Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Yeongdo, Korea, 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family faces ruin. But then Isak, a young Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.

Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country where she has no friends and no home, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story.

Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinko is an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.

Pachinko is a story of the ups and downs of a family over generations, starting in a poor Korean fishing village and doing everything they can to advance in the world against the odds. Sunja is the constant throughout the book and it is through her eyes that we see the progress and changes.

The yakuza is the other constant. Sunja is simultaneously desperate to get away from him and furious that she is inadvertently reliant on him. The tension involving him frames much of the conflict in the book.

The beginning of Pachinko is set before the division of Korea, during the Japanese occupation. There is considerable tension between the Koreans and the Japanese and this is only more stark when Sunja moves to Japan with Izak, her new husband. She fights for everything, working as hard as she can to be self-sufficient in the face of the hostility and prejudice she faces from the Japanese people.

I had not known that the Korean-Japanese divisions ran so deep, even after the split of Korea and the end of Japanese occupation. Sunja’s children and further descendants are all born in Japan and are native Japanese speakers, yet they are still on the back foot socially, having to overcompensate to ensure that they can never be criticised or used as an example to justify the prejudice against Koreans.

I felt that Pachinko was slightly let down by some of the writing. It was largely very readable but at times it unexpectedly lapsed into some unsophisticated passages which read almost as if they were a first draft. Some of the speech in particular came across as clumsy.

Nonetheless, there is impressive coherence in this historically informative eighty-year tale.