Sadness in small moments: Henry's review of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Before I started Pachinko I was hoping to rediscover a love of the novel that I definitely had growing up, but have steadily lost over time.
I think that the more I have come to learn about my own backstory and mixed White-Asian cultural identity, the less I have naturally wanted to empathise with the fiction often recommended to me in e.g. British school curricula. That’s both a failure of my own, i.e. to not seek out a diverse range of authors, and possibly of my schooling, but I’m happiest to take the blame for myself.
The last fiction I enjoyed, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, a collection of magical realist short stories, has nearly the opposite style: abstract (vs literal), recursive (vs linear), speculative (vs narrative). What the two books have in common is an examination of history, and thus memory.
Pachinko is set over four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, and there is good history here for those who know what to look for. However, it’s very much an accessible story written for a casual English-speaking (American?) audience. Some chapters stand alone and resemble short stories that might appear in The New Yorker magazine, to which the author is a regular contributor. While that style of magazine writing has never seemed essential reading to me, I do value what that style has brought to this story: clear and direct writing that captures your attention. Beautiful outdoor scenes are interlaced with graphic, sexual horror, then perhaps followed with a passage describing traditional Korean food.
In Book I, I most noticed that the atmosphere and sense of place are both excellently described. The vivid description of youth, of being naive, draw you into the story, and the main(?) character Sunja grows a lot in a short time. Much is said in few words.
“Not yet,” Sunja said. The marriage had taken place three days ago, but for lack of space, Sunja still slept in the same room with her mother and the servant girls.
“I’d like to be married,” Dokhee said.
Bokhee laughed. “Who’d marry girls like us?”
Book II draws out more of the historical setting, with more literal description (especially description of kimchi), war, and continuing with the constant reference to perceived beauty.
That’s something you notice throughout the book, that the female characters are almost always thinking about their bodies and how they are perceived, and this is almost always brought up because a man has made some comment or some insult to that effect.
The author is especially good at creating sadness in small moments.
Later in Book II, we have a nostalgic college romance, which is slightly cliche at times but still moving. The issues it brings up around cultural identity and being viewed as a foreign object were particularly interesting to me.
“Noa-chan, why are you so angry with me? You know that I think you’re the best. Let’s go home, and you can fuck me.”
Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn’t himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person.
Book III sees a change in emphasis, where modern distractions of electronic culture and liberal attitudes to sex become dominant themes. There is an interesting contrast between tradition and modernity, as might be expected for a description of 1970s and 1980s Japan.
It is also the point that for me the key themes of the book seemed to crystallize: the struggle of individuals to succeed in a pointless and amoral game, and the contradictions of family values in a changing society.
Phoebe smiled.
“So you lost your cherry to your hooker half sister, and now she’s in trouble.”
“Compassionate of you.”
“Quite liberal and tolerant of me not to be upset that your ex is calling you drunk when she’s a professional sex worker. Either I’m confident in my value, or I’m confident in our relationship, or I’m just ignorant of the fact that you’re going to hurt my feelings when you return a troubled young damsel whom I know you’re interested in rescuing.”
“I can’t rescue her.”
“You just tried and failed, because she does not want your help. She wants to die.”
“What?”
“Yes, Solomon. This young woman wants to die.” She pushed back his forelocks and looked at him kindly. She kissed him on the mouth. “There are a lot of troubled young women in this world. We can’t save them all.”
The references to Excel and working in finance do much to wake up the reader and remind us we are nearing the end of the twentieth century.
“Man, I can’t wait until I put you on one of my deals. You will be hanging out with boxes of due diligence all fucking weekend, and I will make sure you only get ugly girls to work with,” Ono said. He had a doctorate in economics from MIT and was on his fourth marriage.
Of course, we have to end the story somewhere. A small but detailed moment of reflection ends the book, and rather than burdening the reader with a literal description of her nostalgia, this is left up to us to imagine.
Sunja smiled at the groundskeeper, who seemed hopeful about sending an old woman to school. She remembered Noa cajoling Mozasu to perservere with his studies.
The groundskeeper looked at his rake. He bowed deeply, then excused himself to return to his tasks.
When he was out of sight, Sunja dug a hole at the base of the tombstone about a foot deep with her hands and dropped the key ring photograph inside. She covered the hole with dirt and grass, then did what she could to clean her hands with her handkerchief, but dirt remained beneath her nails. Sunja tamped down the earth, then brushed the grass with her fingers.
Pachinko is a work crafted with great skill, doesn’t try to be too much, and while it won’t be for everyone, it is a valuable and moral observation of life itself.