Review | Min Jin Lee’s epic Pachinko takes on the complex and fraught history of Korea and Japan

Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
Grand Central Publishing

“History has failed us, but no matter.” So begins Korean-American author Min Jin Lee’s gripping new novel about a chapter largely ignored in English literature: the Koreans in Japan.

It is only as the reader approaches the end of the novel that the momentous historical weight and narrative ambition of this enigmatic opening hit home. Within a few scant sentences, Lee transports us directly into the joys and vicissi­tudes of an ageing fisherman and his wife who, in 1910, are living in the Korean fishing village of Yeongdo with their only son, a hardworking, club-footed, cleft-lipped 27-year-old named Hoonie.

Not that the page-turning quality of Lee’s unadorned prose should come as a surprise. She’s renowned for her award-winning short stories, and her debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was declared one of the top 10 novels of 2007 by The Times of London and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Pachinko may be hitting bookshelves a decade after the author’s debut, but it has been almost 30 years in the making. As Lee reveals in the novel’s poignant afterword, its genesis dates to 1989, when, as a senior at Yale University, she attended a guest lecture series about the zainichi, the Japanese term often used to describe Korean-Japanese – migrants from the colonial era or their descendants, as well as people with partial Korean heritage. Haunted by an account of a 12-year-old schoolboy who jumped off a building after being bullied because of his Korean background, Lee has been on something of a mission to write about the long, vexed history of social and legal discrimination against Koreans in Japan ever since, and wrote Pachinko’s first drafts in 1996.

It was while living in Tokyo from 2007 to 2011, when she met and interviewed dozens of Koreans living in Japan, that she completed the final draft.