Review of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Note: Spoilers abound.

In an interview, Lee describes her thesis for Pachinko being that “History has failed all of us. But no matter, because defiantly, we have lived important, meaningful, passionate, interesting lives. And I thought, ‘I’m going to write that.’”

And write that she did. Pachinko feels like life – random.

The narrator begins with a focus on a random girl named Sunja. Later on, an older man named Koh Hansu randomly involves himself in her life while she’s a naïve teen. She gets pregnant, randomly. Then a saintly minister saves her from a life of stigma and shame, in a random act of kindness.

This build-up felt interesting to me. I was picking up on religious vibes. There is a theme of having faith, despite life’s random hardships, upheavals, and pain. Despite Sunja and the rest of the characters’ resilience, they are powerless about the ways they are discriminated against, exploited, and tortured.

As the novel continues, re-enter Koh Hansu, who reveals himself as an omnipotent mobster who can seemingly control fate. For years, without her knowing, he has pulled strings to make sure Sunja and her family haven’t perished in the Korean ghetto. He can enact miracles, such as reuniting Sunja with her mother, bringing Yoseb back from the rubble of Nagasaki, and sending Noa to school. But this joy and safety comes at the cost of entanglement with a narcissistic, dangerous member of the yakuza.

This is a fascinating and horrifying conundrum – a test of Sunja’s faith. Will she accept easy miracles from a monster, or try her best to flee and have faith she made the right choice?

The answer, disappointingly, is very dull. She reluctantly accepts his help, only because she can’t say no. Afterwards, she faces verbal abuse from her brother-in-law. Hansu sends their son to school. The son finds out his real dad is a yakuza, lives in shame, and later commits suicide – the novel treats it as just another random bump on the endless road of random misery. And by the end of the novel, Hansu’s relationship with Sunja almost felt romanticized, with descriptions of Hansu sexually pining for an old woman he groomed as a teen and whose life he subsequently controlled.

And sure. Honestly, that feels like a pretty realistic outcome. But if I wanted brutally realistic stories about abusive men, discrimination, and trauma, I’d rather read news articles, court records, and history books.

Pachinko isn’t just about Sunja. It focuses on the wide community of people around her. The omniscient narrator feels like a voyeuristic phantom invading random people’s minds, revealing their secrets – as if it is an ancestor spirit trying to find its displaced family. I found this fascinating at first. After a while, it felt undisciplined. Too random.

Pachinko began to devolve into random vignettes about sexual fantasies and trauma. Those are topics very worthy of being written about and read. But then these vignettes started focusing on characters who didn’t feel very consequential to the plot.

And that brings me to the plot. Namely, that there isn’t much of one. I’m not put off by plotlessness, but plotlessness combined with nothing fresh to really do, say, explore, or powerfully evoke (except endless suffering) feels aimless. Later into the novel, stories felt less tied to themes of “home,” “knowledge as power,” and “faith,” and I began to watch characters, major and minor, go through trauma without much reflection. Prolonged exposure to their traumas made me feel less empathy for any of them.

Somehow, I was tricked into reading a soap opera – one that wasn’t even entertaining. One that was shockingly ableist and misogynistic. A disabled character is treated as a monstrous burden, whose own brother confesses to fantasizing about murdering him in a conversation that lasts as long as a shrug. Every new female character that was introduced was scrutinized under the male gaze – I know the shape of almost every female character’s tits.

Here’s one example of where this soap opera jumped the shark for me. For context, this takes place immediately after the funeral of a major character’s wife – who we knew for about two chapters.

Hansu hit [Noriko]’s face so hard that blood gushed from her pink mouth.

“Uncle, Uncle!” she cried. She swatted at his thick, clenched fist.

He hit her again and again, banging her head against the side lamp of the car until she stopped making any noise. Blood covered her face and the front of her peach-colored dress. The necklace was splattered with red spots. The driver sat motionless in the front until Hansu was finished.

...

After the driver dropped Hansu off, he took Noriko to the bar where she worked. The horrified mama-san took her to the hospital, and even after the surgeons did their work, the girl’s nose would never look the same again. She was ruined. The mama-san couldn’t recover her expenses so she sent Noriko off to a toruko where she would have to bathe and serve men in the nude until she was too old to work that job. Her tits and ass would last half a dozen years at most in the hot water. Then she would have to find something else to do.

This is the first and last time we meet Noriko. What purpose does this serve, other than to shock us? Lee has already well-established that Hansu is a bad dude. Lee has already established that sex work is dangerous in this society, and that “women’s lot is to suffer.” But maybe this scene doesn’t need a purpose – maybe it’s just a depiction of a random woman being randomly battered and having her life randomly ruined.

Sure, this happens IRL. But the wonderful thing about fiction is that, unlike life, it can offer resolution, hope, character-development, meaning-making, etc. I don’t need stories to have joyful, deus-ex-machina endings, but, as someone who understands life’s random brutality quite well, I at least want fiction to offer a sense of purpose and momentum that life never gives. Without that, it’s suffering for suffering’s sake. It’s trauma porn.

What happened here? By her own account, Lee sounds like a hardworking novelist from a nontraditional (AKA, non MFA-in-writing) path, who bled a lot of effort into her craft. Pachinko is well-researched, with a strong sense of setting, and some aspects of it have good potential. It does have themes, motifs, and memorable characters, even if they aren’t fleshed out as fully as I feel they could be. Because I know it must have taken so much work to undertake this novel, it honestly feels bad to find fault with it.

But overall, it feels like the beginning to an unfinished novel mashed with an unfinished collection of short stories.^[1] That is the only way I can guess that a family saga focusing on familial pride, faith, and Korean identity turned into loosely-connected stories about forest orgies,^[2] a fallen woman archetype dying cornily of AIDS, and lots and lots of tits.

What all these stories have in common is that they aren’t fun. There is no ending to the characters’ suffering – but that’s realistic. More unforgivably, there doesn’t seem to be an ending to the actual book. The last chapter doesn’t seem to even attempt to wrap up the questions, themes, or character dilemmas that Lee presented earlier.

If Lee’s thesis is nothing more than “that’s life,” then all I can really muster is a shrug. I want stories that try to make me care, that try to rekindle my hope and faith in a world that’s doing its best to try and snuff it out.

Other reviews I like

• “...she literally ends chapters or sections of the book with something along the lines of: ‘And then he died.’ ...”
• “Since everything eventually works out, you just stop caring about whatever is happening. Because it does not matter. ...”
• “This book went from amazing to incoherent. It would have benefited from aggressive editing. ...”
• “It’s fucking rude how this book wastes our time. It’s rude for a book to be this long. ...”
• “i am honestly not just disappointed but appalled by the fact this book is so well-loved and highly regarded. ...”