“I’ve lived in Tokyo for a couple of years. My husband and I moved there because I got a job at a Japanese engineering company as a technical program manager. In my first year there, I attended the yearly regional team meeting. I was the only woman present. During a round of introductions, the CEO asked who had brought his secretary. He was referring to me.”

This was one of the stories that came up during a book club discussion of Min Jin Lee's ambitious novel Pachinko. Set mostly in Japan, this almost-Dickensian novel follows a Korean family for four generations during their exile from a Korea that none of them would recognize as 'home'. Together with the characters, who constantly encounter prejudices, racism, and sexism, the novel forces us to think about how we arm ourselves in the game of life. Do we allow ourselves to hope for a better future (and quite possibly get crushed), or do we accept that it is our lot to suffer (and thus barely give ourselves a fighting chance)?

"[T]here could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." (406)

The novel centers around Sunja, a crippled fisherman's daughter, who finds herself pregnant in her early teens after a forbidden romance with the mysterious and rich Koh Hansu. When he wants to take care of her but can't marry her because he already has a wife and family in Japan, she breaks off the relationship. Instead, she marries the shy, tubercular minister Baek Isak, who offers her his help and takes her with him to Osaka.

In Japan, the family tries to weather poverty, prosecution, and World War II. Noa, Sunja's firstborn, grows up together with his half-brother Mozasu, not suspecting that Isak is not his biological father. The interpersonal relationships within the family and with those around them are what makes Pachinko such an intriguing read. Even though we do not spend the same amount of time with all characters, Lee's storytelling skills bring them all to life and give us well-rounded, conflicted, individual characters.

This is probably the result of the extensive time Lee has spent with them. She got the idea for the story in 1989, wrote the first draft between 1996 and 2004, then rewrote the entire novel after interviewing many Korean-Japanese when she moved to Japan herself in 2007 and kept working on it until its publication in 2017.

The result is a sprawling narrative which, for many western readers, brings the familiar in the unfamiliar. Because apart from our female engineer, no one else in the book club had any personal experience with Korean and Japanese culture and history. It gave us the all-too-familiar issues of racism and sexism and placed them in a—for us—unfamiliar setting, while the simplicity of Lee's writing style often made that which she doesn't write more heart-wrenching than that which she does write.

"[T]he small shoulders, the gray bun gathered at the base of the neck, the bow of the short blouse knotted neatly in a soft rectangle: Umma. How was that possible? Sunja trampled the potato slips in the path to get to her.

'Oh, my child. My child. Oh, my child.'" (208)

However, although Pachinko can be compared to Dickens' or Eliot's novels in its wide span, Lee seems to have more trouble directing her readers' attention than Dickens and Eliot. Towards the end of the novel, it becomes hard to keep track of all those different characters. Too many seem to be coming and going, and multiple book clubbers argued that Lee made the ending drag on for too long.

Despite this shortcoming, Pachinko does a very good job of bringing questions of hope and suffering come to life. The game pachinko becomes a metaphor: in pachinko as in life, the board is often stacked against you. The only thing you can do is to try and get in a good position while accepting that you will probably still get screwed. But despite everything, there's the hope that you might still win. After all, pachinko is a foolish game, but life is not (406).

Every first Sunday of the month, the Cambridge Book Club gets together at Harvard Square to discuss a new book. In January, we read Pachinko. In February, we're reading Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.

Review: Pachinko

Pachinko