Korea 2023- Pachinko
It has been a well-established ritual of mine for some years now to prepare for a trip by reading novels from the destination I am about to visit. If I cannot find specific authors in Swiss bookstores, I purchase them on-site once I arrive. For me, literature remains a fundamental lens through which to observe and learn about the customs, history, and mindset of a country.
That’s exactly how it went with Pachinko: we were in a bookstore in Seoul, inside a mammoth shopping mall—the kind where you get lost even with a map. My travel companion bought a basic Korean course manual (she is the specialist in Korean culture), while I allowed myself to be drawn in by the colorful cover of Pachinko, totally unaware of its content, save for the brief summary on the cover and the mention of “New York Times Bestseller.”
I returned home, unpacked my suitcase, placed it on the shelf, and left it there for over a year, joining the ranks of volumes waiting to be read. A couple of weeks ago, finally having the chance to relax and spend a weekend “in panciolle” (lounging), I started reading it and was immediately enthralled. As an expert book-devourer, I reached the end of the 500+ pages of the paperback edition in about four days. It had been a while since I encountered such magnetic prose, and I felt the need to share my thoughts on it.
Min Jin Lee’s narrative has the depth of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the sweeping scope of Gone with the Wind; the definition of “epic” attributed to it resonates with me. It is the saga of four generations of Koreans in Imperial and post-Imperial Japan, tracing the unfolding and evolution of their relationships throughout the 20th century. Personally, I would not hesitate to place it within the tradition of the social-historical novel, rightfully alongside the great works of the 19th century, even though it is contemporary literature.
Sunja, a teenager from the Busan area, has an affair with a Korean businessman—Koh Hansu—who emigrated to Japan, and she becomes pregnant. Only then does she discover that the man cannot marry her because he is already settled with three daughters in Osaka. Rejecting the proposal to be a kept woman, the young woman makes a courageous decision, abruptly ending the romance and marrying a Protestant minister—Isak Baek—who wishes to protect her and the unborn child. Sunja thus moves to Japan, also to Osaka, where she lives with her in-laws in Ikaino, a literal Korean ghetto.
From there, the story unfolds with many twists: the unexpected reappearance of Koh Hansu twelve years after their separation, Isak Baek’s imprisonment, the Nagasaki explosion involving his brother Yoseb Baek, and various spin-offs of Sunja’s descendants—sons and grandsons—once they emancipate themselves and live their own lives.
It is a sad story, woven from one sorrow after another, both personal and universal: the pain of losing a parent, illness, the brutality of colonialism, impossible love, poverty, war, the terrible fate of “comfort women,” political persecution, the lack of a sense of belonging, being a foreigner in the country where you were born, racism, and the bullying that drives the most fragile to suicide. There is dissatisfaction, broken dreams, WWII, a divided country, and the nightmare of Communism in North Korea.
A series of endless sorrows, diverse yet equally profound, seasoned by mostly grueling and exhausting work from which neither women nor children escape, are expressed in starkly bitter and pithy sentences: “When the war is over, I will find another job and support the boys and my mother. I will work as long as my strength holds,” Sunja declares to Koh Hansu after he saves her from the bombing of Osaka and brings back her mother, refusing his financial support for the second time. And Yoseb, forced to give his wife and sister-in-law permission to work in a restaurant—a man humiliated by his inability to provide for his family alone—reflects: “Which was worse: his wife working for loan sharks or him being in debt to them? For a Korean, there were only shit choices.”
Moments of happiness are too ephemeral and disjointed—for instance, Sunja gives birth to her first child in the middle of an argument with her brother-in-law—and couples break up one after another for the most varied reasons: illness, death, suicide, flight, imprisonment, or irreconcilable differences in mindset. There is no happy ending, no amor omnia vincit, no economic or social redemption; financial prosperity does not compensate for previous suffering. There is no positive message at the end that gives meaning to the burden of infinite suffering and grief, nor a God who consoles with promises of a better life after death. The Benedictine rule “ora et labora” (pray and work) becomes for these Koreans “pati et labora”—suffer and work.
It is the tragedy of uprootedness. The lack of a community to belong to, of a reference point. UPROOTED. This sense of displacement, perpetuated from generation to generation, hovers like a black cloud that permeates every place, every person, and every emotion like radioactivity. Transplanted against their will, like trees or shrubs moved by force into a distant, unfavorable, and sometimes hostile humus, they grow twisted and never fully bloom.
“You and Solomon were born here.” “We can be deported. We have no homeland,” Mozasu, Sunja’s surviving son, considers while accompanying his boy to the alien registration office with his Japanese partner. Koreans from a Korea that no longer exists (at the beginning of the novel, Korea is a Japanese protectorate) must choose in the post-war period between a life as foreigners in Japan or an uncertain return to a homeland cut in two: those who return to the North are never heard from again, vanishing into a sort of black hole; those who return to the South are condemned to a life of hardship even harsher than that of an emigrant. And then, the Koreans born in America: “Why on earth should I be South Korean or North Korean? It’s absurd! I was born in Seattle; my family came to the United States when only one Korea existed.” This is a glimpse of extreme finesse that translates large geopolitical shifts and historical events of the 20th century into everyday reality, making them understandable even to those who aren’t history experts.
A saga of the disinherited, the uprooted—a modern version of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, but without even a hint of a happy ending. No Marius and Cosette reunited, no reconciliation with Jean Valjean. The novel ends with Sunja at Isak’s grave and Koh Hansu in the hospital with cancer, after being rejected once again by the woman he asked to marry after becoming a widower (though, in fairness, the day of Sunja’s mother’s funeral was certainly not the best time for a marriage proposal). A lasting love, certainly far from perfect, but unrequited until the end. It leaves one a bit disappointed, because we are all convinced that after so much suffering, some consolation for Sunja would eventually arrive.
A series was adapted from the novel, but I am very undecided whether to watch it or not.
Note: I wrote the original text in Italian and translated into English with AI.
