Pachinko: Why Reading an Epic Korean Novel Matters

I first became aware of Korea as an iconic setting for profound fiction when reading Paul Yoon’s award-winning collection of short stories Once the Shore. Despite having traveled to over 27 countries by the time I was thirteen, I’m embarrassed to say how little I knew about Korea, or about Korean literature.

Korea has once again risen to the forefront of our nation’s consciousness. Before being divided into two nations in 1948, Korea was colonized by Japan before 1910 and ruled by Japan until the end of World War II. Over 5 million Koreans were forced into labor, and (according to CNN) over 200,000 young Korean girls and women (known as “comfort women”) were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military.

Which brings me to Korean-born American author Min Jin Lee and her epic novel Pachinko. I met Min last February at Denver’s Tattered Cover Bookstore’s annual Literary Feast.

“I come from a working-class background,” Min told the audience, “and at Yale, I was absolutely outclassed.”

Min was 19 years old when she heard a story about a 13-year-old Korean Japanese boy who jumped out a window and killed himself after classmates wrote into his class album, “Go back to where you came from…die, die, die.”

The story burned itself into her brain. “I wanted to explore the complexities of the evil in our hearts,” she said. “I wanted to talk about what it means to hate each other.”

Her father was born in northern Korea, her mother in southern Korea. They understood diaspora. They understood how hatred could drive a wedge through one’s homeland.

In 1996, Min decided to explore these questions through fiction. “After all, how hard can it be to be a novelist?” she asked herself.

She quit her job at the law firm where she practiced, and with $15,000 in her savings account, spent seven years living in Japan, researching and writing Pachinko.

But to tell this story, she needed to tell the story of a country. And that required writing a family saga spread over not two or three generations, but four—a family exiled from their Korean homeland and forced to live in the land of their imperialist neighbor, Japan. It also required writing that saga using an omniscient narrator.

“I was interested in how we all might have conflicting points of view. I love, love, love beautiful 19th century English writing, but this had to be in a 20th century American style.”

The novel begins: “History has failed us, but no matter.” This failure, of a family’s history, or a country’s history, or for that matter the history of one young Korean girl, mild and tender as a newborn calf, is a failure that ties together each chapter of the novel.

It also ties us, readers, to our own history.

Min does not ask overtly, “How can Americans separate their history from the history of all others driven from their homeland?” But the question remains for the reader, long after the last page of this ambitious novel has been turned. And what we read does matter.

You can read more about Min Jin Lee and her writing here and the NPR review of Pachinko here.

This post first appeared on Page Lambert’s blog, All Things Literary & All Things Natural.

 

Page Lambert’s writing is found inside monumental sculptures at the Denver Art Museum, online at Huffington Post, and in dozens of anthologies about the West. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, she designs and teaches graduate writing courses for the University of Denver’s Professional Creative Writing Program. Co-founder of Women Writing the West, Lambert is a member of the International League of Conservation Writers, an advisor for the Rocky Mountain Land Library, and a senior associate with the Children & Nature Network. Author of the memoir In Search of Kinship (Fulcrum Publishing) and the novel Shifting Stars (Tor/Forge), she writes the blog All Things Literary & All Things Natural from her Colorado mountain home west of Denver. She has been leading outdoor writing adventures for 22 years.