As the axiom goes, always better to first embarrass oneself in front of a small group than a large one (although I wasn’t planning my fiction for any sort of publication, just for sharing with a hundred friends and some family relatives). Been working on the story for over a year:
Summary: A Japanese man, surnamed Tanaka, is abducted to North Korea along with other foreign nationals (based off of real life.) They are all held hostage by the NK government. While in North Korea, he falls in love with his jailer (for lack of a better term,) a kind woman surnamed Park. They can’t let anyone else find out, so they communicate in secret ( tracing words on each other’s backs or shoulders with their fingers, etc.)
(There is a backstory about Park being a youth cadre leader in Pyongyang a decade earlier, wearing a leader’s red armband. Prior to that, her father was a diplomat and would secretly smuggle in Japanese, Pixar and Disney movies for Park to watch, but then Park got in trouble at school for re-enacting scenes from those movies for her peers, and her teachers demanded to know where she’d learned that stuff from. Park later performed in school plays at age 14 as an ‘American imperialist villain’ due to having high proficiency in English and was so superb at the role that she became a mini-celebrity in Pyongyang. Due to her language skills in English and Japanese, she was later assigned to be the caretaker/jailer for the foreign captives when she’s in her 20s.)
The main villain of the story is a Canadian woman surnamed Saint-Clair who is a high-ranking figure in North Korea [she joined the NK regime for ideological reasons] and is a wanted figure by the Canadian government. During the time that Tanaka is a hostage in NK, Saint-Clair hates Tanaka because he’s the only abductee who doesn’t fear her and in fact treats her with outright contempt, and Saint-Clair orders Park to break all of Tanaka’s fingers, which Park has no choice but to do in her presence. Park makes sure to do so in a way that causes the minimal pain possible, though.
After years in captivity, Tanaka and the other hostages are released back to Japan (and their other respective nations) in return for diplomatic concessions. Tanaka and the Japanese ex-hostages had become famous in Japan during their captivity but Tanaka shuns publicity and book deals and instead (after undergoing much therapy for PTSD) becomes a counterintelligence officer for Japanese intel.
Park, after a while, becomes a spy for North Korea but wants to defect and leave the nation for good. Japanese intelligence finds her out while she’s doing espionage work in Japan but want to convert her to a double agent rather than arresting her. They know Tanaka’s prior relationship with Park, so they have him be the one to approach her, seeing as how he has the best chances of persuading her to switch sides. Which he does.
(Later on, Tanaka is brutally killed by the North Koreans when they find out he’s a counterintel officer, and Park commits suicide by swallowing poison capsules after her cover is blown and she is cornered in a stairwell by Saint-Clair and guards/soldiers. But that all comes near the end of the story.)