Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central Publishers, Hachette Book Group)

Several years ago, I spent an excruciating afternoon in a Shenzhen historical museum. A newly born city, Shenzhen took on the entire Pearl River Delta region in its exhibits and focused heavily upon the opium trade that enriched the West and the Treaty Ports that humiliated the Chinese. This area of the museum was the most heavily laden with signs in English and as I read about the harsh and discriminatory treatment by Western countries toward the people whose country they forcibly occupied, I grew hot with national guilt. When I finally reached the area devoted to the cruelty of the Japanese invasion during World War Two, I almost cheered with relief at encountering a villain who wasn’t a flower of Anglo-European civilization, an ignoble reaction but a human one. Deflect that guilt.

I had that response again as I read Pachinko, a novel that spans the relationship between the Japanese and the Koreans throughout the 20th century, beginning with Japan’s colonization of Korea and ending with the discrimination faced by Koreans whose families had lived for generations in Japan. Horrifying as this was, it evoked the same deflection: See. We aren’t the only ones.

Min Jin Lee has encapsulated this history of humiliation within a compelling family saga. A country girl from a Korean fishing village, married to a Christian minister from Pyongyang, is taken by her new husband to Osaka where he becomes a missionary. The two of them quickly learn that Koreans in Japan have no foothold within the country that rules over their own. Crammed into a ghetto where the housing is shacks built from scrap material because the Japanese refuse to rent to Koreans, the young couple do their best to live up to the advice the husband was given--be perfect. Even so, the young minister is imprisoned under a political protest and returns to his family only to die. His wife becomes a street vendor to ensure her children’s survival, and his sons are tormented in school by their Japanese classmates. 

An indiscretion in the wife’s past gives her an unlikely protector, a Korean who has risen in the Osaka underworld.  His care extends to her children and he keeps the family alive throughout World War Two. But not even his influence can erase the truth that the Japanese-born Korean boys will succeed in the country of their birth only if they deny their bloodline or if they become involved in the shadow economy of Pachinko, the pinball machine parlors that have spread across Japan.

In the family’s second Japanese-born generation, a son rises through education, finds success in America, and returns to Tokyo with a job in international finance that brings comfort beyond anything his grandmother has ever known. He soon discovers he’s a kind of freak, neither Western nor Japanese nor Korean. His roots are in pachinko, with its undertones of yakuza gangsters, and these roots run deep.

Lee brings stark and vivid details to her characters: the ink still visible under a child’s fingernails, when he appears on his birthday for an annual interrogation and fingerprinting at an immigration office in the only country he’s ever lived in, clutching his Korean passport and haunted by the threat of deportation; the odor of homemade kimchi that clings to the clothes of little boys who are singled out and bullied because they are different; the disbelief evoked by the Korean-American girl when she tells the women of her boyfriend’s family that she’s only eaten Korean food in restaurants because her own mother never cooked it at home.

Pachinko’s story of closeness and rejection, of success and disgrace, of being disregarded in a country of birth as well as in a country of origin, brings a little-known history into the light, illuminating a disgrace that is mirrored in countries all over the world. After reading it, we know we’re not alone in our crimes of colonization and exploitation, a knowledge that does nothing to mitigate our own failures. ~Janet Brown