It is loud, confusing, and everywhere. Ball bearings rattle and ricochet across bumpers, barriers and neon lights; bells, music, alarms and sirens explode with significance; the lever pressure-fires, the metal pellets launch into the maze, everything moves and everything is alive in noisy and unpredictable ways.
Each pull of the lever is a different bet and each ball a monetary value. Manage to run one across certain hoops, lights or buttons and you win bonus options; steer one into the impossibly hard to reach central pocket and you win a jackpot: more ball bearings. You can then exchange those for carnival prizes, or in semi-official back-alley trades for cash (Japan has peculiar and yet easily circumvented gambling laws).
What pinball must look like during a messy acid trip, the vertical games are forced into long lines, with sad and eager addicts pulling the levers to a well-practiced rhythm. A technicolour Las Vegas, the noise smashes into itself setting off spikes of anxiety, misery and migraines. These parlours are incubators of mental illness.
Those not scared away are of a certain kind. Dressed in grease, tattoos and violence, they are always drinking, always smoking, and when within reach they are groping some poor hostess (paid just enough to keep a smile and not complain). It is a world of low class gangsters and lower class labourers. Pachinko is a Korean thing... or it was!
In the most charitable light, Min Jin Lee is trying to set-off an explosion within the Korean literary scene. You don’t, or you cannot, write a book like this without understanding what people will say about it – the tones, the words, and the fawning audience that will lap it up. It is all in the details…
It begins in Yeondo, an island just outside of Busan, South Korea. Life is painful, limited and plenty humiliating. There is a shortage of marriageable men, and somehow also a shortage of marriageable women; everyone struggles to eat each night, and the slightest “fever” or “diarrhoea” is a death sentence. Cough-up some blood in the middle of the night (tuberculosis), and your family will start digging the grave right away.
Every free moment is a chance for sex and love and heartbreak and shame. And so Pachinko starts with a teenage pregnancy, a dead father, and a smooth talking, smooth dressing, member of the Yakuza.
Getting fatter by the day, sixteen year old Sunja has a problem that 1930’s Korea will not understand. Her baby’s thirty year old father, Hansu, the man she expected to become her husband, already has a wife and three children across the ocean. But the real problem is one of labels and ownership. This is not Korea anymore, it is part of the expanding Japanese empire, and tragically Hansu’s “marriage is already registered in Japan”.
In a huff, and with a threat to “kill myself”, Sunja sums it up like this: “If he did not marry her, she was a common slut who would be disgraced forever”. From here the novel trundles forward across four generations of pain, loss and a constant war beat of forgetful petulance.
The names hit with a hard missionary tone – sounding plausibly Korean while phonetically Christian: Isak, Samoel, Yoseb, Mozasu, Noa, Solomon… It is Isak that saves the day and marries the “common slut”, allowing the unborn child to take his name, those prying eyes to believe that he is the father, and for himself to play the role of saviour like the “Prophet Hosea” who too had married a “harlot”.
The newlyweds are then on a slow boat to Osaka where Isak’s brother and sister in-law are waiting with slightly better jobs and prospects. But not before the young, pregnant Sunja is imparted with two gems of wisdom. The pastor that reluctantly performs the hasty vows can’t swallow his judgement far enough down to not threaten her with the wrath of god: “You must swear that you’ll be faithful to this man”. Then her mother waving goodbye from the port: “Take good care of your husband. Otherwise, another woman will.”
Imperial Japan is not too keen on its new subjects, and so Isak, Sunja and the newly born Noa arrive as unwelcome and untrusted immigrants, not as fellow citizens of Hirohito’s Asia. Life is racist, fearful and small – and so much better than it was back in Busan. Five people sleeping on the floor of a delicate shack in an ethnic ghetto, at least here there is possibility. Here, maybe, all that struggle and suffering might actually achieve something beyond mere survival.
Warned by his brother, “don’t get mixed up in the politics”, Isak quickly gets mixed up and imprisoned. Then the war turns, the bombs begin to fall closer to home, and Japan is on its knees. And yet with each new difficulty and threat comes a swift, born-again moment of rapture, relief and unnatural good luck. Sometimes, clearly, it is useful to have a high ranking member of the Yakuza in the family.
Doting father, yearning lover, always underappreciated and resented for his help, it is hard to see what keeps Hansu peering-in from the shadows. A biological son is one thing, but Noa believes that another man is his dad, and has been consciously raised with a religious disgust toward the type of criminality, dishonour and strength that Hansu lives with each day. Somehow the reader is forced to believe it has much more to do with Sunja, who we are told at every turn is “stocky”, “round”, “plain”, “unremarkable in her manner”, “not ugly, but not attractive”, with a “flat face” and “thin eyes”.
Grandmothers arrive, uncles survive, distant relatives are murdered off-screen, wives are killed in traffic, and sons decide that suicide has its charms. Linking it all together is the quick-burn of childish emotion, righteous, angry, and selfish; everyone except for the actual villain that is, Hansu, who takes everything in his stride, returns smiling and gracious, and understands when not to force himself into peoples’ lives.
North and South Korea are divided and occupied by Americans and Russians, the two halves then go to war, Japan slowly rebuilds and Korea follows in pace, the northern peninsula becomes a sinkhole of information and of people returning to their homeland. Slowly, and then not so slowly, America descends as a cloud across the Southern Republic and the Japanese isles, hoovering up talent, time and culture.
As if Min Jin Lee is checking items off a shopping list, it is all there – every twist in history, every national emotion, humiliation and flash of pride. And none of it hits the way that it should!
Chains of people are introduced, family trees extend and then break with fast indifference, characters are announced in deliberate tones and then forgotten about, sentences and sentiments repeat over and over (“a woman’s lot is to suffer”, “For a Korean man, the choices were always shit”), while meaning arrives on the page clumsy and contrived through adolescent prose: “If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie was this steady, beating organ”, “she crammed her mind the way she might have overfilled a pig intestine with blood sausage stuffing”.
The words are shovelled onto the page with a thirsty impatience. Lee is trying very hard to build something grand here – she is trying to write the kind of novel that makes people call it an ‘epic’ or perhaps even ‘The Great Korean Novel’. Everything of imaginable importance gets a mention. With each date, name drop, and broken slab of history, the reader is increasingly shaken-awake to the writing process.
Wet and heavy with the author’s ambition, Pachinko is soon so thoroughly pock-marked that it is even possible to see the stuttering pace of when, and how, Lee put pen to paper – when the words flowed and the dialogue came naturally, and when she struggled, stepped away, and came back a week, or month, later with a different voice and an incomplete memory.
Lee’s literary influences are no better disguised here. All the way down to the names of her characters, Pachinko rings like someone trying a little too hard to replicate the work and style of Hwang Sok-yong. Even the overborne concept that Lee forces her story to embrace is uncomfortably close in form to Yom Sang-seop’s Three Generations.
But there is something strikingly original here: the author’s own split identity and difficult nationalism. America gets more play than makes creative sense, and near-swallows up the Korean and Japanese elements towards the end. And it is hard not to read the fraught emotions, restrictions, and limitations of birth, as belonging to Lee more so than her characters.
Japanese born, Japanese educated, and knowing only Japanese culture, our suffering heroes are always still Korean, unable to travel domestically, own a passport, rent an apartment without sponsorship, or work without special visas. But more than this, it is in the mind that things become truly difficult, self-isolating, self-imprisoning: “One bad Korean ruins it for thousands of others”, “one industrious Korean can inspire ten thousand to reject their lazy nature”.
It is a lived passion that Lee writes instinctively. But she’s not trying to produce an entertaining story here. Everything, at all times, angles for something more significant. So instead of letting the characters tell their stories and explain their nationalism, the reader is instead beaten-down with a near-full length and unnecessary quote from Benedict Anderson and his now clichéd thoughts on ‘Imagined Communities’.
Soon, through all the seriousness, we are being asked to picture flamboyant gay orgies in the public parks of conservative Japan (“there were too many lovers to count”...“naked bodies humped beneath large trees”), stereotypical Westerners lamenting the “Frat-boy brother shit” of each other, and a compulsive focus on the way female skin ages through hard work: “Her skin deeply grooved from the years of sun”.
Bashing away in the background like an out of control drum – constant sources of shame and wealth – are those noisy pachinko machines and those seedy parlours. They appear and reappear throughout the eight decades of this novel, finding their place and meaning in the only manner that Min Jin Lee feels comfortable with – with her favourite literary device: repetition, repetition, repetition…