Pachinko by Min Jin Lee: book review

Pachinko (2004, English translation 2017) is set in a poor fishing village in Korea from 1910 to 1989.

Twenty-seven-year-old Hoonie is cleft-lipped and club-footed when he has an arranged marriage to fifteen-year-old Yangjin. They have a daughter Sunja. She is thirteen when her father dies, and her mother takes in boarders. This is the story of Sunja in Japan, when in 1933 a Japanese boarder, a Christian minister named Isak, marries Sunja and takes her to Osaka.

Their sons, Noa and Mozasu, resume the tale from 1939 to 1962, and during the 1944 bombing of Osaka. The boys want to leave farm life: Noa wants to be educated, and Mozasu wants to be a businessman. Mozasu eventually works as a foreman at six pachinko (arcade game) parlors at the age of 20, and is promoted to manager.

From 1962-1989 the boys marry and the tale continues. Time passes quickly: ‘The marriage was a stable one and eight years passed quickly. The couple did not quarrel.’ This summarizes the excitement readers can expect.

This is a generational story – a long, long, long generational story. Far too long. The themes of love and loss, courage and despair, generosity and bigotry, and family relationships are well explored, but the book is in need of an edit. It is neither well written, nor riveting, nor suspenseful, although some parts are interesting – readers just need to persevere to find the gems in the story.

In the acknowledgments, the author states that after graduation she was pondering her future: ‘I sought distractions.’ So this novel is a distraction. And it reads like a distraction, rather than a passion, a labour of love, or a need to impart a message. Moreover, she states, ‘I have had this story with me for almost thirty years’ yet she has not found time to edit it. This is a tragedy. Despite being a bestseller, it could have been a well-written bestseller, but it isn’t. It is not easy to connect with the characters – time passes, so do their lives, and all of the years are said and done in a sentence, yet there are far too many sentences.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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