Sandra's Reviews > Pachinko

“History has failed us, but no matter.” This is the start to a sweeping family saga spanning four generations and 80 years in Korea and Japan beginning in wartime and ending in the aftermath of Japanese colonization in Korea and its effects of displacement, racism, and survival. This novel portrays indisputably strong characters that take root in readers’ minds, toiling with our emotions of their fates, decisions, and suffering. It includes righteous female characters whose integrity soars high amidst war-torn lives; male characters in a patriarchal society who try to do the right thing based on their beliefs and personal intentions; and children who live carrying the burden of their parents’ past, while also facing the uncertainties of their own children’s future. Min Jin Lee examines so many themes with these characters: the cost of living in exile and the resulting “homelessness” while living in one’s “home”; the suffering, sexual power, and value of women; the question of family lineage, honor, and the meaning of “self”; and cultural racism, sexism, stereotyping, and discrimination among Koreans and Japanese, to name a few. The ending was beautifully written, rendering an aching heart over a resounding closure.

Here’s the brilliance of the mysterious title, Pachinko. A pachinko parlor is lined with an arcade game—bordering on gambling device—that looks like a vertical pinball machine, often run by Koreans and the business looked down upon by Japanese patrons. The author beautifully expresses the metaphor of the pachinko and the lives of people during wartimes (or anytime for that matter): that the end result is a combination of owners setting the pins to alter the probability of winning/losing in some machines and leaving the rest of the playing outcomes to fate; life is the sum of higher-power manipulation and random chance. To me, the thing about reading historical fiction is not only learning about valued human experiences of the past, but also realizing that we should live our lives not taking what we have for granted, for our lives have been spared of suffering, hardships, and turmoil like that of those before us. We must heed the lessons learned from history so that it cannot fail us again. What incredible relevance this message partakes in our cultural-political mess of a reality today. This is an incredible book if you are up for a long, emotional, wartime tale of the east.