Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Very rarely are we asked to examine the repercussions of an ancestor’s choices on our own lives made years or decades earlier. How profoundly different would our world be had a grandmother not chosen to move away for college or a parent not maintained certain friendships? The possibilities of these questions are of course unknowable, but when faced with the gravity of our choices, it’s impossible not to wonder.
This abundance of choice or mobility is often reserved for those who have privilege--privilege to leave, privilege to stay, privilege to enact agency throughout circumstance and status. For those who cannot claim such independence, these choices are further and farther in between, though just as present and deserving of a voice. This is an assertion made by the sweeping generational tale of Pachinko.
Min Jin Lee’s second novel paints a portrait of interwoven generations anchored by choice, home, and the perspectives of those often denied a story, opening with a short yet deeply resonate line that we are asked to revisit throughout the novel’s 490 page entirety: “History has failed us, but no matter.” A statement that calls out injustice and responds with a quiet endurance, as if the existence of Pachinko itself is an attempt to write the wrongs of an abandoning history.
Spanning over seven decades, Lee explores the heartbreaks, losses, joys, births, and deaths, of a family helmed by matriarch Sunja Baek. Born to Hoonie and Yangjin in Yeongdo, Korea at the start of the 20th century, Sunja grows up on the tiny island just off the coast of Busan working to help maintain her parents’ boarding house. Her childhood is quiet and happy, and she is particularly adored by her father before his death when Sunja is just 13, the earliest and most lasting devastation of her life. Her father’s death when she is just 13 is a loss that Sunja returns to often, even in her old age, as a reminder of lasting grief and a continued decision to keep stride through heartbreak.
A few years after Hoonie’s death, an older business man named Koh Hansu preys on Sunja, grooming her with attention and gifts before eventually betraying her when she becomes pregnant with his child. After this deceit, Sunja marries a kind and honorable pastor, Baek Isak, and the family moves to Osaka, Japan. Hansu remains a constant and looming presence in Sunja’s life, despite her wishes otherwise, as a watchful eye and means of financial help. He is not a choice she made, yet he is a force placed upon her life. Sunja leaves her childhood home and journeys to a foreign and often hostile country all to the backdrop of World War II, imperialist Japan, and clashing cultures.
Although Lee’s prose rarely linger on sentimentality, the novel is deeply empathetic. Its characters voyage through time, relationships, and geography as we periodically drop in for glimpses at the lives expanded from Sunja’s origins in Korea. The meaning of pachinko (a popular Japanese pin-ball machine) becomes clear about half way through the novel as Lee frames her characters ricochetting through life from choices made by them and for them, intersecting themes of shame, home, and responsibility.
Certain paths feel particularly devastating and Lee writes from a place of patient observation, the novel at its most gripping when externalizing complex emotions in relationship to culture and space. In a compassionate moment, Isak notes, “If you love anyone, you cannot help but share his suffering. If we love our Lord, not just admire him or fear him or want things from him, we must recognize his feelings; he must be in anguish over our sins. We must understand this anguish. The Lord suffers with us. He suffers like us. It is a consolation to know this. To know that we are not in fact alone in our suffering.”
Many things in life are inevitable-- loss, pain, suffering-- but so is the joy that comes with enduring for what and who we love. Pachinko asserts this truth, that life is both devastating and wonderful.
