BookPage Reviews
Exploring the hidden history of Korean immigrants in Japan
Reading Pachinko is like binge-watching every season of an HBO series. Instead of capturing a single time and place, Min Jin Lee's heartbreaking historical novel spans the entire 20th century through four generations, three wars and two countries with a troubled past. A moving and powerful account of one of the world's most persecuted immigrant communities—Koreans living in Japan—it may be remembered as one of the best books of the year.
But here's a secret: Lee almost abandoned Pachinko after the first draft.
Twenty years ago, she quit her job as a corporate lawyer to become a writer. It didn't go well. "I wrote a dreadful manuscript with a pretentious title that was never inflicted upon innocent readers," Lee says. Her second attempt didn't go much better, but her third attempt at fiction, Free Food for Millionaires, was published to universal acclaim in 2007.
And yet, Lee couldn't stop thinking about her abandoned second novel, the one that would eventually become Pachinko. While Free Food for Millionaires focused on Korean Americans in New York, she still wanted to write about the Korean diaspora in Japan. "The fascinating history of the Korean Japanese," Lee says, "is one of the clearest manifestations of legal, social and cultural exclusion in a modern, well-educated and developed democratic nation."
The first draft of Pachinko was set in Tokyo during the 1980s. But when Lee returned to the manuscript, she realized that she had to go back much further.
In 1910, Japan annexed Korea. With the stroke of a pen, every citizen of Korea became a subject of Imperial Japan, and would remain so until Japan's defeat at the end of World War II. During those 35 years, thousands of Koreans immigrated across the sea to Japan, many of them farmers unable to prove they owned their land.
It is these Korean-Japanese immigrants and their descendants—the Zainichi—that Lee wanted to explore in the resurrected novel that became Pachinko.
The word Zainichi is Japanese for "staying in Japan temporarily," which is misleading, since most Korean Japanese are permanent residents and naturalized Japanese citizens. Sadly, Zainichi have suffered decades of oppression in Japan. During World War II, Korean men were forced to fight for Japan while Korean women were kidnapped as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. After the war and throughout the 20th century, Koreans were disenfranchised, excluded from Japanese society and denied equal rights. In fact, Japan didn't stop fingerprinting Koreans during alien registration procedures until 1993.
"The Zainichi are by definition considered foreign, transient and ‘other' by many Japanese people," Lee says. "Moreover, some Korean Japanese, especially children who are traumatically bullied, are seen as other to themselves. I was profoundly disturbed by this idea of being seen as permanently ‘other' at key stages of one's psychological development."
In 2007, just after the release of Free Food for Millionaires, Lee and her husband moved from New York to Tokyo.
"The move to Japan was a lucky coincidence for the book, but when I had to let go of the initial draft and start again—buddy, I was not a happy camper," Lee says. "The field research forced me to throw out the initial manuscript and write a historical novel based primarily on one family."
The result is Pachinko, a poignant, sprawling, multigenerational epic in the same vein as Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, full of births, deaths, marriages and betrayals. Written in light, fluid prose, it begins in the 1880s on the coast of Korea, where a boy with a cleft palate is born into a small fishing village. Shortly after Japan colonizes his homeland, he marries the daughter of a farmer with the help of a matchmaker. Their own daughter, Sunja, almost brings the family to ruin as a young adult, but a Protestant minister whisks her away to Japan in 1933, where she becomes the matriarch of an extended family.
In Osaka, Sunja and her children are subject to bigotry because of their Korean heritage. Through World War II and the fall of the Empire of Japan, Sunja raises two boys with the help of her sister-in-law. The firstborn studies European literature in college until he learns a shocking family secret. Heartbroken, he moves to Nagano and pretends to be Japanese, eventually joining his brother in the pachinko business, though not in the same parlor, or even the same city. Eventually, Sunja becomes the grandmother of a Tokyo banker who carries the story into the 1980s, a full century after the story began.
The novel was initially called Motherland, but Lee changed the title when she came to a realization: "Nearly every Korean-Japanese person I interviewed or researched was somehow related (either intimately or distantly) to the pachinko business, one of the very few businesses Koreans were allowed to work in or have an ownership interest."
If you've ever watched "The Price Is Right," you're already familiar with pachinko. It's essentially a vertical pinball machine, though it was stylized as "plinko" for the game show.
"The pachinko business—a multibillion-dollar industry with double the export revenues of the Japanese automobile industry—is often viewed with great suspicion and contempt by middle-class Japanese," Lee says. "However, one out of every 11 Japanese adults plays pachinko regularly, and there is at least one pachinko parlor in every train station and shopping street in Japan. Pachinko is a game of chance and manipulation, and I was interested in this gambling business as a metaphor."
Like a pachinko ball, Sunja careens through the 20th century as a daughter, a wife, a mother and finally a grandmother. "It took so much of my life to write this novel, and even though the work and the waiting was its own trial, I have to acknowledge that it was helpful to age along with the book because I had the opportunity to encounter and learn as many different perspectives as possible," Lee says.
And while Pachinko takes place on the other side of the globe, it should be required reading for Americans in 2017.
"The recent presidential election has demonstrated a deeply divided nation, but what is even more troubling to me is how all the different groups cannot seem to comprehend the views of the others," Lee says. "In an increasingly polarized world with great economic, educational and socio-cultural disparities, I want to believe that we can turn to narratives to empathize with all the parties who participate in both inclusion and exclusion."
If you want a book that challenges and expands your perspective, turn to Pachinko. And don't be intimidated by the page count or the grand scale of the story—in Lee's deft hands, the pages pass as effortlessly as time.
This article was originally published in the February 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2017 BookPage Reviews.BookPage Reviews
Book Clubs: The wide world of historical fiction
Four dazzling works of historical fiction, all set outside of Europe and America, are perfect for book clubs.
When Benito Mussolini invades Ethiopia at the beginning of Maaza Mengiste's powerful novel, The Shadow King, a young maid named Hirut wants to fight alongside the men, but she's not allowed. Joining with other women, including the wife of her employer, Hirut eventually comes into her own as a resistance fighter, and her coming of age and developing political consciousness provide a captivating arc for readers to follow. Mengiste's fierce novel is a study of loyalty and identity in the years leading up to World War II.
Set in the 19th century, Esi Edugyan's Washington Black tells the story of Wash, an 11-year-old boy who is enslaved in Barbados and selected to be the manservant of Christopher Wilde, the brother of his enslaver. Christopher takes Wash under his wing, using him as an assistant in his experimental launch of a hot air balloon. When the two are forced to leave Barbados, new possibilities open up for Wash. Complicated examinations of colonization, slavery and power dynamics add richness to Edugyan's tense, gripping tale of adventure. Expect a rousing good read with somber undertones as Wash struggles to find his place in the world.
In Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, a young Korean woman named Sunja has an affair with a rich man who turns out to be married. When Sunja discovers she's pregnant, she marries a good-natured minister and they move to Japan. Lee spins a hypnotic saga that opens in the early 1900s and unfolds over several decades, first following Sunja's and her husband's experiences as immigrants, then the stories of subsequent generations of their family. Book clubs will find plenty to discuss in Lee's sweeping novel, including gender roles and the pressures of family.
The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell begins in 1904 Northern Rhodesia (what is now the nation of Zambia) and spans a century. When British photographer Percy Clark makes his home in a colonial settlement known as the Old Drift, his adventures lead to unforeseen involvement with three Zambian families. Serpell draws upon elements of magical realism and Zambian history and mythology to create a singularly innovative and slyly funny narrative that unfurls the history of an evolving nation.
Copyright 2020 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience, seen through the fate of four generations.Lee (Free Food for Millionaires, 2007) built her debut novel around families of Korean-Americans living in New York. In her second novel, she traces the Korean diaspora back to the time of Japan's annexation of Korea in 1910. "History has failed us," she writes in the opening line of the current epic, "but no matter." She begins her tale in a village in Busan with an aging fisherman and his wife whose son is born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot. Nonetheless, he is matched with a fine wife, and the two of them run the boardinghouse he inherits from his parents. After many losses, the couple cherishes their smart, hardworking daughter, Sunja. When Sunja gets pregnant after a dalliance with a persistent, wealthy married man, one of their boarders—a sickly but handsome and deeply kind pastor—offers to marry her and take her away with him to Japan. There, she meets his brother and sister-in-law, a woman lovely in face and spirit, full of entrepreneurial ambition that she and Sunja will realize together as they support the family with kimchi and candy operations through war and hard times. Sunja's first son becomes a brilliant scholar; her second ends up making a fortune running parlors for pachinko, a pinball-like game played for money. Meanwhile, her first son's real father, the married rich guy, is never far from the scene, a source of both invaluable help and heartbreaking woe. As the destinies of Sunja's children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the troubles of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view. An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth. Copyright Kirkus 2016 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Set in Korea and Japan, Lee's follow-up to her acclaimed debut,
Library Journal Reviews
Lee's debut, Free Food for Millionaires, was named one of the year's top ten novels by multiple venues. This second work, a big hit at both BEA and ALA, opens in early 1900s Korea with unwed Sunja rescued from the shame of her pregnancy by an offer of marriage that takes her to Japan. What follows is one family's seesawing fortunes over generations. With a 150,000-copy first printing.. Copyright 2016 Library Journal.
Library Journal Reviews
In early 1900s Korea, Sunja is the only surviving child of humble fisherman Hoonie and wife Yangjin. After her father's death, 13-year-old Sunja works at a boardinghouse with her mother, only to surprise the family with a pregnancy by an older married man. When another guest, a Christian minister, offers to marry her and take her to Japan, Sunja starts a new life. What follows is a gripping multigenerational story with plenty of surprising turns that culminate in 1989.
Library Journal Reviews
Lee's powerful National Book Award finalist begins with an unmarried pregnant girl in Korea and traces the effects of her choices through generations of her family while taking the reader through 70 years of Japanese and Korean history. (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Lee's (Free Food for Millionaires) latest novel is a sprawling and immersive historical work that tells the tale of one Korean family's search for belonging, exploring questions of history, legacy, and identity across four generations. In the Japanese-occupied Korea of the 1910s, young Sunja accidentally becomes pregnant, and a kind, tubercular pastor offers to marry her and act as the child's father. Together, they move away from Busan and begin a new life in Japan. In Japan, Sunja and her Korean family suffer from seemingly endless discrimination, and yet they are also met with moments of great love and renewal. As Sunja's children come of age, the novel reveals the complexities of family national history. What does it mean to live in someone else's motherland? When is history a burden, and when does history lift a person up? This is a character-driven tale, but Lee also offers detailed histories that ground the story. Though the novel is long, the story itself is spare, at times brutally so. Sunja's isolation and dislocation become palpable in Lee's hands. Reckoning with one determined, wounded family's place in history, Lee's novel is an exquisite meditation on the generational nature of truly forging a home. (Feb.) Copyright 2016 Publisher Weekly.