Fragments & Concepts in Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is the story of love and sacrifice known for its unique form and portrayal of Korean immigrants in Japan. It follows four generations over the time frame of a century, retaining inexplicable narrative detail without cheap time skips or plot holes. This post is a collection of interesting themes and techniques I noticed while reading the book.

Warning: Though I will not explicitly outline the plot of the book here (its synopsis is easily accessible elsewhere), this post will contain major spoilers for the plot of Pachinko. I recommend you buy the book and at least give it a try before reading this. You won’t regret it.

Transitions!?

The single most remarkable aspect of the book in my opinion is its transitions between vastly different lives, times, geographies and cultures. Stylistically, the opening scene of Pachinko reads like a fast-paced scene out of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.

The first eight pages span the birth and death of Sunja’s father, painting the setting of the story in broad strokes and setting up a number of plot points referenced throughout the rest of the book. A particularly fast passage reads:

If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie$^1$ was this steady, beating organ. They had lost their other sons — the youngest to measles and the middle, good for nothing one to a goring bull in a pointless accident. Except for school and the market, the old couple kept young Hoonie close by the house, and eventually, as a young man, Hoonie needed to stay home and help his parents. They could not bear to disappoint him; yet they loved him enough not to dote on him. The peasants knew$^2$ that a spoiled son did more harm to a family than a dead one, and they kept themselves from indulging him too much.

Other families$^2$ in the land$^3$ were not so fortunate as to have two such sensible parents, and as happens in countries$^3$ pillaged by rivals or nature, the weak — the elderly, widows and orphans — were as desperate as ever on the colonized peninsula. For any household$^2$ that could feed one more, there were multitudes willing to work a full day for a bowl of barley rice.

In the spring of 1911, two weeks after Hoonie$^1$ turned twenty-eight, the red-cheeked matchmaker from town called on his mother.

By using semantic rather than chronological links, Lee passes over about 20 years in 3 paragraphs without the reader batting an eye. The subject of Hoonie (annotated 1 above) links to the larger situation of the family (2), which links to the situation of the country (3). Lee then refocuses down to Hoonie’s personal situation in a different context and time.

Similarly to how artists create the illusion of detail , Lee’s addition of small details also gives the impression of an incredibly detailed world, despite the brevity and speed of the passage. She chooses the most important details to feed to us, and the reader’s mind fills in the rest.

The Effects of Time…

The generational time frame of Pachinko allows its characters to break free from the functional caricatures of your average fiction to depict humans whose roles, tendencies, and beliefs shift over time. Sunja, the main protagonist of the story, evolves from being her mother’s quiet helper, to a wary single mother, and finally to a grandmother hardened by a life of suffering.

An interesting effect of the length of this time frame is that readers who would ordinarily never relate to characters like Sunja’s bitter old mother towards the end of the book (“When things get difficult, it’s easy to leave. Fine. I’ll die now…”, pg461) may have found themselves rooting for the same stoic, hardworking mother at the start. In drawing a smooth, continuous line over the entire life of its characters, Pachinko enables readers to take on perspectives they otherwise would not have.

…On Religion

Sunja’s missionary husband, Isak, appears somewhere around 1920-1930, right about the time when christianity is experiencing a huge uptick in following in Korea. Over the course of the book, we see the role religion plays in the lives of each of the family members, and how the environment of their upbringing affects it.

Characters & Faith

Isak is born a sickly child into a presumably christian family. He held his deeply religious older brother Samoel in high regard and longs to follow in his footsteps (Pg67-68). Isak’s faith is deep and powerful, compelling him to commit acts of radical love and fuelling him through adversity.

Sunja’s faith is born in equal measures out of necessity and thankfulness (Pg86). Over the course of the book she gradually comes to understand the religion she adopted from her husband, and it becomes a pillar she holds on to in the midst of her troubles. Even so, Isak always acts like an intermediary between Sunja and her god, (“Isak always used to say that God had a plan”, Pg265) and she held certain convictions, like her love for her children (Pg421) over her faith.

With regards to religion, Yoseb and Noa are perhaps the most similar characters in the book. Both are born into christian families (Yoseb being the brother of Samoel and Isak, and Noa the son of Isak and Sunja) and carry names derived from the bible. Yet both seem to show little regard for the rules of their faith (e.g. “It isn’t up to Yoseb to change God’s laws” Pg301, “[Noa] had no apparent religion” Pg421). It is possible their shared experiences of having a loved one killed due to their faith (Samoel Pg67, Isak Pg167) may explain their lack of regard for divine authority.

Notes on “Conversion”

The concept of conversion is elusive. Often its definition differs between the convert and the advocate, and its complex nature causes people rooted in different fields to come away with different understandings of the concept. The psychologist understands conversion in terms of psychological processes in the isolated individual and the sociologist sees conversion as a tide of societal change. It is important to see that the methods of any single field may be insufficient to fully describe a process such as conversion, which concerns the deepest convictions of a human soul.

However scholars may choose to delineate its causes, nature, and consequences, conversion is essentially theological and spiritual. Other forces are operative, but the meaning, the significance, and the goal are religious and/or spiritual to the convert. Phenomenologically speaking, interpretations that deny the religious dimension fail to appreciate the convert’s experience, and attempt to put this experience into interpretative frameworks that are inappropriate, even hostile, to the phenomenon.

Some psychological and sociological explanations of conversion are reductionist, and converts are rightly disconcerted when their experience is discounted, if not rejected, by the researcher. Nevertheless, there is value to the researcher in bracketing the theological dimensions in order to uncover the social and personal dynamics of conversion. Good scholarship should start with rich description of the phenomenon, and with respect for its integrity. On the other hand, some religious scholars have a tendency to spiritualise the study of conversion by relegating everything that is not spiritual to the realm of the demonic or the irrelevant. (Understanding Religious Conversion, 1993)

Religion In Modern Secular Society

Admittedly, this section doesn’t have much to do with Pachinko at all. I’ve just wanted to write about this for some time. You may want to skip this section if you’re not interested…

Reading into the formation of religious identity in modern society may shed some light on the fading pulse of religion in Pachinko. Edward L. Queen, while writing on the subject, notes two significant factors which contribute to the current socio-religious situation: the movement of religious identity to the realm of choice, and the instatement of tolerance as a moral value in the modern social order.

The combination of these and other factors has posed serious problems to major religious institutions, which are rapidly seeing a decline in public adherents. In the same essay, Queen raises many other questions on religion in modern society:

• How does one develop a tradition in a positive way, without being contingent on developing a negative understanding of another?
• Can traditions develop apologetics that seriously considers the positive goods of the Enlightenment, the horrors perpetrated by religion throughout history, and the general social compact that has enshrined religious tolerance as a social and moral value?
• Can one even hold strong religious faith in the context of pluralism and tolerance?

Queen is not the only scholar to sense the contradictions emerging between religion and our modern social stance. In John D. Caputo’s Truth he writes:

The secular state is, officially at least, a neutral public order that regulates public affairs for the common good and leaves private matters, like religion and your favourite flavour of ice cream, to autonomous individuals to decide for themselves. In principle, religion is treated with a maximum of tolerance, but this tolerance is merely polite and political. This is to say that the public secular order combines a maximum of political tolerance with a minimum of epistemic respect; it grants religions the freedom to organise and express themselves while not acknowledging any truth-content in religion. When the topic of religion comes up, the emphasis falls on religious freedom, not religious truth.

The question of whether religion is or is not fundamentally incompatible with a secular society is difficult. Wars have been fought over this, and I would be complacent to believe that I could be the one to conclude it (In a book review, no less). Yet I feel these questions — of the fundamental purpose of our existence and the things that that purpose demands of us — are important to consider. For without knowing what we are here for, how would we do anything at all?

Enough sidetracking however, we press on with the rest of Pachinko…

…On Food Insecurity (& Commodification)

“一粒米，一滴汗” (Roughly: One grain of rice, one drop of sweat)

On the first of every month, each lodger paid twenty-three yen for room and board, and increasingly, this was not enough to buy grain at the market or coal for heat. The lodging fees couldn’t go up, because the men were not making any more money, but she still had to feed them the same amount. So from shinbones, she made thick, milky broths and seasoned the garden vegetables for tasty side dishes; she stretched meals from millet and barley and the meager things they had in the larder when there was little money left at the end of the month. When there wasn’t much in the grain sack, she made savory pancakes from bean flour and water. (Chapter 2, Book 1)

For people who have grown up in a time and place where automation and cheap outsourced labor has made hunger essentially a concept of the past, Pachinko’s continuous line from the early 20th century to the times we now live in provides a peephole into the minds of the older generation, those that survived through a time when people were “willing to work an entire day for a single bowl of barley rice”.

Over the course of Pachinko, we witness food (or the lack thereof) depreciate in power as a deciding factor of the characters actions. Food is the reason Yangjin is married off to a man with deformities. Food is the reason the boardinghouse tenants do not marry. By the end of Book 1, commodification causes money to overtake food and shelter as the primary worry of the main characters.

there hadn’t been a single soul in that squalid room… who wasn’t worried about money and facing the terror of how he was supposed to take care of his family in this strange and difficult land. (Chapter 17, Book 1)

“She filled the teapot with hot water and floated a generous pinch of tea leaves. It was easy to recall a time when there was no money for tea and a time when there was none to buy.” (Chapter 4, Book 3)

We can see that though the overall shortage of resource is still a problem for the household, food itself has ceased to be a resource that can be gathered, grown and traded on its own, and is instead simply something that is procured with money. Any lack of food becomes a symptom of a lack of the more general resource, money.

The theme of food and its shifting roles in the story comes to a head at the conversation between Phoebe (Solomon’s then girlfriend), Kyunghee and Sunja, where a group of women who have grown up in a culture where food is prepared meet a woman who grew up in a culture where food has always been something bought in restaurants.

“My mother doesn’t cook,” Phoebe said, looking only a little embarrassed.

“What?” Kyunghee gasped in horror and turned to Sunja, who raised her eyebrows, sharing her sister-in-law’s surprise. … “But you didn’t eat any Korean food?” Kyunghee couldn’t comprehend this.

“On the weekends we ate it. At a restaurant.”

The women understood understood that the mother was busy and hardworking, but it seemed inconceivable to them that a Korean mother didn’t cook for her family. What would Solomon eat if he married this girl? What would their children eat? (Chapter 18 of Book 3)

…On Identity and Values

“…physiological needs are the most pre-potent of all needs… A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else… It is then fair to characterize the whole organism by saying simply that it is hungry, for consciousness is almost completely preempted by hunger.” (A H Maslow, 1943)

“Every day you are closer to death. You are half-dead already. Where does your identity come from?” (Pg430)

As Noa and Mozasu secure stable jobs and the family becomes more affluent, the struggle for money and food is replaced with the struggle for identity.

Maslow’s heirarchy of needs lists self-actualization at the highest level. Is identity is only important in the absence of a struggle for one’s existence? When we “graduate” from a struggle from existence to a struggle for identity, does our suffering decrease? Increase? Does it remain constant? Where does the struggle for identity go while one is fighting for existence?

We see the struggle for identity personified most in Noa, who finds himself unable to seperate his identity from the blood he carries in his veins and the money he has taken from the Yakuza.

“All the worse koreans are members of these gangs. I took money for my education from a yakuza, and you thought this was acceptable? I will never be able to wash this dird from my name… How can you make something clean from something dirty? … All my life I had to endure this. I tried to be as honest and humble as Baek Isak was; I never raised my voice. But this blood, my blood is Korean, and now I learn that my blood is yakuza blood. I can never change this, no matter what I do… a foolish mother and a criminal father. I am cursed.” (Chapter 19, Book 2)

Identity crises have often been seen as lesser struggles by a generation that has lived in the struggle for food and existence. Yet it is important to recognise that though to a person starved of food, identity is of little value, such a statement is not true in general.

It cannot possibly be denied that such things are true but their generality can be denied. Emergency conditions are, almost by definition, rare in the normally functioning peaceful society. That this truism can be forgotten is due mainly to two reasons. First, rats have few motivations other than physiological ones, and since so much of the research upon motivation has been made with these animals, it is easy to carry the rat-picture over to the human being. Secondly, it is too often not realized that culture itself is an adaptive tool, one of whose main functions is to make the physiological emergencies come less and less often. In most of the known societies, chronic extreme hunger of the emergency type is rare, rather than common. (A. H. Maslow, 1943)

Value Conflict

[Sunja] was a proud woman, and this was humiliating for her… But the boy, her first child, was happy. (Pg295)

The theme of conflict between values is prominent within Pachinko. When Sunja is young, choices are relatively simple: Live a comfortable life as the mistress of a rich man, or honour her family and the memory of her father? As she ages, the choices become more complex. Is honour more important than saving your loved ones in the midst of a war? Can money for good things come from bad places? Is it better to bow in front of a god you don’t believe in or die in prison for a god you’ll never see?

Over the course of Sunja’s life we see the good and the bad of the many consequential decisions she made in her life. Her decision to take the outstretched arm of Koh Hansu in the face of an imminent bombing saves the lives of her family but creates a relationship of dependancy (“Take money from him for Noa, and there will be no end to him”, Pg292) and arguably sets the stage for the suicide of her son, Noa. Her decision to live her life in service of her children causes a rift between her and her mother, and her insistence on working to provide for herself creates animosity between her and the traditionalist Yoseb.

It is interesting to note the values that do and do not persist throughout the book. Sunja’s honour, as is revealed from the very start when she refuses to feed from Hansu’s hand, is one of her deepest values. Yet even stronger than her honour is her love for her sons. Under great duress, she takes Hansu’s offer twice: once to save her family from the bombing, once to send her son to university.

And what is the value of honour anyways? Did Sunja simply take the harder path for the glorified cousin of bragging rights? Or was her concern about taking Hansu’s money born out of a deeper fear that his support would not be stable? For the most part of the story, it is known that Hansu is a part of the yakuza, and that is taken as reason enough to believe that he does some terrible things. Yet, his disposition towards Sunja is often so soft that it is difficult to believe this reputation, till the first described act of violence by Hansu at page 381. It is touched in the following pages that one of the things Hansu found arousing about Sunja was her innocence. Would abandoning her honour have itself removed her allure for Hansu, thereby causing him to withdraw his support for her? In a sense, was there ever any choice for Sunja?

He believed that she’d been foolish for revusing to be his wife in Korea. What did it matter that he had a marriage in Japan? He would have taken excellent care of her and Noa. They would have had other children. She would never have had to work in an open market or in a restaurant kitchen. Nevertheless, he had to admire her for not taking his money the way any young girl did these days. In Tokyo, it was possible for a man to buy a girl for a bottle of French perfume or a pair of shoes from Italy. (Pg388)

It could be argued from this passage that Hansu would have taken care of her, but how well does Hansu know himself, truly? Can a man think without overestimating his virtues? Does he know what it would’ve taken to take care of her? After all, “it was his way to appear then disappear” (Pg389).

Endnotes

Its tough to write a conclusion for a post that has no central point to begin with… but it also seems strange to just end it there. I was hoping to write quite a bit more here on state and nationality (arguably the main theme of the book) but as it is the post is longer than I can hope for anyone to read and ive spent literally weeks cutting out and adding chunks of my terrible writing…

Nonetheless if you’re the one person that made it this far I thank you for taking the time to read this little work! I’m still developing my writing skills, so hopefully there will be more blog posts/writing to come. If you have any feedback or just want to discuss the book, I’d love to hear it :))) You can reach me mainly on discord but sometimes also on Instagram.

I also announce most of the new things I make in the discord, so if youre interested to read/listen/see more stuff I do thats the best place to go.

Bye :D