Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
A Review of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko
“We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.”
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (2017). Published by Grand Central Publishing.
Okay, so I’m the biggest history nerd I know, and so when this novel dropped originally I was so excited for it. Now, four years later, I’ve finally picked up the copy I’ve had for two years and read it.
I’m surprised it took me this long, even after the dry spell of reading I had last year, I absolutely love Korean history, which is what redeemed this novel for me, as we really dig deep at how Koreans were treated under Japanese occupation, especially the ones who had emigrated to Japan in pursuit of a better life.
I had never read any of Min Jin Lee’s non-journalistic work before, but I’ve heard so-so things about her previous novel Free Food for Millionaires.
Lee’s background is interesting because she was actually a lawyer for years before turning to writing as a job, which endlessly fascinates me because I genuinely believe getting a degree in writing is a scam. Or, well, any art form degrees are a scam in my opinion. It’s a hot take but it’s a legitimate take.
There really is so much unpack with this novel, so let’s jump right into the novel itself.
Book Blurb
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant — and that her lover is married — she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters — strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis — survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
Content
This is both a sad and really hopeful novel. We’re introduced to an insane amount of characters throughout the story, but, at the same time, that makes sense because we’re following the main protagonist, Sunja, throughout her life. She is the only successfully born child to a man named Hoonie, who has a cleft lip and protruding left foot. Her father and mother don’t have much, but they spoil and give her everything in the world for what they can provide. But, when she is thirteen years old, her father dies, leaving her mother and her to take care of the boarding house.
Sunja, who isn’t married off as soon as she is of age, gets pregnant at sixteen. The father is a man with three kids and a wife back in Japan, and, disgusted and disgraced, she runs off and leaves him behind. A kind missionary who has been living at the boarding house offers to marry her, then takes her to Osaka in Japan, where his brother and sister-in-law have been living.
The remainder of the story largely takes place in Japan, where we meet her new husband’s family, have the backdrop of WWIII and the Korean War, and the devastation that racks both Korea and Japan during this time. We see extraordinary feats of survival, a testament to the strength and trauma that Koreans have faced, as well as the dark underbelly of the yakuza, racism against Koreans, and the struggles of discrimination and poverty.
I genuinely didn’t think this book was long enough for the content it tackled, and that A) the author needed to expand on the last arc of the book or B) split each section into its own book. There are too many jumps, too many characters, and too many new plot points introduced that
It also felt that at times things were just too conveniently sad. Our main character just happens to have been pregnant by one of the biggest yakuza lords in Japan at the time, who happens to be one of the accepted Koreans, and he stalks her for eleven years. Yoseb just happens to go to work in Nagasaki after the bombing of Osaka, where the nuclear bomb is dropped. The son’s wife just happens to get into a car accident and die. Yoseb and Kyunghee’s parents just happen to be wealthy landowners in Pyeongyang, then when the communists take over are murdered or they starve to death.
It’s tragic, yes, but it seems like a little much at times for me. These seemed like too-perfect coincidences, just to make these characters suffer even more during their brief lifetimes. I think we also need to step away and realize that at the same time, this book is feeding into anti-Japanese sentiment at times, which is appropriate for the characters, but we as readers should be able step away from it and use this as a historical learning moment.
Characters + Writing
Merging these two sections because they go hand in hand. I think there were too many characters, way too many to keep track of. This lends itself to the idea that this book needs to be multiple books, because way too much just happens in it. I understand that this is Lee’s style—her other novel is also quite thick—but I totally couldn’t vibe with it at all.
I thought we got the perfect glimpse of the father, Hoonie, to balance out how the daughter sees him for the rest of her life. His death also perfectly sets up how she gets the yakuza’s attention and ultimately becomes pregnant, because she is seeking validation from an older man twice her age in order to feel something. Later in the novel she acknowledges she saw him through rose-colored lenses at the time because she didn’t know anything else about men or even him at the time.
Characterization is spot on, until the third arc when it seems to go astray. Again, too many characters by that point and way too many ugly twists in the tale.
As for writing, her style is good, it’s very to the point and not flowery at all. I was neutral towards it. It works for the story.
Overall Thoughts
This book is a monster. It’s well written and well-fleshed out, but there’s too much contained within 500 pages. As a reader, I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff going on, but I absolutely enjoyed the look into how Zainichi Koreans were treated in the colonial and post-war era. I wish I didn’t purchase a copy of this book, to be quite frank, because it’s more of a one time read that I wouldn’t willingly pick up again unless I wanted a resource to cite when it came to that time period, although it is fictional.
All in all, check it out from a library. It’s a neat era of history, full of tragedy and suffering, and this exemplifies it.
Rating: 3.5/5
