Pachinko

As a child, I was fascinated by the Pachinko machine in my grandparent's basement, with its pinging balls, steady rhythms, and mysterious writing (kanji, I learned much, much later). No doubt, these memories drew me to Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, whose title caught my eye immediately.

I am embarrassed to say, I initially thought Pachinko was a foreign book. As is true of many foreign books, it starts a bit slowly, meandering through an unfamiliar landscape, the language close and the characters lilting. The National Book Award designation might have clued me in, but sadly I didn't notice it until I was nearly finished. No matter. The "foreign" feeling that infuses Pachinko is a testament to Lee's writing, that she so captures her characters and their environs that I truly *believed* they were foreign.

So who are these characters? Pachinko begins with the story of Hoonie and Yangjin, boardinghouse owners eking out an existence for themselves and their young daughter, Sunja, in the early years of the Japanese occupation of Korea. Over the course of nearly a century, and across the generations, Lee traces the triumphs and trials of their progeny, who leave Korea early to work menial jobs in Japan. Through their eyes, the reader experiences the Depression, World War II, the Korean War and subsequent cleaving of the country, on through Japan's emergence as one of the world's dominant economies.

To say "triumphs and trials" sounds trite, but Lee imbues her characters with such humanity that Pachinko is anything but. Additionally, I was fascinated by the plight of ethnic Koreans in Japan, a topic about which I was completely ignorant. (And for good reason as Lee explains int he afterward, in which she describes the lengths to which Koreans go to hide their ethnicity, even those whose families have lived in Japan for four or five generations.)

Another aspect of the book I loved was the evolution of Japan over the course of almost the entire twentieth century. From being encouraged to fight the Americans with bamboo spears and grappling with the fallout from the atomic bombs, to the role of women and the rules around Japanese identity and citizenship, and even the place and power of the yakuza, Lee captures the disparate sensibilities that make Japan Japan even today.

Pachinko is an outstanding read, whether one has an interest in Japan or not. For those who do, Pachinko is simply that much more rewarding.