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government and media were totally surprised that someone named Hitomi Soga was one of the abducted that North Korea admitted to having still. She was not on the roster of suspected abductees that the Japanese government had submitted ahead of the meeting, and you could hear the newscasters that night scramble for details on this unknown woman. “Who is she? Where did she come from? Why didn’t the Japanese know about her before? We will bring you details as we uncover them.”
    By the afternoon of the next day, the radio networks had started to piece it all together, and by the time I tuned into NHK that evening, they had almost the whole story. They knew not just the details of Hitomi’s abduction in 1978 from her hometown on Sado Island, but that she was now married to me, Sgt. Charles Robert Jenkins, a mysterious American who, for reasons unknown, was thought to have walked across the DMZ and into the communist dictatorship on a cold January morning in 1965.
    As we finished listening to the news that second night, we didn’t know what it all meant or what was going to happen to us, but we did know that some people from the Organization would be coming for us soon.
    And the next morning, they did.

1 | Super Jenkins
    My first memories are of World War II. One day, late in the summer I was five years old, the fire engine in our town was running up and down the main street with its lights flashing and sirens blaring. Rich Square, North Carolina, where I was born, was a small, poor town, so the main drag was only a few blocks long and had only a single stoplight. But when the engine got to the end of the street it would turn around and come back the other way, clanging and making a racket, over and over again. I asked my mother why the fire truck was doing that, and she said it was celebrating because the war was over.
    The winter before that, I remember my mother would go to a little shed in a cotton patch on the edge of town in the middle of the night a couple of times a week. She was part of a rotation with others from town pulling watch for the German air raids that everybody feared but that never came. I spent many nights in that little shack there with her, playing with whatever little wooden or tin toy I brought, while she scanned the skies.
    My father never pulled air-raid watch. He was too busy working. He worked down at the ice plant only a couple hundred yards from my house, and he was working all the time. For days at a time, I would rarely see him. He was the foreman, though the plant was small. Usually he oversaw two other men at a time. He often said that the plant never took a break, so neither could he. He would come in to the house at, say, 4:00 a.m. and get two or three hours of sleep. Then he would head back to the plant, work until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m., come home and have dinner, get a few more hours sleep, and then head back out to the plant before dawn. That was typical. My father was drafted into World War II, but he never served. The doctor from our town wrote the draft board to get him out of going, not for any medical reason but because, the doctor wrote, “the town’s gotta have ice.”
    My father was a big man, not like me. At a different plant he worked at in a nearby town called Rocky Mount we moved to for a few years, there was an elevator that would carry the fivehundred-pound blocks of ice up to the freight train cars for loading, but it broke a lot. When it did, my father would grab the blocks one by one with a giant set of tongs and drag them up a ramp to the train all by himself. At times like these it seemed like there was nothing he couldn’t do.
    Drinking was his weakness. He liked his alcohol, and Three Bears Whiskey was his favorite drink. When he wasn’t drunk, he was all right, but drinking got him into trouble a lot. His name was Clifton Rose Jenkins, but he hated his middle name—and he was none too fond of his first name, either, to be honest. One day, one of the black men