512 pages
English language
Published Feb. 13, 2017
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 …
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.
Family, migration, survival, the power of poverty and coercion and being outsiders. Koreans in Japan, 20c. The depth of family complexity flattened to a hyphen in immigrant labels like "Korean-American".
The first third was easily engrossing. It was refreshing to learn about the history of Ikuno and about the Korean diaspora in Japan. The formula of family sagas is difficult to escape though. The older generations stoically live through readable hardship, while the younger generation is spoiled and ungrateful. I was actually expecting the youngest generation here to end up in America and to experience new discriminations, but the United States is maintained as a distant promised land. The novel holds the ideology too of work and wealth as virtue with no compunctions for example about swindling an old lady out of her home—and I nearly resented having to read through a banker bro poker game. Why are all the protagonists of the younger generation men? Both the narrator and the characters examine the structures of racism but none confront the misogyny, and the women who are granted long lives …
The first third was easily engrossing. It was refreshing to learn about the history of Ikuno and about the Korean diaspora in Japan. The formula of family sagas is difficult to escape though. The older generations stoically live through readable hardship, while the younger generation is spoiled and ungrateful. I was actually expecting the youngest generation here to end up in America and to experience new discriminations, but the United States is maintained as a distant promised land. The novel holds the ideology too of work and wealth as virtue with no compunctions for example about swindling an old lady out of her home—and I nearly resented having to read through a banker bro poker game. Why are all the protagonists of the younger generation men? Both the narrator and the characters examine the structures of racism but none confront the misogyny, and the women who are granted long lives surrounded by devoted family members accept their lot as one to suffer—confines that are vocalised repeatedly across 470 pages.
Incidentally, if Phoebe and her disapproval of aspects of Japan were to be written more roundedly, the most salient affliction of living in Japan as a woman and expat is the omnipresence of pickup artist bullshittery and anti-feminist pageantry.
