Review by Mary Kat

Rating: 😻😻😻😻+.5 /5

Recommend for: fans of family dramas, lovers of the literary word, those interested in generational stories, readers interested in the history of Koreans living in Japan

INTRO

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a family drama spanning from 1910 (!) in a small island in now South Korea to 1989 in Tokyo with at least five generations and nearly endless characters, both in their richness and sheer volume.

SPOILERS AHEAD! CONTINUE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

All The Best

Pachinko is utterly lovely in its portrayal of such distinct characters as they try to adapt to life over multiple countries, wars, loves, many children and many deaths. There were multiple places in the novel where I bookmarked areas of beautiful sentences with an almost poetic quality that hits deeply emotionally. I am immensely impressed by the richness of the characters created which were numerous and felt vividly alive.

Still, I have qualms. The book starts with powerful characters that I couldn’t forget if I tried, but ends with a middling “who is that again?” whimper. There is Sunja, our steadfast protagonist, who begins the novel struggling to keep her mother’s boardinghouse clean and afloat despite the death of her father Hoonie (disfigured by a cleft palate, but beloved) and poverty (fisherman sleep in shifts on the floor). After he rescues her from some shithead gross boys, she meets Hansu, a man who seems strikingly hot but totally inhumane. Like a slow-motion horror movie with me yelling “don’t do it!!”, we see Sunja fall in love with Hansu and become impregnated, despite an age gap and Hansu’s marriage. This is social suicide, and an utter disgrace.

Sunja meets a pastor named Baek Isak who is touched by grace and marries Sunja so her son will have a name. Hansu had offered Sunja life as a second wife (aka mistress in Korea while his wife lives in Japan) which Sunja said hell no to, in an awesome show of power. This son is named Noa. From here, they move to Korea and decades of life (and hundreds of pages) spin out.

Like my summary here, the back cover of this book only really addresses this initial premise. But there’s over a dozen other characters than these. Some are incredible and feel nearly alive (Kyunghee, Yoseb, Yangjin, Mozasu, Yumi), but many don’t hold a candle to the tension of Sunja, her early childhood, marriage and family dynamics or relationships with Hansu and Baek Isak. The best parts of the book are watching Sunja navigate and divert societal expectations and fight against the power and temptation of Hansu (a yakuza). Noa is Hansu’s only son, and he wants to provide for and protect Noa, despite Sunja’s insistence on independence. Sunja never quite succeeds however, as she also wants for Noa, but the tension between the two is delicious.

I literally gasped when Hansu showed up in Sunja’s kimchi restaurant after years of being apart. The kindle of love and hate still burnt between them.

But that fire slowly fades into cold ashes as Sunja, Hansu and Baek take a backseat. And then everything goes up in smoke when (big spoiler here) Noa finds out about his biological father Hansu, runs off and leaves his origin family behind, and then commits suicide when Sunja visits.

First off, excuse me! The chapter ends with Sunja and Noa meeting again after >10 years, and all seems amicable. But then right after she leaves, Noa kills himself (?!). I kept pounding pavement reading the book, diverting other timely work to do so, hoping for reasoning, but this is not explained.

Once Noa is out of the picture, Sunja and Hansu are nearly nonexistent, which is a major loss to the novel. The novel futzes on for another ~150 pages with other characters, but the spark is lost. I honestly have no idea why we even spend time with these later characters because they’re only briefly portrayed compared to earlier characters. Plus, my heart and mind are already saturated from the earlier characters — why can’t we learn more about Kyunghee rather than letting her fade into the background? Whatever happened to Kim Changho? And I want to hear more about Yumi! These questions will keep me awake at night.

Hot take for an alternative ending: it should have been revealed that Hansu got Baek Isak jailed (the jailing for religious persecution that eventually led to his death). We know that Hansu is obsessed with Sunja, even years later and fixates on her long after their relationship has faded. We see brief glimpses of violence from Hansu to others. Rather than letting Baek Isak’s jailing and death be a senseless event, it should have tied into the grander character story and the ultimate reveal should have been Hansu behind this imprisonment all along. That would have been a worthy gut punching ending.

Verdict

Nevertheless, I loved the novel. Particularly the first half of the novel is just gorgeous, and its characters feel like real people I’ve interacted with. The novel feels both too long yet incomplete, as we focus on other characters but lack satisfying endings for our main O.G. ride-or-die homies from the beginning. But my passion to understand these O.G. characters speaks to just how beautiful and powerful the family story is from the beginning.

Quotes I Loved

“She had never seen her son talk to a girl; most village girls avoided the sight of him, and Hoonie would have known enough not to want something he could not have — this forbearance was something that any normal peasant would have accepted about his life and what he was allowed to desire.”

^The tragic lack and desire for more hits deep in quotes like this

“Sunja remained quiet and still like a seedling sprouting from new soil, upright and open to collect the light. She would have uprooted herself to have seen the world with him, and now she was seeing it without him.”

^Ugh, girl, who cut onions in here?

“She loved spending the day with Kyunghee, whom she called Sister. After two brief months, they found themselves enjoying a close friendship — an unexpected gift for two women who’d neither expected nor asked for much happiness.”

^I definitely noticed a theme of happiness being scarce — particularly early on folks expect little and accept less

“Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”

“Why had he not come sooner? Why had he kept back like a watchful shadow over her life? How many times had he seen her when she had not seen him?”

^Why is that kind of hot? Am I crazy for being into Hansu?

“Were you supposed to have only one person in your life? … Was her person Hansu or Isak? … Sunja wanted her sister-in-law to make Changho wait, but it wouldn’t have been Kyunghee if she had made him do so. Changho had loved someone who would not betray her husband, and perhaps that was why he had loved her. She could not violate who she was.”

^Just like Sunja saying no to Hansu early on, I got the sense there are lines that run through each character that cannot be broken and end up defining their fates

“She was his lover, but more than anything, she was his wise friend. He could never replace her. And he felt he had done her a great injustice by not having told her this.”

“She felt angry with him for lying, but she felt grateful too. She had loved him, and she could not bear the thought of him being gone from this life.”

What to Check Out Next

Check out A Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell for another well-written immersive historical drama!