Visiting Korea + Japan with Pachinko

Normally, I’m not a person with the presence of mind to savor things. I’m a rusher. I run around cities and race through meals. I’m someone for whom adoration often comes in the aftermath – when the vacation is over, when the moment has passed, and when the book is done and back on the shelf.

For that reason, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko – the first book I read as part of my Vicarious Reading Project – was an anomaly in my literary life. Not just because it’s historical fiction, free from witticisms, and uncluttered by cultural references, but because I took it slow. For nearly two weeks, this elegant novel has been my comforting companion, the understated accompaniment to dozens of meals, subway rides, and pre-bed rituals.

Pachinko spans 80 years in the history of the Baek family, Zainichi who lived under the Japanese occupation of Korea, who faced discrimination upon moving to Japan, and who reacted to that discrimination in myriad ways – by subverting their identities, by defying stereotypes, or by making the most of the few opportunities available to them. Over the course of the novel, and the passage of time, I transferred my affection from one male character to another – from Hansu to Isak to Noa to Mozasu to Solomon. But it was a woman, Sunja, on whom the novel turned. She’s a daughter, wife, and mother who suffers quietly all her life and wonders what meaning to derive from that suffering:

“‘Go-saeng,’ Yangjin said out loud. “A woman’s lot is to suffer.”

“Yes, go-saeng.” Kyunghee nodded, repeating the word for suffering.

All her life, Sunja had heard this sentiment from other women, that they must suffer – suffer as a girl, suffer as a wife, suffer as a mother – die suffering. Go-saeng – the word made her sick. What else was there besides this? She had suffered to create a better life for Noa, and yet it was not enough. Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she’d drunk like water? In the end, he had refused to suffer the conditions of his birth. Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?”

Pachinko is, if not a celebration of suffering, then a celebration of mildness. This is a book that sees the beauty in good intentions, the value in duty and care. It lionizes humility and stoicism – giving dignity to hardships and to the people who absorb those hardships with grace.

Perseverance matters in Pachinko too, as it has in Lee’s life. Min Jin Lee spent 30 years wrestling with this story in one form or another before her novel was published in 2017. A self-described “late bloomer,” Lee is American, but spent a decade living in Tokyo researching the book. According to the New York Times, while Pachinko has been picked up by publishers in more than a dozen countries, it hasn’t been published in Japan.

Pachinko is at once intimate and sprawling – a story of small gestures across sweeping arcs of time. It’s also incredibly smooth, a book that was absorbing and oddly effortless to read. I dove into it for hours at a time on several occasions and came up for air with no memory of flipping pages, of feeling my body, or of having thoughts beyond what was on the page. The prose is beautiful the way all minimalist things are beautiful – there’s nothing more than what’s necessary, and everything that is there is carefully considered. When horrible things happen, like (spoiler alert!) Noa’s death, the language is so simple and spare that the blow is all the more shocking.

This novel really challenged how I think about place, and impressed upon me how deeply our experience of different places depends upon privilege. In Pachinko, Osaka, Yokohama, and Tokyo feel dramatically different if you’re Korean than if you’re Japanese. You rise to the same sun, walk the same streets, take the same trains, but the similarities end there. It begs the question – if two people in the same place work, eat, and live entirely differently, are they even experiencing the same reality?

In Pachinko, the Baek family experiences Japan as a land of arbitrary oppression and daily humiliations. Japan is a place they can never belong to even if they were born there. As Mosazu says:

“There’s nothing you can do. This country isn’t going to change. Koreans like me can’t leave. Where we gonna go? But the Koreans back home aren’t changing, either. In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I’m just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am.”

My experience of Japan was different of course. For three weeks back in 2009, I walked for days without uttering a single word, called my then-boyfriend at 3am from a phone in my bathroom at the Keio Plaza Hotel, rode in metro cars where my head scraped the ceiling, and tried on clothing too compact for my long limbs. Like some knockoff Scarlett Johansson in Lost in Translation, I had the luxury of courting an exquisite sense of ennui. When you contrast this experience of Japan against the Baek family’s – my otherness vs. theirs – it’s like a different place entirely. Maybe the selves we bring to a situation, and the boxes we’re put in by others, do more to determine how a place feels to us than the place itself.

While I was reading Pachinko, it put me under a sort of spell. It felt like my own special secret: the rare book I didn’t really feel like talking about. And yet, I must, because it’s the subject of my first Vicarious Reading book club tomorrow. Wish me luck!