Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
‘History has failed us, but no matter.’
Min Jin Lee’s epic, sprawling tale of exile, race and identity spans almost 100 years, from the small fishing town of Yeongdo, off the coast of Busan, at the southern tip of Korea, to the bustling city of Osaka, Japan. Exploring immigration, diasporic identity, and ethnic discrimination for one Korean family across four generations, Pachinko navigates a fate this family’s cast of characters are unable to shift, try as they might to escape the socially construed confines of their identity in a country that proves itself to be consistently hostile to them. At turns tragic and humbling, Min Jin Lee takes a stark look at immigrant life and what it means to call a place home.
At the novel’s beginning in Yeongdo, Honnie marries fifteen-year-old Yangjin, whose family has been impoverished in the Japanese colonial conquest of Korea. They suffer the untimely deaths of three of their children, but one child miraculously survives - Sunja - whose tale will form the anchor of Min Jin Lee’s novel.
After falling pregnant with the child of a wealthy and married fish broker and yakuza, Koh Hansu, a teenage Sunja is left heartbroken and betrayed. It is Baek Isac - a lodger at the family boarding house, a Christian minister, and a sickly man plagued with tuberculosis - who acts as a saviour to Sunja in his offer to marry her and take the child as his own. Avoiding the disgrace so often bestowed upon young Korean women (a nod to patriarchal double standards), Sunja and Isac marry and move to Osaka to live with Isac’s brother and wife and start their new life. Sunja knows no Japanese, barely knows this man, but has no choice but to capitulate to this pilgrimage.
It is this move, however, that lays the roots for the decades of ethnic divisions and differences, struggle and survival, and another kind of disgrace, that are to follow. It is the life of an immigrant. Japan, a country that had once held prospects of hope and betterment for the couple, quickly becomes one of discrimination and hardship. The extent of the prejudice Koreans face from hostile Japanese folk is stark: confined to a Korean ghetto, poverty, and a meagre income, life is a constant struggle for the family.
Despite Pachinko’s epic, multi-generational span, history remains a back-drop, the novel intensely family-orientated, with landmark events felt as reverberations on the personal and as markers of generational change. As the novel sweeps these generations, Min Jee Lee unveils how different characters deal with prejudice, from relentless toil, stoicism and survival, to educational enlightenment and the pursuit of western customs, to riches and social mobility. Some characters attempt to emulate Japanese manners, to assimilate, to make life easier for themselves. But Japanese-born Koreans are fated to remain as outsiders, it seems. As Sunja’s second son, Mozasu, now a wealthy pachinko parlour manager, says, “In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean”. It is the nuances of ethnic identity that come to be a source of fracture and fragmentation for couples and families alike.
The titular Pachinko is symbolic of the fate of each new generation of the family, as, despite their attempts to outgrow the demeaning Korean stereotypes they face daily, they capitulate to the pachinko parlour labouring expected of them. Pachinko, a pinball-like game found across Japan, has associations with gambling, organised crime and ‘low-life’ Koreans. It is a fixed game, and while players may try their luck, only a small minority can win, just as in life.
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