Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Sometimes you read a book and it is so good on so many levels that you don’t really know where to start, and so you tell people, just go and read this book. That’s how I feel about Min Jin Lee’s National Book Award Finalist, Pachinko.
“History has failed us, but no matter” the book begins. It is a saga about four generations of Koreans, set against the epic backdrop of the Japanese occupation of Korea, moving from 1910 to Japan in 1989. It is a story about one Korean family that moves to Japan in the hopes of something better than the hardship of occupied Korea, who find that no matter how many generations have lived there, they will never be considered Japanese, and they will always be suspect in Korea. In that sense, history has, indeed, failed them.
It is a grand tale in the Dickensian mold, a large cast of characters, textured relationships, and visceral descriptions of everyday life. Each character is rendered richly, empathetically and even lovingly. It is heartbreakingly beautiful, capturing the challenges of an immigrant life, the stubbornness of love for family and for people you barely knew but who remain part of your life forever.
Hoonie is a fisherman in Yeongdo, Korea. Born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot, his marriage prospects are slim. But as the economy under colonial rule worsens, a matchmaker introduces Yangjin, one of four daughters in a family with no sons. They are wed and run a boarding house as “thrifty and hardy peasants.” After the agony of losing three babies Yangjin gives birth to a hearty daughter, Sunja.
If there is an anchor character, it’s Sunja, swept away by the romance and appeal of Hansu, a Korean merchant who visits their town, but who does a brisk business between Korea and Japan. “Koh Hansu stood out like an elegant bird with milky-white plumage among the other men, who were wearing dark clothes. He was look hard at her, barely paying attention to the men speaking around him.” She is smitten and soon finds herself pregnant as a teenager. He can’t marry her because he has a wife and children in Osaka, but he wants to look after her in Korea, set up home and provide for their child, an arrangement she cannot agree too.
She is spared the ignominy of unwed motherhood when a lodger in their guesthouse, Isak Baek, a young pastor from Pyongyang, offers to marry her and build a life with her in Japan, along with his brother and sister-in-law, Yoeb and Kyunghee.
This is when the book really shines, and we learn about an invisible community in Japan, the Koreans. They live in slums, earn little and live the life of second-class citizens. The picture that Lee paints of this life is searing and moving. Koreans are suspect in Japan and the life the two couples eke out is hard and unforgiving, compounded by a war-ravaged economy. Their house was a shack, “the animal stench was stronger than the smell of food cooking or even the odors of the outhouses…the houses appeared to have been put up by the residents themselves using cheap or found materials—not much sturdier than huts or tents.”
We follow the path of the family, the destitution of the war years, and the in between world the children grow up in, caught in a limbo of not belonging, their status always subject to renewal as residents in Japan since citizenship was almost impossible, their loyalties always questioned, citizens of South Korea, a country that didn’t exist when the family left and which has no loyalty to them “This country isn’t going to change. Koreans like me can’t leave. Where we gonna go? But the Koreans back home aren’t changing, either. In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am. So what the fuck? All those people who went back to the North are starving to death or scared shitless.”
Pachinko, a Japanese game that is part pinball part slot machine is the industry that most Koreans end up in. It is an industry that Hansu has been involved and it has the stench of corruption about it, the purview of gangsters and criminals. No matter how straight a business one of Sunja’s son’s, Mozasu, runs, the perception of Koreans in the pachinko business is that they are shady.
The story of multiple generations in one family trying to live their lives is epic because epics aren’t just about historical figures or an historic moment, but also about the impact that history has on ordinary people. Pachinko grapples with the challenge of identity. Where is “home?” What does “belonging” mean? Will the burden of “passing” prove too much to handle? Is family “biological” or something else?
This is a masterful book, full of passion, empathy and heartache, told with such authority and confidence and skill, I fell in and got lost in the story and still find myself thinking about the characters long after reading the last page.
BEFORE YOU READ
Length: 479 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Themes: family, immigrants, identity, love, sacrifice, Korea, Japan
Commitment: It’s a long book but you can get completely lost in it
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