Min Jin LEE : Pachinko

Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.

Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story.
Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.

 

 

I read this book for several reasons : I heard a lot about it, I read many Japanese novels in my life but none from the Korean point of view, my daughter is learning Korean so we have discussions about Korea and Japan, history, culture, and finally, I have a colleague and friend who bought it, read it and lent it to me graciously (thanks Karine !).

As I was reading this novel, I was heading for a 4 stars rating, quiet but efficient, yet as I was nearing the end it got more emotional and when I closed it, I needed to take some time and reflect back on it, then I raised it to 5 stars. Why ? Let's see the cons and pros.

The cons

4 generations of people : many people, not much time for in depth psychology. Gaps of decades between one part of the book and the next. People that you got used to tend to vanish (oh, he's dead, you read a few pages later, or he's emigrated and you never hear ab out him again - I would have liked to). Characters felt like representations of different types of people most of the time, different situations, not like real people themselves. Koh Hansu was described as bad, a Korean yakuza, yet he takes such care of Sumja and her family that he had to do *that* thing to really be suddenly seen as really dangerous.

The pros

The novel weaves a tapestry of history and characters quite well, after all. There are so many types that exist : different people in Korea, different generations of Koreans born in and out of Japan, those who speak only Korean and very little Japanese, the Koreans born in Japan who speak practically no Korean but feel Japanese, those who want to emigrate out of Japan to be able to live without the social pressure, poor Koreans on the brink of starving, rich Koreans looked down upon as if they were burakumins.

There were (are ? it's still the case for burakumins) Korean ghettos in Japan, no possibility of marrying Japanese respectable people, no possibility of having a good job, Japanese born Koreans having to register regularly because they can't have Japanese papers, they still have a Korean passport, are being looked down upon, thought the worst of : Koreans are lazy, drunks, murderers, just no good, whatever their level of education are, whatever they're trying to do to escape it, even leaving their  family and pretending they're Japanese to be able to lead a normal life. It's like hell, decade after decade, even if they finally escape starvation. Yet when you can't change your life, what other choice do you have but to turn to crime to escape starvation ? And this persisting idea that women, whatever they do, will have to suffer throughout their whole life. This novel is important for this, it brings the Korean people recognition.

The social pressure also is on the Japanese side, we all heard about those who "evaporate", the children killing themselves under the pressure of studies and making a life for themselves at any cost, just like this girl in the story who ends up badly simply because her mother got a divorce.

The Japanese society can be harsh, in spite of the beauty of its creations, literary, graphic, esthetic, it hates foreigners (like many islanders => Brexit ?), it's harsh on the foreigners, but also harsh on the Japanese themselves. Reading this novel made me think about this for many days, I know I will think of it still afterwards, it's a novel I know I simply won't forget. That's why I gave it 5 stars and why you should read it.