Review: Pachinko — Min Jin Lee

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“Epic,” “sprawling,” and “sweeping” are some words that have been used to describe Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s second novel. While Free Food for Millionaires, Lee’s debut, follows the lives of Americanized Koreans in New York City, Pachinko begins in the Korea of early 1900s–at a time when the whole peninsula is under the talons of Japanese imperial rule–and ends in the Japan of the late 1980s.

Pachinko is written in the style of nineteenth-century novels by the likes of George Eliot, Victor Hugo, and Honore de Balzac. In a self-referential wink, one of the characters in the book, Noa, is portrayed as being fond of these authors, especially Charles Dickens. The fortunes of the characters in the book change drastically with time: In the beginning, Yangjin and Sunja are living in near-poverty, but by the end, they have access to more wealth than they know what to do with.

Pachinko is a novel of great moral complexity. Characters in the book find themselves caught in situations that require them to do things they would not do in different circumstances. For instance, Sunja finds herself under the spell of a married yakuza boss known as Hansu. By the time she realizes he is married, it’s too late– she is already pregnant with his child. Baek Isak, a young Christian missionary from the north, marries Sunja and spares her of the shame that would have followed had she stayed in her hometown. Baek takes her to Japan where the bulk of the story unfolds. Noa, Hansu’s son, grows up thinking that Baek is his biological father; his mother doesn’t tell him the truth believing she is protecting him. When the Americans start bombing Japan, Hansu reappears in Sunja’s life and offers his shelter. Though Sunja detests Hansu, she believes she has no alternative; she takes the offer.

An overriding theme in Pachinko is racism and exclusion. In Japan, Koreans are treated with great contempt; they are considered filthy and criminal. They are denied work opportunities for no reason other than their Koreanness. As a result, many of them resort to the “dirty” business of pachinko– an equivalent of casinos in the West. Korean protagonists find themselves shunned in Japan even after spending decades in that country. Noa, Sunja’s son by Hansu, passes for Japanese, and when his cover is thwarted by his mother’s reapperance in his life, he commits suicide.

The strength of Pachinko lies in the lucidity of its style–Lee’s sentences are often short, and there are no strained attempts to be clever. It is this simplicity and the tightness of plot that makes Lee’s world so addictive.