Review of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

My bestie gave me Pachinko for my birthday last year, and I’m glad she did, because I’m not sure I would have picked it up on my own. She has a knack for finding books I wouldn’t know to love. Min Jin Lee writes about subject I know nothing about—ethnic Koreans born in Japan, and the discrimination they face. Additionally, this is an intergenerational story, something I am always down for. Pachinko reminds me somewhat of A Fine Balance for the bleakness its characters often experience. Reading this book was hard at times. Yet it was also enthralling and, in its way, enjoyable.

The story follows nearly four generations. Sunja grows up in a small shore town in Korea. After a married man impregnates her, Sunja decides to marry a visiting pastor, who relocates her to Japan. As she builds out here life and has a second child, she and her family live through the Second World War and subsequent separation of the Koreas. Sunja’s children grow up, and she has grandchildren, who eventually age into adults facing their own tribulations. All of this happens as the twentieth century ticks by, right up into the 1980s.

It’s interesting to me how Lee’s style shifts gradually throughout the novel. At first, the story is very exposition- and narration-heavy, and dialogue is sparse. Lee’s writing style becomes more modern as the novel’s setting does, with dialogue taking up more space. This means the beginning of the story feels slower, more meditative, and the end feels faster-paced. I was definitely more engaged in the story towards the end, as we follow Mozasu and his family, but that might also have been a function of how much time I had spent with this family up until that point.

Probably the heart of Pachinko, at least for me, is the way Lee explores the motif of sacrifices for one’s family. No one in this novel has the life they want or envisioned for themselves. It’s on one level heartbreaking, for you want all of these characters to be happy. Yet it’s also an important reminder of the need to play within one’s limitations in life: if you spend all your time dreaming of what can’t be, you miss out on the contentment you can find within what is. This reminds me a lot of Siddhartha.

I’m not really able to do this book justice in my review right now … it’s beautiful, tragic, and satisfying in the intricacy with which Lee tells this family’s many stories.