It seems fitting that Charles Jenkins, a man who lived in such seclusion for four decades that most people forgot he existed, can now be found in one of the most inaccessible places in Japan: the remote ex-prison island of Sado where he shares a small house with his wife, Hitomi, and daughters Brinda and Mika.
A shy man, Mr Jenkins' whole demeanour, from the sad, wary eyes encased in a heavily creased and lined face to the apologetic body language, seems crumpled, worn out from the 39 years he spent as a cold war trophy in North Korea and the daily effort of having to readjust now, aged 66, to a different life. 'I got used to North Korea. You get beat in the face every day and you're expecting it,' he said in his thick southern drawl. 'You don't care no more.'
Mr Jenkins' extraordinary life reads like a spy novel and can be divided, like the best drama, into three distinct acts. The first was his upbringing in a poor, working-class community in North Carolina, where he dropped out of school, aged 15, to join the US Army. Act one ended on a January night in 1965 when, drunk and unhappy, he deserted his post in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that divides the two Koreas and defected to the North.
He refers to that act as 'the biggest mistake I ever made'.
So began act two behind the bamboo curtain, where he claims he was beaten, starved and robbed of his identity, eventually becoming Min Hyung-chang. He was saved, he says, by Hitomi Soga, the Japanese woman he married, and who was 19 when she was abducted with her mother by Pyongyang's spies in 1978.
His wife's mother has never been found, but Mr Jenkins believes she was murdered. 'I think they hit her on the head and threw her in the sea,' he said. 'I know the way those guys work. They don't leave no witnesses.'