Pachinko — Min Jin Lee
Learning about a reality different from our own is one of the many gifts of reading. Especially because in the end it becomes easier to see that although the geography is different, the experiences are similar. Pachinko is a family saga that begins in 1910 in a unified Korea during the Japanese occupation, and ends in 1989 in Japan, with the country back on its feet after the Second World War and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The story begins with Sunja, a humble 16-year-old girl living and working alongside her mother in their boardinghouse in the fishing village of Yeongdo in Korea. When she discovers that she is pregnant and that the man she loves is married, she decides to accept the marriage proposal from one of the lodgers, Isak, a young Christian minister that offers her a last name for the baby and a new life in the Japanese city of Osaka.
History and fiction are seamlessly intertwined, and facts presented in such a way that it is not necessary to know the history of Korea and Japan in detail in order to read this book. However, it helps to keep some key events in mind. Korea was occupied by Japan between 1901 and 1945, the year in which Japan and the other Axis powers lost the Second World War. The Korean peninsula became formally divided in 1948 after Soviet troops occupied the north and American troops did the same in the south. Some Koreans returned to their newly divided home country, but many remained in Japan.
The main topic of this novel is the experience of Korean immigrants living in Japan. Koreans were never welcomed in Japan. They were targeted with the same negative stereotypes we see replicated on many other groups of people deemed as “immigrant”; they were thought of as criminals, lazy, dirty, basically inferior to the Japanese in any possible way. They were invisible people, with no citizen rights whatsoever, who had to live in designated areas and had limited options for work. It is nowadays still very difficult to obtain Japanese citizenship, and discrimination towards Koreans has perhaps lessened, but not entirely disappeared.
Min Jin Lee, who was born in Seoul and moved with her family to the United States when she was seven, writes in the acknowledgements that the idea for this book first came from a conference she attended while in college, where she heard about the case of a middle school boy living in Japan who was bullied because of his Korean background and ended up jumping off from a building. It would make such an impact on her that she would later quit practicing law and start writing about the experience of Koreans in Japan. After many years of research, which included a stay in Tokyo where she got to interview dozens of Koreans who lived in Japan during the 20th century, the book finally came together.
Pachinko renders a beautiful portrait of a community from which little is known in the rest of the world. It is a novel filled with captivating characters that is both delightful and moving and makes us ponder about the sacrifices of our predecessors. There are so many stories behind our story that we will never know, but that will in some way always be part of us.
This review was originally published in Spanish at Cuaderno Reciclado.
