The sign said Pyongyang Rainbow in Korean, and above it hung a North Korean flag. Most businesses in Xita, the Koreatown of Shenyang, capital city of China’s Liaoning Province on the border with North Korea, were marked in Korean and Chinese. The streets in Xita resembled the bleak alleyways of Amsterdam’s red light district. Finely made-up women, around 19 or 20 years old, stood in the doorways of the restaurants, wearing bright silk Korean hanbok and platform heels, Great Leader badges pinned to their chests, looking to attract passersby. These women wait tables, dance, and play North Korean songs in nightly shows. It is widely known that the places where they work function as fronts for shadowy transactions, either illegal trade or money laundering. The women, chosen from upper-class families in Pyongyang and deployed here by their regime’s secretive Bureau 39, are considered almost diplomats back home, although in truth they remind me of the maimed street children exploited by thugs to beg for cash. In Shenyang, there were several such North Korean restaurants, and one morning I walked into one to find a man called Haruto sitting with another man I had never met before.

Haruto-san was a Japanese government official in his mid-forties who spoke fluent Korean. (I have changed Haruto’s name to protect his identity.) I had met him by chance several years earlier in Yanji, another Chinese border town, through a North Korean defector I knew from Seoul. Haruto-san’s job, he claimed, was to determine the whereabouts of Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea between 1977 and 1983. But the official tally was just 17 victims, and five had already been returned, so I suspected he had other responsibilities. Japan had long been accused of exploiting the issue to heighten tensions in the region so that it could embolden its military. Under the post-World War II pacifist constitution imposed by the United States, Japan could not use military force except under a narrow, and contested, definition of self-defense. Whatever the real nature of his job, mild-mannered Haruto-san, with his black-rimmed glasses and a habit of nodding diligently, looked more like a professor than a government agent. He traveled to this corner of the Chinese border from Tokyo at least once a month.

How could real relationships develop in a place where trust can lead to death and fear governs everything?

Sitting before a steaming bowl of soup was a man whom Haruto-san introduced to me as Boss Yu. This title of “Boss” is a strange one; South Korean men sometimes address each other with it, similar to how Americans might use “Mister,” but here it was a way to avoid revealing full names. Instead of saying “hello” in greeting, Yu gestured to the waitress to bring another bowl for me. On the wall was a neon sign that read Pyongyang Dangogi-Jip, which meant the restaurant’s specialty was “sweetmeat,” the term for dog meat in North Korea. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, too early to eat, I told him—although, in truth, my palate was not generous enough to include such soup. I asked for coffee instead, and the waitress brought a mug of brown, sugary instant. Haruto-san, a follower of Silver Birch spiritualism, who believed that anything with a mother should not be consumed, had only a cup of water before him.

Yu was a small man, about five-foot-six, with beady eyes, a dark complexion, and greasy hair. His heavy eyelids looked swollen, as though he’d either drunk hard the night before or his food had been too salty. He appeared to be slightly older than Haruto-san but was dressed younger, in a nylon tracksuit with a Kappa logo, a shiny silver chain around his neck, and friendship bracelets on his wrist. Listening to him speak, it was hard to guess his origins: South Korean, ethnic Korean from China, ethnic Chinese from North Korea, or North Korean. Of these, only the South Korean accent is distinguishable from the others, and there have been cases of Korean-Chinese people passing themselves off as North Korean refugees to steal humanitarian aid. Despite the similarities, there is a certain something that distinguishes each one, which might be why Haruto-san told me later that while Yu had always said that he was South Korean, he wasn’t entirely convinced.

When I asked Yu where he came from, he shrugged and said in rather nondescript Korean, “Everywhere.” He said that for a man like him, without much schooling, the world was the same anywhere, so he went wherever the winds took him—Hong Kong; Thailand; Japan; and for the past few years, the Chinese towns bordering North Korea. He was a common merchant, he said, but when I asked him what he sold, he demurred. “This and that. Clothes, food, whatever makes money.” The nature of his business with Haruto-san was unclear, and both were silent on the subject.