Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is Min Jin Lee's 2017 epic historical fiction novel centered around a Korean family who immigrates to Japan. This book was a National Book Award finalist and has been rolling around in my TBR list for quite some time.

This book is unrelentingly sad. It starts in a small fishing village in Korea where a fisherman and his wife have a son with a cleft lip named Hoonie. When Hoonie is in his 20s, Japan annexes Korea and Hoonie's life is a lot more stable than many other Koreans, so he's able to marry a young woman named Yangjin. They have a daughter named Sunja and Hoonie dotes on the daughter he never thought he'd have, but when he dies of tuberculosis when Sunja is thirteen, she does when any teenager would do and seeks attention from another father figure. She gets pregnant by a wealthy Japanese businessman.

Sunja refuses to tell her mother who the father of her child is, but a Christian minister who is traveling through Korea on his way to Osaka marries her. Oh, I just realized that if I keep telling you about all the trials and tribulations of the succeeding generations of the family this post will be 15,000 words long. Eventually the family immigrates to Japan where they are treated quite poorly and struggle to make ends meet and remain in safe housing with enough to eat because Koreans were discriminated against a lot in Japan, particularly in the context of WWII. I was unaware of a lot of this cultural backstory and found it super interesting and sort of parallel to how people with Japanese ancestry were treated here in the US in that same time period.

This book has a lot to say about discrimination, power, and social mobility. I myself was absolutely fascinated by the super quick changes from one generation to another in terms of literacy, education, and language. It can be that a grandparent and grandchild cannot really communicate because they speak entirely different languages and have entirely different cultural viewpoints, from religion to to the role of women in the world to the propriety of certain jobs to the importance of higher education. The book is centered on a family and the family dynamics were fascinating to watch, especially since we did a deep dive into each generation and could see where they were coming from, even as one generation clashed with another.

It was quite good and I think of it as a winter read because of its unrelenting bleakness. Even as things are getting better economically for the family, they're still essentially stateless and at the mercy of the Japanese government. They can't go back to Korea and many of them don't even speak Korea. They aren't eligible for many jobs in Japan, even if they can culturally "pass." I would recommend this book, but it's 500 pages of sad, so maybe don't read it if you're already in the winter doldrums. 

4/5 stars

Lines of note:

Her husband, the father of their six children, was as good as dead to her, though he was alive and living in her house several day a week in a drunk stupor. (page 142)

What a lot of information you can get from one sentence.

 Lately, Yangjin felt tired and impatient; small things bothered her. Aging was supposed to make you more patient, but in her case, she felt angrier. Sometimes, when a customer complained about the small size of the portions, she wanted to tell him off. Lately, what upset her most was her daughter's impossible silence. Yangjin wanted to shake her. (page 238)

It does seem like people who are aging go into anger or patience modes and there's no in between. 

Hansu never told him to  study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor. (page 275)

Hidden truths about pedagogy.

Before she'd left the house, she hadn't even bothered to look in the mirror. She wasn't hideous or shameful to look at, but she had prematurely reached the stage in a woman's life when no one noticed her entering or leaving a room. (page 352)

I feel like I entered this stage of life as soon as I left my twenties. 

Noa had noticed her beautiful handwriting on the files even before he noticed her.  It was possible that he was in love with the way she wrote the number two - her parallel lines expressing a kind of free movement inside the invisible box that contained the ideograph's strokes. (page 357)

I took two semesters of Japanese in college. I remember how freeing it was to write the numbers and this line really sparked a memory within me of rewriting the numbers over and over again.

Over lunch, for thirty minutes a day, he reread Dickens, Trollope, or Goethe, and he remembered who he was inside. (page 359)

Nerds be nerds across place and time.

Etsuko Nagatomi loved all three of her children, but she did not love them all the same. Being a mother had taught her that this kind of emotional injustice was perhaps inevitable. (page 386)

Parenthood is one guilt trap after another from what I can tell.