatever terrible end she's found, it coincides with the disappearance of those terrible boats.\n\nDespite the face of optimism the father puts on, if for no one other than the younger daughter, he's shattered. Soon he moves from this house and sends his daughter to live with relatives. He holds a funeral in the temple yard for his older daughter, burying her lipstick, rice bowl and a few other mementos beneath a pile of dirt. In grief he makes the only offering he can think to bring his lost ones back: On the day they disappear, Shigeru, the father, quits drinking.\n\nThe military eventually notifies the mother of Charles Robert Jenkins that her son has \"disappeared\" to North Korea. Quietly, it is building the case that he has defected\u2014a case largely built on the good-bye letter found in his footlocker and addressed to her. He has signed it \"Charles,\" though since birth she's only called him Robert. Why has he signed his last letter to her like a stranger?\n\n\"He loved his people and he loved his mama,\" she says when local reporters come knocking on the door to her tilting house. She's a 52-year-old woman, widowed and remarried, who has raised and supported her six children by working as a chiropractor's assistant. As much as life has thrown at her, her son's disappearance leaves her staggered. \"If he's there, he sure didn't go over there on his own,\" she says. \"And if he did, he fooled me.\"\n\nThis is 1965, in the midst of the Cold War, in the conservative, staunchly anti-Communist farm country of North Carolina. His brother, his four sisters, his friends and the people who know him in the town of Rich Square find it inconceivable that one of their own has crossed the line. The mere suggestion seems blasphemous. The vision burned into their memory is that of the little red-haired boy with the jug ears, the small hands and that lisp, by the cotton field, glowing. The boy who picks blackberries for twenty-five cents a bucket. He can't seem to spell or add, but hunts Commies every day with his buddy, Cookie. Cookie is a hunched, chubby kid with a quick mind\u2014the opposite, in many ways, of his friend\u2014and together they rush the hill with Springfield bayonets and fireworks.\n\nThey call him Thooper, self-dubbed one day, by a typical slip of the tongue. \"I'm Thooper-man,\" he declares after safety-pinning a pillowcase round his neck and pretending to fly.\n\nIn the caste system of a small southern town, this boy is an untouchable; expendable, eclipsed, forgotten from the start. Not a girl looks sideways at him. Thooper grows into Super. Runty as he is, he can clean-jerk 200 pounds off the ground. One day when Cookie's fingers get trapped under a corn-shelling machine, Super literally pulls the machine clear of the hand\u2014an amazing feat. He drops out of eighth grade and joins the National Guard after his mother agrees to falsify his age. His will for the military, for its starched discipline, is astonishing. In his uniform, he goes down to the neighboring town of Scotland Neck in search of girls who know nothing except the figure he cuts before them as a military man. He shows up at the Friday-night football games, burning rubber when he leaves in his '50 Ford, the one he got by trading away a Shetland pony he won in a lottery at a local church.\n\nThat may be the single luckiest thing that ever happened in his life: winning a Shetland pony in a lottery.\n\nWhere is she? After a day's journey at sea, Hitomi Soga, for whom time suddenly has no relevance, arrives at a foreign port filled with strange boats, among people who speak an alien language\u2014and is then hurried to the outskirts of the capital, even as her body seems to dissolve, surrendering its molecules into the air. There must be a case of mistaken identity; after all, she's a nursing student guilty of little but curiosity. She bears no state secret, no blueprint for nuclear victory. What could anyone want from her?\n\nThe scheme of her captors is simple, grandiose, psychotic: to kidnap representatives from every nation of the world, to create a Noah's ark of abductees, a global zoo of people for North Korean spies to study. If Great Leader could have his way, he would be the Great Zookeeper, ruling a kingdom of people caged and cast in his image. He would regulate when they eat and drink, when they go to the bathroom, when they pay homage to his greatness. Though he must settle for what his agents bring back, he trusts that these warm bodies will at least train his spies to help him take over the world.\n\nJapan is a special case, a nearby enemy with whom North Korea has historical scores to settle. It turns out that Hitomi Soga is merely one of at least thirteen\u2014if not many more\u2014who have been pilfered. Most of the kidnappings occur in villages near the sea. Trying to meld with the local population, the abductors dress for the beach in blue sneakers, white shirts and pantaloons, swimming costumes about fifty years out-of-date in Japan.\n\nA janitor and his wife go on holiday to renew their wedding vows, and he's never heard from again. A couple disappear after going to watch the sunset. All that's left behind is their car, a single sandal and a camera with film that, once developed, shows the pictures they took of each other in the moments before they were bagged.\n\nOnce in Pyongyang, some of the abductees fall into deep depression, commit suicide. Others verge on emotional breakdown, then right their lives and carry on. Some are euphemistically said to have died in car accidents. Others are used to train spies in Japanese language and customs\u2014and some of those spies then go on to kidnap more Japanese nationals.\n\nEvery aspect of North Korean life is monitored and controlled by an invisible hand. The crippled, lame and pregnant are allowed outside only at prescribed hours. Only the well-bred and Party faithful are allowed to move freely in a city seemingly devoid of cars\u2014and increasingly devoid of food. Every citizen wears a lapel pin emblazoned with the image of Great Leader, and then later of his son, Dear Leader.\n\nHitomi Soga, who along with the other Japanese abductees is permitted to shop in the capital once every two years, is told that she now lives in a workers' paradise. But nothing is recognizable as paradise. She clings to the belief that her mother escaped the attack and still lives with her father on Sado Island. She stifles her grief, becomes one of the model abductees whose loyalty to the regime seems, at least on the surface, as genuine as it is unflagging. She spends time with another abducted Japanese national, a 13-year-old girl named Megumi\u2014the same age as her own little sister\u2014who gives her pressed morning glories as gifts. Though they converse in Korean during the day, talking about badminton or the girl's little brothers, they switch to Japanese at bedtime, when no one else is around. Together they sing a Japanese song titled \"Hometown,\" though soon after, she never sees the girl again.\n\nWithin the first year of her arrival, after submitting to obligatory training in North Korean customs and ideology and being assigned a North Korean name\u2014Min Hye Gyong\u2014Hitomi Soga is allowed to take an English class at Pyongyang Military College. Her teacher is an older Western man with distinctive ears and a drawly way of talking. He wears flamboyant shirts. He's treated as some sort of hero.\n\nSoon, he will be her husband.\n\nIn rich square, over the years, the townspeople undertake their own informal investigation, piecing together evidence against Charles Robert Jenkins. One by one the stories emerge, and since Super isn't here to defend himself, the stories carry a dash of hyperbole, if not fiction. Super is edited and revised\u2014mostly vilified\u2014then mostly forgotten. An acquaintance, a big man called Croaker, recalls Thanksgiving 1964, over at the Ford dealership where he and Super once worked. On leave from Korea, Super pulled out a roll of cash, maybe $1,200, fanned it over the hood of a car like a poker hand and said, \"Boys, I need to spend it all now, and then you're never going to see me again.\" Someone else claims that Super was certain that he was soon going to be called to Vietnam and wanted no part of it.\n\nThey remember him as dumb, failing out of school. They remember him getting injured and never playing football again, though he loved the sport. They remember him being boastful to make up for shortcomings. \"He was the kind who, if you said, 'Go climb the water tower and stand on your head,' he would,\" says Cookie. In this environment, anything charged against him becomes truth. It's a communal exorcism. Someone claims Super had \"sticky fingers\" and that after his mama silently brokered a deal with the police chief, he signed up for the army. And they say worse: Charles Robert Jenkins is a traitor. If some here were to see him again, they would sooner put a bullet in him than say hello.\n\nShortly after Super's disappearance, Cookie is called to service in Vietnam, where he runs a rifle platoon of twenty-five soldiers. Dropped from helicopters, loaded to the gills with orders to shoot anything that moves, his platoon kills nearly thirty Vietcong on ambushes. After the first shot, they keep shooting until the enemy doesn't move anymore. Only afterward, when they turn a dead man over and see his face, does he become human again. Haunting and unpretty as it all is, Cookie is proud that when his country called, he didn't run.\n\nAfter the war, Cookie finds a wife and settles into a successful career selling cars. He grows a thick mustache and wears an army fatigue jacket around town, all the while clinging to an idea that there's more to the story, that Super was somehow coerced, or simply snapped, then crossed the line. Cookie is the opposite of his friend: There is no mystery to his life; his beliefs are unshakably American. He is a creation of his own conventional commitments, and these give him solidity and mass. And yet he has room in his heart to believe the best about the jug-eared boy with whom he once rushed the hill hunting Commies.\n\nAs years pass\u2014a president resigns, hostages are taken and released, the capitalist engine churns, more American wars are fought in the name of freedom\u2014Rich Square becomes a dying town. The house in which Super grew up, near the cotton gin, is driven to ground by a tornado. The vacant lot grows over with brambles and walnut trees. Out front is a gully of sick water, choked with old beer cans. White lint from the nearby gin clouds the air, obscuring windows and screen doors and people.\n\nIn the nearly four decades since Charles Robert Jenkins vanished, two of his sisters have died and his mother has been placed in a nursing home. \"If I'd buried him myself,\" she has repeated over the years, \"at least I'd know where he was.\" His brother, a broken-down man with his own demons, has moved in with another sister. The family talks less and less about Robert. But his youngest sister, Pat, a short, gentle woman whose life is her church, has prayed for his salvation with the ferocity of an apostle. She prays now that he may show himself.\n\nAnd one day he does.\n\nHe once lived in a quasi-totalitarian state\u2014the U.S. Army\u2014as a grunt and a pariah. Now he lives in a real one as a state hero. Three weeks after his disappearance, his glorious arrival in North Korea is announced by the disembodied female voice along the DMZ: \"The republic that is the Eternal Paradise will protect with hospitality the brave Sergeant Jenkins.\" A week later, on government radio, Jenkins gives a speech at a welcoming ceremony, appealing to all American GIs to \"fight as one against the policy of the U.S. ruling circles for war and aggression.\" He tells the U.S. soldiers to return \"home where [your] parents are waiting.\" He proclaims that he has found \"a worthy life, a Shangri-la where I can enjoy happiness.\" State radio then explains that he was \"motivated by the unbearable humiliations and the harsh persecution of soldiers\" by the imperialists.\n\nOver the course of fifteen years he goes from being a young man to one entering the second half of his life. There is no record of how he fares\u2014what gifts of money, women and luxury are offered or denied. No evidence of love or regret or secret longing for his home, Rich Square. He becomes a ghost.\n\nAfter their meeting as teacher and student, then their marriage in 1980, Charles Robert Jenkins and Hitomi Soga begin a family, have two daughters and settle down in a district of Pyongyang. It's a place meant to model the success of the North Korean state, full of landmarks and monuments to Great Leader, reflecting his obsessive orderliness and megalomania. Yet for a capital there is a strange lack of activity. Bicycles are prohibited, and for what few cars there are, uniformed female traffic police stand on high platforms gesturing emphatically, like robots.\n\nThey're an American man and a Japanese woman, separated from each other by more than twenty years and from the world by a dark curtain. Where they live now there are no phone lines or mail or flights out. They are untouchables in the truest sense. They're given use of a car, but the state\u2014or a certain paranoia exuded by the state\u2014regulates everything else in their lives, right down to the Great Leader pins they wear on their lapels. Occasionally, they're given tests to evaluate their loyalty to the regime.\n\nIt's hard to know their place in this society. It's hard to know when their public obligation to Great Leader ends and they themselves begin, as they have been partially obliterated, hollowed out. Though their children are evidence of their intimacy, the true nature of their marriage remains a mystery. Each could be spying on the other. So they keep secrets; they hoard memories, relive their former lives in the most fortified vaults of their minds. Later, Jenkins will claim he didn't even know about his wife's kidnapping until several weeks before she left him behind in North Korea.\n\nBeing American presents its own challenges. At the circus, in the theater, on state television, the Yankee imperialist dogs are regularly lampooned and caricatured. They bumble and stumble, bayonet and kill. They're the evil, fanged ones.\n\nAnd yet Charles Robert Jenkins is a national treasure, a propaganda coup. He appears in a film titled Unknown Heroes, about righteous North Korean spies outfoxing the Americans during the Korean War, in which he plays a prognathic senior intelligence official wearing an ill-fitting suit with a big collar. He explodes on-screen, slams his hand on the desk. He says to another suited man\u2014in English that's dubbed into Korean for the film\u2014\"You coward! I will directly report you to the head of the jury.\" He's unconvincing as a bad American, a small person at odd angles to himself.\n\nDoes he control his own destiny? If not, at least the couple is granted one gift. In most of the other Japanese-abductee families, the children have been taken by the state and sent away for their education. This is considered an honor, even if a mother and father see their off spring only twice a year. But in the case of the American and the Japanese, the vanished and the kidnapped, they're allowed to raise their children. The elder, Mika, looks like her father, with those same ears and that somewhat austere expression; the younger, Belinda, looks like her mother, always mischievously on the verge of a smile.\n\nYears pass; the children grow. Their mother wakes early to make them lunch for school. She once lived in the garden as a girl, one of two daughters with a mother who worried over her every step. Now she lives in this Eternal Paradise as a woman with two daughters of her own, a mother who worries over their every step. She knows nothing from the world beyond. There's only great shock and three years of mourning when Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, dies in 1994. Then come floods and famine. In a country of 22 million, a million die of starvation. The son, Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, takes control of the state, siphoning humanitarian aid to the military for a nuclear buildup.\n\nOne day, in a Pyongyang coffee shop, the American strikes up a conversation with a North Korean who will later escape to the South. Jenkins explains who he is and how he came to be here. It's the closest we may ever have to an assessment, or indictment, of his years in the North.\n\nI think I'd like to go home now, he says.\n\nNo word, no sign. For more than thirty years. They're sure he's dead. Then, the North Korean government admits that five American defectors are alive and well in Pyongyang. One of those is named Charles Robert Jenkins. His sister Pat goes to the North Korean consulate in New York City with a letter to be delivered to him. \"We would all like to hear from you,\" she writes. \"There's not a day that goes by that we don't think about you and pray for you.\" But she's certain it's never delivered.\n\nStill, he's alive.\n\nIt's 1996, and the press picks up on the story for a while, runs a photo of Jenkins from the propaganda film in which he plays the prognathic American intelligence officer. It makes for a chilling sight\u2014the shadowed hollows of his cheeks, the way his teeth seem to end in glittering points. But then the story has no oxygen, no detail, as the North Koreans fall into their customary fetal silence. It becomes just another shallow oddity of that day's news, forgotten with the next page.\n\nSix years later, at a summit meeting with the Japanese prime minister, Dear Leader admits that North Korean agents kidnapped thirteen Japanese nationals more than twenty years earlier. Though the admission is meant to signal a rapprochement in relations, a new openness between the two countries, it is taken more as a measure of the regime's psychosis. The North Koreans offer up five of the Japanese nationals for a ten-day visit to Japan, and on the list is a Hitomi Soga, age 43.\n\nAt first the Japanese government has no clue who this Soga might be, but word travels that a Hitomi Soga, who is officially dead, once existed on Sado Island. (After her funeral in the temple yard in 1986, she was marked deceased and stricken from the town register.) That Hitomi Soga, if alive, would now be 43.\n\nOn the island there is a rush of pure joy\u2014then slight apprehension. She is their innocence, returning, but until she has, this must be considered only a dream, a dream opposite to the one they lived on the day she went missing, a dream that allows them to dream again.\n\nBut then, they've already tumbled giddily ahead of themselves. With every great ecstasy comes this prick of pain: What of her mother? Where is her name on the list?\n\nThrough the streets of the capital, beneath the robotic arm of the traffic police, he drives his wife to the airport with their two children, who are students at the Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies: Mika, the Party faithful, is 19, and Belinda, the mischievous wild card, is 17; they both have her hands. Her exact hands. Before she is flown away, as she sits across from him, perhaps he's grateful to his wife, misses her already even in her presence. After twenty-two years with him, she's about to cross the line, and if he could, he would probably go, too.\n\nHe worries that once in Japan, he could be extradited and court-martialed for desertion. As for her, perhaps she's being sent on a propaganda mission. Of the Japanese abductees still alive in North Korea, she is one of five who have repeatedly shown loyalty to the regime on their tests. Over the years, when asked some version of the question of whether she wants to return to Japan, she has consistently, firmly, answered in the negative. So she's picked to go.\n\nAt the airport, the family poses for a last portrait. Projected already into the future, they each seem knotted in their own worlds. None can muster a smile, not even Belinda.\n\nWhen asked by a Japanese official whether he wants to visit Japan with his wife, Charles Robert Jenkins says that an immediate visit \"is not easy.\" He seems eager to speak. \"Hitomi is almost twenty years younger than me,\" he says, \"but she made us a very good family. I do appreciate her for that, even though she may have felt lonely for marrying a man this much older.\"\n\nIf he hugs his wife good-bye, there is no witness. Cotton gathers on the skein of memory; molecules pour from their dissolving bodies. Their history, right now, and for this moment, belongs only to them, but even clasped together, they're already alone.\n\nAs she boards the plane, he stands at a fence by the airfield, a solitary, hunched figure, waving good-bye.\n\nGood-bye.\n\nOctober 15, 2002\u2014it's a day that transfis all of Japan. She joins her fellow abductees\u2014the ones who left Japan as university students, teachers and laborers, the ones thin from famine, wearing shabby, outmoded clothes\u2014on a plane flying from Pyongyang to Tokyo. She's 19 again, her world having stopped in the temple yard in 1978. When the plane lands at Narita, cameras beam the moment live to millions. No one knows what to expect when the door opens, what fanged creatures will step out.\n\nA high-ranking government official named Shinzo Abe, a man who for fifteen years has believed that the North Koreans have abducted Japanese nationals, whom time has vindicated, steps aboard the plane. He is tall, elegantly dressed, in the throes of a historic moment. \"I would like to welcome you back home on behalf of the Japanese government and people,\" he says. But rather than some great release of joy, the group seems perpled. Outside the window on the tarmac are waving crowds. Who are these people? What strange planet is this?\n\nHer sister waits for her there. But what of her mother? The North Koreans deny that she was kidnapped. Yet Miyoshi Soga has never been seen since that August day in 1978. Crushed by camera crews and 200 reporters, Hitomi Soga appears as if she's just arrived at a funeral. She keeps her head bowed and, in a monotone, says merely that she is \"glad to see\" everyone.\n\nMeanwhile, her father waits on Sado Island, where her relatives and friends crowd the television, too, half pleased and half frightened, wondering what claw marks the North Koreans have left on her. When she appears on the screen, they clasp each other and wail. It feels as if some invisible hand has lifted them high in the air: She looks exactly like her mother! She is her mother!\n\nWhen she comes back home, when she appears in person, when she's enveloped in the comfort and safety of family, she's the same warm, funny, peaceable girl. She walks over to a cousin's house, just steps through the door into the front foyer, and her cousin, overcome, weeps.\n\nDo you remember me, cousin? she pleads.\n\nAnd of course, she does. Having been frozen in time, Hitomi Soga remembers everyone\u2014and everything. In the most minute detail. She can recite what former classmates were the leaders of what clubs at school. She remembers every face, even those from childhood. A man who was once in the same school as she, back when they were youngsters, writes his vitals for her on a piece of paper.\n\n\"You've changed the way you sign your name,\" she says, watching him scribble.\n\nHe looks at her, bewildered. \"Yes, I have,\" he says.\n\nStanding before people, she has an air of not being there at all. Canceled nearly twenty-five years ago, she is a person neither fully alive nor dead. She is something in between. Only her memories give her mass.\n\nTen days and her visit will end. She will return to her family. And yet when the ten days expire, the abductees do not board a plane for Pyongyang. Even as Hitomi Soga makes it clear that she wants to return to her family to discuss the future, the Japanese government announces that the five will stay in their homeland.\n\nHis wife isn't returning, can't. She's become a symbol and a metaphor\u2014kidnapped\u2014all over again. So he becomes a pawn.\n\nThe North Korean government arranges for the American and his daughters to meet with Japanese journalists at a hotel in Pyongyang. The boy from Rich Square, North Carolina, dresses in a suit and striped tie, sits with his hands on his knees, Mika to his right and Belinda to his left. His daughters wear dark jackets and their Great Leader lapel pins.\n\n\"All I want now is for her to come home,\" he says with a drawl. He heaps praise on Dear Leader. \"I have been living happily in North Korea for thirty-seven years,\" he says. \"This is the first time things have been painful for me.\" When asked how he got to North Korea, he says, \"I walked.\"\n\nA picture of the three at the Pyongyang hotel is picked up in newspapers around the world, and Pat Harrell, the sister of Charles Robert Jenkins, sees her brother alive for the first time in nearly four decades, his red hair going gray. As a concession to age, he wears boxy glasses.\n\nIn the picture, the elder daughter, Mika, holds her hands with fingers tightly locked, while casting her eyes down from the camera. Belinda seems to lean out of the photograph, gazing back as she goes, lips pressed together. Their father stares directly into the lens with a morose, almost angry expression. A presence seems to lurk outside the frame, weighing on them. The family's discomfort\u2014in these clothes, at this moment, with one another, out in the light\u2014is palpable.\n\nEven as the Jenkins family clings to the photograph as a miracle, the people of Rich Square see an old and wasted man, used up by the Communists after all these years. They joke how in America, Super was an eighth-grade dropout but in North Korea he became a professor teaching English.\n\nMeanwhile, Cookie walks the old overgrown lot where his friend once lived, pondering his absence. It's raining, and voluble a man as he is, he's haunted, hunched in his green fatigue jacket. \"Shoot, most people in this town haven't left the county in fifteen years. They're stuck in place. You just expect that Super would still be living here.\n\n\"Sad thing, sure is,\" he continues. \"My mind says maybe he's guilty, but in my heart, I'm with him. I think he's probably had a better life over there than the one he would have had here, in this town. Maybe that's it: Maybe he didn't decide to become a Communist, he just wanted a better life.\"\n\nAnd in some complicated way, that revelation eases his mind.\n\nShe doesn't like big cities, so she feels very much at home again on the island, in all its glorious autumnal desolation. The cold weather has come, and soon those clattering Siberian winds will carry clouds of snow to the garden. She goes to town hall to reregister as a Japanese citizen, as a live human being. She picks up her high school diploma, earned twenty-four years ago. She visits her own grave in the temple yard and bows her head silently before it, before her old rice bowl and mementos from her past.\n\nAt first she lives with her father, but then the government gives her a big house, and the people of the island enthusiastically fill it with donated furniture so that it will be ready for the day her family arrives from North Korea. She walks the rooms, waiting. In one month, she has become a motherless national hero, her every move cataloged by the droves of journalists that hover around her. If Hitomi Soga holds a press conference, regular broadcasting is suspended in order to bring her words to the nation. And yet she says little of substance (\"I'm glad\"; \"I'm sad\"; \"I ask for privacy\"), for to say too much might jeopardize her family in North Korea or alienate the Japanese people. Her words remain captive, too.\n\nWhen she hears about the interview with her family at the Pyongyang hotel, she weeps. \"My family wants to see me, but I can't. It can't be helped.\"\n\nEvidence suggests that her mother is dead, and the North Koreans have said that Megumi, suffering from deep depression, hung herself at the age of 28. But Hitomi, broken free of her captors, believes them less and less. She was once buried in the temple yard, after all, and here she is again, resurrected.\n\n\"[My mother] was like a friend with whom I can talk about anything,\" she says. \"Even now, I still want to see her.\" This is the conundrum: She can't quite figure out in what world, or tense, she exists.\n\nFor a long time she appears dour in front of the cameras, on the verge of tears. She goes back and forth to Tokyo to meet with government officials to see what can be done about bringing her family across the line, though her daughters have professed that they don't want to live in Japan. As winter progresses, she decides to look for a job, for at least that will occupy some part of these empty days.\n\nOn a February day, she arrives at an elementary school with a small entourage of government officials to size it up as a possible workplace. She wears a blue sweater with a white poodle on the front. Her hair has been shorn since her return from North Korea, and her eyes, though hooded and almost sad, are quick to light up when she sees a class of children waiting for her in the room.\n\nThe kids are a burbling chaos. They're about to have their English class with a young blond-haired man from Canada. At his prodding, they recite the words I'm happy! I'm hungry! I'm OK! And Hitomi Soga sits among them Indian-style, rocking. She touches the head of a small girl, whispers to another. She recites the alphabet, too, in the foreign tongue of her husband.\n\nThey play a game in which pieces of colored confetti are spread on the floor, and the teacher yells out a color and the children race to pick up confetti of that color and put it in a bag that Hitomi holds. They play this game intensely for fifteen minutes, Hitomi chasing the children around with an open bag. Then they sit again, but this time Hitomi Soga sits a little apart, trying to catch her breath.\n\nShe is a 43-year-old woman who will soon be diagnosed with lung cancer. Everything is temporary. She sits, holding a bag of colored confetti, smiling.\n\nHappy, hungry, OK.\n\nWithout her, he's an old man: wan, drawn, puffy-eyed, cratered. He's hospitalized for exhaustion. The doctors test his heart, chest and kidneys. A Japanese film crew is invited to visit him again, to project his image to the world. A bit like a zoo animal. He may realize that now: He's a zoo animal in this country. When asked about his health, he says, \"Right now, pretty bad. Very bad.\"\n\nHis doctor claims his condition has been caused by separation from his wife.\n\nHe's a 63-year-old man, the same state hero he was at 24 when, the story goes, he came looking for a better life. If he was the misfit back in Rich Square, the one glowing, the one vanishing at the edge of the cotton fields, he is still that untouchable.\n\nAnd so long as he stays, he can't be touched. Can't be extradited, court-martialed or imprisoned. He knows nothing about his wife's unsuccessful efforts to have him pardoned by the U.S. government, or the fact that she has had a successful operation to remove a tumor from her lung. He knows only what he is told by those who control him. If a camera crew visits his hospital room, he is required to talk.\n\nHe came here looking for freedom. Has he found it?\n\nJanuary 5, 1965. The wind rips from Siberia and penetrates the North Korean mountain ranges, scouring their low-lying plains before funneling hard to the DMZ, where a sergeant hears a noise, steps into the darkness and is swept away. He has spent twenty-four years of his life striving to accomplish all this nothing. He may owe some money. He may be the butt of jokes. He may be bleeding molecules into the air. Does anyone care?\n\nOf course, they will later.\n\nSix miles south of the village of Panmunjeom, and Charles Robert Jenkins stands on the line. He's shown no fear, no failings in his patriotic duty. But he's dying here. Or is going to die soon. Whether it's here or on some other battleground, he will be the body that receives the bullet in the name of freedom, without knowing what that word means. The wind pierces the flesh; the woman's voice sounds so warm.\n\nOnce over the threshold, his feet start moving. Heart thrumming, he will either live or die. The past recedes; this new man is born. His spirit lifts from beneath some long-settled sediment\u2014hurry, go!\u2014and then he's out across the shallow cup of denuded land, soaring, compass in hand, headed north.\n\nHere is his moment: In the wordless mile between two poles, in this mined, empty no-man's-land, in the shock-cold of night, he finds the only true freedom he will ever know."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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