Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

This novel follows a Korean family through three generations and their search to be able to belong somewhere. Everything starts well by engaging the sympathies of the reader. The scene is set concisely, giving the images of life in the small town without too much of the historical background. Gradually the plot evolves throughout the rest of the book, showing the characters moving through their lives, struggling with their individual interpretations of identity. There is plenty of cultural information that is fascinating, in particular the complicated relationship between Korea and Japan. leading into the implications to the family of the Korean divide. World events move at a great pace but, in this story, we see the impact on the people. The flow of the novel is variable though. I found the start quite slow and it took me some time to get into the swing of reading, finding many excuses to put it down. I was much more engaged in the middle section but then it slowed again towards the end where there was one too many characters introduced. Generations merge and there are no clear switched from one to the next which had a very natural feel about it. Finally the end of the book approached and it was thoughtful, revisiting emotions stirred earlier in the story along with tying up many loose ends.

I actually received a proof copy of this book from the Society of Authors, but unfortunately loaned it to a friend who never returned it. Fortunately, it gave me an excuse to purchase another copy. When I first finished reading Pachinko the word that came to mind was ‘masterpiece.’ So often when we think about the immigrant experience, our focus tends to shift towards Europe or the United States and we forget about how immigrants and their descendants in other countries are fighting fierce battles of their own to be recognised in countries that they’ve lived in for decades, or even been born into. Learning about the experiences of Japanese citizens of Korean heritage made me ashamed of the extent of my ignorance. My friend who I lent a previous edition of the book to disliked it, I suppose because this is not an easy read. The characters do not get happy-ever-after endings like you read about in fairytales, although it is far from a misery book. It’s true, the characters do struggle, but that’s what encouraged me to read on, to learn the different ways people react in adverse circumstances. The author of the book, Min Jin Lee, is highly articulate and personable and I remember watching her during a TV interview where she said she was keen to reclaim the stories of ordinary people that history tends to forget. She’s succeeded with Pachinko. The protagonist of the book, Sunja, a fifteen-year old who falls pregnant to her married lover had all the makings of the typical heroines you read about who become ruined women. Min Jin Lee humanises her, and gives a voice to the thousands of Korean immigrants who fled to Japan in the wake of the Korean civil war to create a different sort of life for themselves. A remarkable a achievement that’s created a book I’ll cherish forever.

For some reason I'm absolutely fascinated by Japan & asian culture so I love reading novels set there. At first I was gripped by this book as it did give a real taste of history & life set in this part of the world... However, by about half way through I was starting to get bored.. The author kept introducing more & more characters whose names & family lineage were very difficult to keep up with & the story was going nowhere. It was kind of interesting to see the history & development of a whole family & Korean & Japanese culture over several generations I just wish there had been a little bit more to the story; each time I became invested in a particular branch of the family story it would change & move onto another & this left a quite dissatisfied feeling...

I'm joining the smallish percent who found this novel far less engaging than the reviews and accolades would suggest. I didn't dislike it and I read the entire book but I found it slow-going and very uneven, both in the writing, characterization and plotting. I remain surprised this was a National Book Award nominee. As is the case with many generational sagas, it often had the feel of an outline that was filled in episodically. In some chapters, we got tremendous detail; in others, months and years of action were compressed into a few paragraphs. The themes of change, of discrimination and hatred, of the slow destruction of key aspects of Japanese/Asian society, of women's and men's roles, of sex, of work and the identify work confers, were all interesting, but as with so much of this novel, they were addressed unevenly. Some characters were fleshed out in great detail; others with broad brush strokes. In general, Lee does way better with women than men, but I never really felt I "knew" any of the characters beyond Sunja and to some extent Kyunghee. As we moved into the later years and second and third generations, the characters felt more like caricatures -- representing "types" rather than three-dimensional people. The style, as others have noted, is simple and spare. Sometimes that works well, and there are sections that truly resonated, where I stopped in admiration of a well-crafted sentence or metaphor. But just as frequently, I found sections that were awkward and definitely seemed to be written by someone for whom English was a second language. The sweep of the novel, while impressive, had similar inconsistencies. In some parts, we moved from month to month or year to year and then suddenly jumped several years. This added to the sense we were following an outline rather than a fleshed-out novel. Given Japan's role in the war, for example, it was strange how little of that came through. Even the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed like a footnote; there was virtually nothing about the level of devastation, despite Yoseb's being caught in the Nagasaki bombing and badly burnt and wounded. And by the time we got to the 1990s, it felt as though Lee were racing to finish, sending characters off to die or disappear, with one of the most abrupt endings I've ever read.