Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.
Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
Genre: Historical Fiction
About: Sunja grows up well-loved and sheltered in a small fishing village, but her trusting nature is shattered when she finds out she's pregnant and the wealthy man she thought would marry her is already married. Following her journey from Korea to Japan, during times of war and economic struggle, Sunja and her descendants force a life for themselves where there can be no going back.
The Good
I had tears in my eyes after just the first chapter. This is an emotional read and one that is somehow easy to fall into. Even when I wasn't reading, I was thinking about the characters, their struggles and their dreams. Part of what makes the text so immersive is how the different cultures are shown to evolve with the characters over time. And so much time does pass - almost eighty years - including a world war and the dividing of a country.
Cultural identity is a huge part of the story and Min Jin Lee gives enough time and space for this to marinate with her characters. Language, religion, education, food, clothing, family ties... the novel explores so many complex layers to a culture but links them to deeply personal moments. A breakup can reveal unseen bigotry, or a bag of rice can show a mother's devotion. Some of the experiences characters go through are inspired by the author's interviews with Korean-Japanese and this can absolutely be felt: the lives of the characters can be harrowing, but they all feel very real. I really loved that the main focus of the story was often with characters that were poor; wealthy/criminal lifestyles were not glamourized, instead this is a story of hard-working Koreans with richly fascinating lives.
The Bad
The time skips are mostly punctuated by tragedy. The first half of the novel is focused on Sunja, who I loved but realised by the end of the novel that we weren't really present during the happy moments in her life, or if we were then those moments often became tainted later on. This happens with the majority of the characters. The perspective shifts frequently from one character to another and it begins to feel that we're chasing misery as the story is heavily focused on the bad times rather than the good ones. This is understandable and everything that happened was important to the narrative, however because I felt so invested in characters like Sunja, I wanted to experience those times when she felt empowered or loved because she did have those moments, they were just overshadowed a lot of the time by her struggles. I do think there was room for more joy in the novel than what we get without taking away from the overall message of each generation's struggle.
The Somewhat Iffy
Hansu warns Sunja many times about not trusting job offers in China or elsewhere, it's something she reflects on later and Hansu brings up himself again, and yet in none of the scenes we get of her with Bokhee and Dokhee does she warn them herself. These are two women she views as sisters. It was so frustrating to read of the sister's fate (or the implied fate) as even if that had to happen to them, I would have preferred to know that at least Sunja had warned them. I mean why wouldn't she?
Also Noa and Yumi. Both deaths hit hard, mostly because of the senselessness of them. The other deaths I could at least make sense of but these two took me out of the narrative a bit because they read like a choice rather than being necessary to the story. In Noa's case, he couldn't forgive his mother for lying to him about his father so he made a new life where he ends up lying to his wife about his origins, making his children as unaware of their background as he had been of his. The hypocrisy is realistic but frustratingly so, even more when he choses to commit suicide rather than bridge his new family with his old family. And I would have liked to have had some mention of his wife and kids in the ending, especially given the context of how a suicide in the family can cause the surviving relatives to become social outcasts. As for Yumi, it was another instance of us meeting a character, connecting with them and the difficulties they've faced in life, then getting a time skip to the death and largely missing out on the years of happiness. I don't see why Solomon had to be without a mother - he could have met Hana any number of other ways.
Overall
This is a complex and beautifully felt novel with a whole generation of characters to follow and fall in love with. It's an emotional journey, but an important one that I'd recommend to anyone as the story is ultimately a human one.
Comments