Pachinko

Pachinko is a novel by Min Jin Lee, a Korean American author and journalist whose work often focuses on Korean and Korean-American topics. Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, but moved at a young age to New York City, where her parents ran a jewelry store. Having just moved to the US and knowing very little English, Lee frequented the Queen Public Library, where she taught herself to read and write; however, she did not fully realize her passion for writing until she took a non-fiction writing class during her junior year at Yale College. After graduating, Lee attended Georgetown University Law Center and became a corporate lawyer, but quit after a few years due to chronic liver disease, refocusing her attention on writing. Lee is currently the writer-in-residence at Amherst college and travels to give lectures on writing, literature, and politics at many universities.

Pachinko is the culmination of 25 years of work, featuring interviews conducted with hundreds of Korean immigrants along with countless hours of research done on Korean history and ethnography. Pachinko was a National Book Award for Fiction finalist, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, and was one of the New York Times "Ten Best Books of 2017."

Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family as they navigate forbidden love, search for belonging, and rally against fate in 20th century Japan. As we follow these captivating characters — selfless mothers, devoted fathers, stubborn daughters, and lost sons — through bustling marketplaces, crumbling homes, gleaming universities, and ‘disgraceful’ pachinko parlors, Lee unveils the struggle to not just survive, but thrive against the odds. 

The story begins with Sunja, the teenage daughter of a loving, crippled fisherman and a persevering, peasant woman. Young and impressionable, Sunja cannot help falling for a wealthy stranger on the shores of her home in Korea. Sunja loves this graceful, enigmatic stranger who promises her everything that her tiny island home cannot give, but when she discovers she is pregnant – and that her decorous lover is already married! – she is disillusioned. Rather than live a shameful life as a mistress, Sunja marries a kind, sickly minister and journeys with him to live in Japan. Her decision sets off a dramatic saga of love, sacrifice, ambition, and perseverance that resounds through generations. 

From the many lives of her characters, Lee weaves a melancholic, but strikingly beautiful story, which will suck you in so completely that you cannot help but feel each moment of joy and pang of sorrow.

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko tells a remarkable story of immigration, exploring themes of family, identity, survival and resistance through multiple generations of a Korean family living in 20th century Japan. Pachinko, written in response to the historic mistreatment of Korean and Japanese-Korean individuals living in Japan, breaks the traditional America-centric narrative of immigration by focusing on immigration from Korea to Japan. By synthesizing numerous differing narratives of identity and immigration into a singular, linear story, Lee reveals the broad spectrum of immigrant experiences globally. Lee demonstrates the shared experience of xenophobia through her characters, who suffer invalidating racism. 

Min Jin Lee uses the Japanese gambling game pachinko to explore fate’s ‘random’ antagonism, which is well known by immigrants. Denied job opportunities, educational equality, and citizenship within their birth nation because of their ethnicity, Lee’s characters repeatedly lose the vast The Pachinko game of life. Superficially, pachinko appears to be a game of luck, but in actuality, the game is rigged, the pins tapped into the perfect positioning: players are led to believe they are on the brink of victory, only to watch the ball fall back down to its starting place. Lee’s characters constantly scratch the surface of success, only to be quickly plunged back into their previous states of despondency. 

After a long period of financial desperation, Sunja and Kyunghee Baek are given the opportunity to make kimchi for a local Japanese restaurant, earning many times more than they could have ever hoped. While this new opportunity temporarily improves their family’s livelihood, their fate seems to catch up with them, bringing the death of Sunja’s husband and the eventual closure of the restaurant. Moreover, even once Noa and Mozasu gain control over pachinko parlors, their fate remains a product of their ancestry, for they are still ostracized by the Japanese because the game associates them with the criminal underworld. 

Walking the line of morality, Pachinko parlors are stigmatized as illegitimate businesses, similar to how the Japanese never fully accept Koreans as legitimate citizens. Cultural stigma pervades the novel, plaguing the possibility of “fate” for many characters. For instance, Mozasu frustratingly explains, "in Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastard, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make, or how nice I am.” It seems that despite his hard work, Mozasu may never fully control his own destiny, for his “fate” rests on his Korean identity. Though commonly thought of as a random product of the universe, Pachinko reveals that fate is rather inherited by our culture and identity. Generations later, characters seem to accept the twisted outcome of fate, which seems to mock their misled hope, as they are drawn back to a game of deceptive victory.

1. To what extent is fate inherited (i.e. based on our culture, history, and identity), and to what extent is it a product of randomization through the universe? 

2. How does the text’s form (as a narrative across multiple generations) add to the novel’s message of identity and blood? 

3. After Noa learns the truth about his real biological father, Lee writes, “blood doesn’t matter.” Does this ultimately hold true for the characters in Pachinko? To what extent are they able to craft their own identities, apart from their blood relatives?

4. How does Lee use the game of pachinko as a metaphor for life?

5. The novel emphasizes the duty to become a “good Korean” or “good Japanese.” To what extent does assimilation into a culture aid a sense of belonging for the characters or restrict their identity? Ie. can we fully belong while holding onto our own identity and values? 

6. In what ways does the novel grapple with the mental affects of discrimination and invalidation? 

7. How does Min Jin Lee’s position as a female author change the way we perceive misogyny in the novel? 

8. Throughout the novel, both men and women repeatedly reference the line “a woman's lot is to suffer.” How and where do we see similar sentiments reflected in modern society? How do such sentiments come into being? 

9. A number of Min Jin Lee’s male characters exhibit extreme misogyny towards their female relatives. How do women in the novel struggle to reclaim agency in the face of such sexism and to what extent are they successful?