For all the news and analyses about North Korea that we in the West encounter, we read relatively little coming directly from that country. This holds for literature as well as for such fields as politics and military affairs, and few texts from Pyongyang reach us in translation via our own publishing companies. 

The literary flow from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), part of what we would call the ‘Choryu,’ is only a ripple compared to the mighty ‘Hallyu’ wave of popular culture from the Republic of Korea (ROK) now rolling throughout the world.