If I hadn’t already heard about Pachinko when it was selected as our book club book this month, I might have stepped aside for September. This behemoth of a novel is almost 500 pages long – quite a feat to read in just four weeks, especially seeing as the rentrée was in full swing. But thankfully, I had heard of it before. In fact, it had been heartily recommended by the same friend who recommended Minor Feelings. So I dove into this weighty tome… and friends, I beseech you to do the same.
Pachinko is a multi-generational epic of one Korean family’s journey from rags to riches, from occupied Korea to Japan. Told through an ever-evolving close third-person narration, it manages to show the ways in which colonialism, war, honor, shame, love, and responsibility touch the members of one family as they attempt to stay together and, occasionally, keep secrets from one another and from society at large. Beginning with one working class-turned-poverty-stricken family, the narration wends through the major issues of the time, including what it was like to be a Japanese-born foreigner in the latter half of the 20th century and the sacrifices people had to make – in livelihood, lifestyle, and even to their own morals – in order to survive.
An epic like this could risk trying to do too much, but Min Jin Lee is deft and thorough, at once curating an enormous tapestry of interlinked lives while also providing the detail and pathos that makes the reader empathize with each and every one. Her ability to provide a peephole into this complex part of Korean and Japanese history somehow offers the perfect blend of immersion and familiarization: she uses Korean and Japanese terms seamlessly, offering no translation but not necessarily forcing the reader to a dictionary either. I am in awe of the world she has created – a world so based in true history that one comes away with deep furrows of emotion and awareness.
In short? Please, read this book.
Ohmygosh, I loved this one! (Her most recent book, FYI, not as much.) I started it on a trans-Atlantic flight and almost didn’t mind the middle-of-the-night wake-up-from-jet-lag experience that first day because I could just sit there with nothing else to do and read this book. Glad you enjoyed it as much as I did!