"History has failed us, but no matter."
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
Pachinko begins in 1883 in the fishing village of Yeongdo, Korea and concludes in Osaka in 1989. A sprawling story about four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, it is an intimate cross-examination of the discrimination Koreans faced from the Japanese, and how this distorted the national identity of the Korean people.
(First, a brief history lesson: Japan annexed Korea in 1910. This occupation lasted until the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, after which Japan conceded defeat and surrendered Korea to the Allies. It is necessary to include this quick timeline in order to contextualise the core thematic content of Pachinko.)
The title of the novel comes from the game pachinko, a popular form of gambling in Japan. Pachinko represents several things, but the most important is the treatment of Korean people by the Japanese. After the annexation, Native Koreans experienced terrible discrimination from the Japanese who moved to Korea in search of agricultural work, and this is first exemplified by Sunja, the ‘main character’ of the novel, if one must be assigned. A young woman devoted to assisting her widowed mother to run the family inn, Sunja is one day accosted by a group of Japanese boys while returning home from the market. A section of their taunting is below:
‘Yobos eat dogs and now they’re stealing the food of dogs! Do girls like you eat bones? You stupid bitch [...] I don’t understand you, you stupid Korean. Why can’t you speak Japanese? All of the Emperor’s loyal subjects are supposed to know how to speak Japanese! Aren’t you a loyal subject? [...] The yobo has really big tits. Japanese girls are delicate, not like these breeders’ (Lee, 2017).
This incident is emblematic of the discrimination that Koreans faced, both in Korea and in Japan. Job opportunities were minimal in Korea due to Japanese migration, but the demand for labour in Japan was high, forcing Koreans to migrate east; however, the only jobs available for Koreans were physical labour roles, as Koreans were typically less educated than Japanese. Koreans could only live in particular areas of Japan, usually slums, and during WWII, thousands of Korean men were drafted into the Japanese military, while hundreds of Korean women were conscripted as ‘comfort women’ for the Japanese soldiers. Lee symbolises this discrimination under the simple umbrella of pachinko. A combination of pinball and slot machines, pachinko is a game of chance: winning and losing is based entirely on luck. The Japanese pachinko market is worth more money than the gambling revenue of Las Vegas, Macau, and Singapore combined, but it is also considered a dirty business in which Japanese will not concede to work, instead delegating the role down to Koreans. Even though pachinko supposedly originated in Japan, the Japanese people still believed themselves above such nastiness as operating the businesses, forcing Koreans to take the jobs for which the Japanese were too good.
Korean identity was distorted horribly by the discrimination that Koreans faced, and Lee demonstrates this with Sunja’s eldest son, Noa. In his twenties and attending college in Tokyo, Noa begins dating a Japanese girl, who claims that all Japanese are racist and that she doesn’t see him as a good Korean or a bad Korean; she sees him as just Korean. Noa, however, does not want to be seen as just Korean; what he wants “most of all [is] to be seen as human” (Lee, 2017). Having his racial identity validated is not what Noa seeks. Beneath our skin, our blood all runs the same colour, and Noa wants to be seen and known on this bone-deep level. Indeed, he does somewhat achieve this goal. Sunja is married to a man named Isak, but Isak is not Noa’s biological father; when Sunja was a teenager, she fell for a man who did not tell her that he was already married until after she was pregnant with his child. Isak volunteers to marry Sunja and takes her with him to Japan, where they raise the child Sunja bears as if he is Isak’s own son. Noa does not find out the truth until he is in college, and following this revelation, abandons his education and disappears, determined to relinquish his identity once and for all. He assumes a new identity, taking a Japanese name and a job in a pachinko parlor whose owner refuses to hire Koreans. He does not want to be seen as Korean; he does not want to be seen as any race, to be fair, but anything, even the race of his oppressors, is better than being Korean.
The central internal conflict of Pachinko is one we often see in stories of war: are we willing to give up our identity in order to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe? Pachinko is a novel written about Koreans by a Korean, but it is not about reclaiming Korean culture or standing up for Korean heritage. It is a work of historical fiction, aiming to capture the reality of ordinary Korean life in the aftermath of the Japanese occupation, and ordinary Korean life did not feature great acts of bravery or heroism in the name of saving the Korean way of life. It was about survival, no matter the cost, and surviving does not always leave room for patriotism or cultural pride. If this was a triumphant tale about Korean people fighting back against Japanese discrimination, it would not have the same effect. It is because the characters are forced to sacrifice their identity for the sake of living another day that this book is so tragic, and so enduring: it demonstrates what must be sacrificed in order to survive.
This is the kind of story that I hope to write someday. Not in terms of the content -- I’m not, after all, descended from any race that has undergone discrimination -- but rather in terms of the significance of the work to one’s own life. Min Jin Lee is Korean American: she was born in Seoul and immigrated to New York with her parents when she was 7, so she knows what it means to sacrifice your identity to survive in a foreign world. Pachinko inspires me to tap into my own history, and draw inspiration from my own experiences to use in my writing. Vast and ambitious, Pachinko is the kind of story that stays with you, and in my opinion, there is no better story than that.
Word count: 1,075
WORKS CITED
- Blackery, E. (2016, August 18). A Very Basic History of North Korea [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8z7u7Agdo8.
- Blakemore, E. (2018, August 29). How Japan Took Control of Korea. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/news/japan-colonization-korea.
