Review by onthesamepage - Pachinko

onthesamepage 's review for:

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

4.0

dark emotional sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage

Heena's update (2022):
I largely agree with everything in the original review, but I changed the rating to 4 stars instead of 5. This mostly has to do with the fact that, for large chunks of this story, I didn't feel the emotional connection with the events that were happening and the characters that I expected to. This is especially true for the traumatic events. More than once, the author makes the choice to tell us about something tragic that happened, and then insert a time jump of a few years in the next chapter. I'm not saying that the characters never end up feeling any emotional impact, because they definitely do, but sometimes I felt like we were rushing past all of this, making it feel more like I was reading a historical account of someone's life rather than a story meant to evoke emotion.

She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.

Yara's original review:
I already know I can't really do this book justice and I don't know where to start but I'll just start from the beginning.

The book starts with the story of Sunja. The daughter of 2 loving parents who run a boarding house in a small town near Busan, Korea. She falls for a wealthy man twice her age and ends up getting pregnant, only to discover that he already has a wife and children in Japan. She declines his offer to become his "wife" in Korea and instead accepts the offer of a gentle minister who offers his hand to her and his name to her unborn child. Pregnant and newly-wed, Sunja moves with her husband to Osaka, Japan, where her new brother-in-law lives with his wife. From there on we follow Sunja, her husband, her in-laws, their children and eventually their grandchildren. The book starts in the 1930s and ends in 1989. We follow this Korean family through the war, the split of the Korean peninsula, all the way to the Japanese economic bubble (stopping just before it bursts).

By the way, you might be wondering, what is Pachinko anyway? Let me tell you first of all, the word doesn't even appear in the book until the second half. But just for the sake of it, I'll explain briefly that it's kind of like slot machines and are used for gambling. However, this book is not really about Pachinko. Rather, it's a symbol and an important aspect in the lives of the family members, and for Koreans in Japan in general.

The book is not shy about the struggles Koreans go through living in Japan. Delving into topics ranging from bullying at school, to discrimination by employers, to mistreatment by the Japanese government. These issues are very real and they are not a thing of the past, rather they are still very present. But the book does more than that. It makes you truly live these struggles through a variety of characters. Some of the characters only make a short appearance but the author manages to make their stories poignant and they hit their mark. You feel the struggle, the pain, the grief that these people go through, and she makes you care deeply about each and every one of them.

The main characters (i.e. Sunja and her family) are portrayed in a way that is very real. The character were so rich and detailed and varied. Within the same family you see there is overlap but also stark differences. The character development as they age and gain new experiences is realistic and touching.

There is just one small thing that bugged me about this book. The author uses Japanese and Korean words throughout the conversations that the characters have. Ending sentences written in English with "nee" or having small full sentences in Japanese like "shouga nai, shouga nai". I have a master's in East Asian studies, I speak Japanese fluently, and can understand a bit of Korean. So I did not struggle in understanding the words, but I don't understand what the purpose is and for me in interrupts the flow of the conversation and takes me out of the story. I can imagine for people who don't understand these words that they'd be looking for the context to try to understand and that it might be even more annoying.

The book has a lot of merit, and I love that it focuses on a corner of the world that has a special place in my heart, and I love that it sheds light on a part of history that remains in the shadows for most of us.

Overall, this book is really profound and thought-provoking. Although the themes might sound a little heavy and gloomy, it was very readable and even when my eyes were closing at night, every time I finished a chapter I thought aah let me read a few lines of the next one and I'd be at the end of it before I knew it.

Highly recommend this book for people who want to know a little more about the Japanese/Korean history, or people interested in topics of discrimination, or people just looking to read a profound story about people.

Content Warnings