Pachinko

Pachinko is a longer book than I usually choose to read, but it swept past as I was fascinated by details of Sunja's life as a Korean woman in Japan. Thousands of Koreans emigrated to Japan in the early part of the twentieth century and made lives there even though they were very much looked down upon and discriminated against by the Japanese. Korean women's attitudes and expectations were (still are?) completely different to my own so I loved being able to learn more about their culture by immersing myself in this novel. Min Jin Lee is an observant writer and I felt that her historical details were both accurately researched and believably portrayed.

We follow Sunja's life and that of her family over several generations which makes this book quite the epic. I was moved by the family's eternal striving for better lives for themselves and especially for their children. This pattern repeats across the generations as is particularly poignant as we see the obstacles thrown in their way. Natural events and wartime disasters play a part, but the majority of their misfortune seems to result from remaining second class citizens in Japan. Even children born and raised in Japan are forced to register as Korean, the result of which leaves them excluded from much of Japanese society, employment, housing and personal relationships.

Lee uses the gambling game of pachinko (a type of pinball) as employment for one of Sunja's sons, Mosaszu, but also as an accurate metaphor for the lives of our central family. Mosaszu manipulates his pachinko machines every day by subtly tapping pins in and out of alignments so the gamblers can never learn a particular machine well enough to guarantee winning, regardless of how much effort (and money) they put in. Life repeatedly plays the same trick on Sunja and her family.