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plaque commemorating his visit to the video arcade (reverberant now with the sound of toy guns). Within twenty-four hours, I was being shown the hugely blown-up color photographs of his Fun Fair trip. The “eminent Marxist-Leninist and outstanding military strategist” had chosen the Fun Fair site himself, I read in a book called
An Earthly Paradise for the People;
and in the book
The Great Man Kim Jong Il
, I learned that the younger Kim had personally demanded that a Jet Coaster be made 1,500 meters long. The Jet Coaster, he had remarked, “is very good for developing boldness in young people.”
    By now, things were beginning to fall into a pattern.
    “What is that statue?” I asked as we drove past a series of
tableaux vivants
and four-hundred-foot Korean monuments to Korea.
    “Oh, Juche,” said my guide, almost casually.
    The Juche idea was, of course, much on my mind as the days went on. Luckily, I had many opportunities to explore it further. The main headline in the
Pyongyang Times
was “A letter to President Kim Il Sung.” Page 2 featured a report on a meeting of the Asian Regional Institute of the Juche Idea (ARIJI); page 3, by good fortune, featured another report on the meeting of the Asian Regional Institute of the Juche Idea. In my hotelbookstore’s display case, there were 114 different works, all of them by Kim
père
and
fils
, in Japanese and Arabic and everything in between; behind them were fourteen more shelves, double-stacked with other titles whose genres were usefully specified—
Immortal History: Revolutionary Aurora
(“A Cycle of Novels”),
The Mother of Korea
(“A Biographical Novel”). I saw two books that did not seem strictly relevant:
Story of a Hedgehog
and
Boys Wipe Out Bandits.
But all the rest, thank Kim, stuck assiduously to the main theme: the Great Leader’s brief biography stretched across 1,808 pages.
    I also took the opportunity, while here, of purchasing a copy of Kim Jong Il’s ground-breaking study,
On the Art of the Cinema.
In it, the Dear Leader begins, surprisingly, by contending that “Art and Life are important activities.” He goes on to pronounce that “Make-up is a noble art.” He concludes, with typical boldness, by asserting that “A person with a low level of technical skill cannot make an excellent technician.”
    People say that Pyongyang is a dreary city, but I found no shortage of diversions there: I was taken to the subway stations (with their 250-foot mosaics, marble pillars, and gold chandeliers, built at air-raid-shelter level), and to the Thermal Power Station; to the Korean Revolutionary Museum, and to a performance by the Korean People’s Army Circus (whose artists wielded guns while doing handstands and chanted slogans while revolving in midair). I even got a tour around the five-hundred room Children’s Palace. “Children are very important,” my guide pointed out. “We must always think of the future.” The future and the past, in fact, seemed the places where the North Koreans felt most comfortable: anywhere but now.
    “The system is like a big family,” he went on.
    “Does your president remain close to his family?”
    “Yes,” he said. “But Kim Jong Il has his own room. He is grown up enough. He is forty-eight.”
    The deliriously smiling infants at the palace were kind enough to put on an hour-long variety show just for foreign guests. In one dance, a laid-back cicada, cradling a guitar, tried to persuade a group of smiling ants to join him in the shade. The hardworking insects, collective-minded to the end, smilingly rebuffed him, and when a blizzard came, the cicada was left friendless and unprepared. “This is a simple parable,” my guide whispered to me. “But it has a big meaning. For example, if we try at a socialist revolution …”
    There was also much else to do. At night, in Pyongyang’s equivalent of the Rainbow Room, I heard a six-piece band play “The Isle of Capri,” and I once played billiards with