Pachinko

The narration was great for the audiobook and I am glad I listened to it. It is a historical fiction about a Korean family, spanning four generations in Korea and Japan. I learned a lot about Japans colonialism over Korea and how various wars and conflicts affected them. It was a well woven, engaging story with multiple characters that are easy to grow attached to. It also tackled many difficult themes (imperialism, racism/discrimation, societal worth, social economic status, etc.) and was very focused on Japanese and Korean culture. Emotional. I heard the book can be long, audiobook was definitely the way to go for myself.

I read Pachinko after watching the first episode of the TV show and couldn't get into it, thought I'd try the book and see if I liked it better. And it is much better. The TV series has its charms: lush visuals, excellent acting including from some of my favorite kdrama actors, but in the adaptation they lost how the book is a winding multi-generational story anchored by the women and one woman in particular, Sunja. An oft-uttered phrase in the book, something like "It's a woman's lot to suffer" conveys this theme, but the TV show first of all time hops episodes back and forth, and this is one reason why, introduces extra stories that weren't in the book, almost entirely about the male characters who were not as central in the book. It's as if they got studio notes - "can we have more stories about the men?" Yep, it's a woman's lot to suffer.

Family, migration, survival, the power of poverty and coercion and being outsiders. Koreans in Japan, 20c. The depth of family complexity flattened to a hyphen in immigrant labels like "Korean-American".

Rounding up a bit on this rating. One of those books that's hard for me to have opinions on since I'm shamefully ignorant about most of the history, politics, and culture it covers. Definitely feels like the US was given far too kind treatment. Hard for me to know what points of view are missing. But interesting and does a great job covering the absurdity of most countries in the world not having birthright citizenship and also ingroup/outgroup dynamics and social controls. I had a tough time liking the women characters and dealing with the christian idealization. Maybe a bit conservative for me generally.

More than half-way through, I decided to re-shelve this one. I just don't care about the characters enough to keep choking through it. It's ambitious - it starts back in the early 20th century and runs up through the present day, showing one Korean family with some tricky ties. Maybe I'll finish it at some point, but there are other books that are more compelling to read. I'll start with them instead.

 Maybe it's having had life changing surgery recently (amputation) and probably being terminally ill (cancer), but I might be expecting more out of some books than I'm getting, and this was very true of Pachinko. I finished it last night. Today, I went online and searched for reviews of it. The reviews I found were overwhelmingly positive and used words like "stunning" to describe it. That was true even when I put "pachinko negative reviews" in the search bar.
 I'm scratching my head over this. While it's clear that the author worked hard on it and did a good deal of research, I failed to find one instance of memorable writing in it. There were no memorable images, and while the characters were interesting enough, none were portrayed so well that I felt that I knew them. And no, the fact that most of the novel takes place in Japan accounts for that last criticism; I lived in Japan for three years, which happened to be the last three years in which Pachinko takes place.
It was all just this-happened-then-this-happened-then-this-happened. I can picture the author with a huge sheet of paper to keep track of the six decades covered in Pachinko (or the computer version of that) but I can't picture her going over her workaday prose to see if she can heighten it a little.
 At no point does she even describe pachinko properly. She, like many westerners, describes it as a sort of vertical pinball game. That's not even close. Yes, there are ball bearings involved, but unlike pinball, there are no flaps, and the balls are numerous and small—about half the diameter of a marble. All you do is put the balls in, turn a knob, and watch them fall. You hope they fall into places that generate more balls, which you can redeem for money, but it's all luck. Pachinko has much more in common with slot machines than it does with any pinball game. Pachinko parlors of the era she writes about were noisy, garishly lit, smoke-filled places.
 If you have an interest in the life those with Korean backgrounds who live in Japan have, you'll learn about it by reading Pachinko, but it's a pretty inefficient way to learn that.
By the way, I have no idea why this site is saying I read it twice. Believe me, I did not but I can't find a way to change that. It's a bug that's been in Goodreads's system for awhile and they often say they've fixed it, but they obviously have not.

Like Dickens (who is mentioned at least twice. Noa liked to recommend him.) only with sex and Korean. Two years after I wrote the above reviewlet, I still remember enjoying this book and am adding a 5th star.

Loved this book.

So brilliant. Dickenson and Balzac would be proud. What a solid work. Highly recommend this novel to all. For reals.