On entering North Korea, the Washington Post reported yesterday, members of the New York Philharmonic “were required to fill out what may well be the world’s strangest customs declaration form. It asks whether a traveler is carrying a “killing device,” an “exciter,” “artistic works” or “publishing of all kinds.”

Is an “exciter” what is known euphemistically here as a “personal stimulation device,” or in a plain word, a vibrator?

If so, why would North Korea want to keep these devices out? I can’t readily answer that question except to say that almost all Communist countries have embraced highly traditional attitudes toward sex, and North Korea is no exception.

Or is it?

Next month, a remarkable book will be published, The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-Year Imprisonment in North Korea, by Charles Robert Jenkins. Jenkins was a young American soldier stationed in South Korea who deserted to North Korea in 1965 with the foolish idea that he would soon be repatriated to the United States. He was to spend the next 40 years in captivity in Pyongyang until allowed to leave to Japan in 2002.

Jenkins’s memoir contains some remarkable passages about the sexual attitudes of his omnipresent “minders” who shadowed his every move. Prudish Communist countries may be, but there is another side of the story. In a nearly perfect totalitarian world like contemporary North Korea, the authority of the state reaches deeply into private lives and dehumanizes everything it touches, very much including sex. Jenkins’ book is not yet out, so I won’t provide the details, except to say that his is one of the most fascinating and heart-wrenching accounts of life in a Communist country to appear in many years.