Seok-won turned up in Edinburgh without warning last month, as he generally does, bearing a paperback with a badly cracked spine and a look on his face that meant argument was not invited. "Read it before you say anything clever," he told me over pints of heavy at our usual corner on Rose Street, in the particular tone he reserves for instructing me on matters Korean. Twenty-odd years of friendship, first forged in a shared lecture theatre at the University of Edinburgh, have taught me not to argue with that tone. The book was Min Jin Lee's Pachinko.
Two Sundays later, having finished it in something close to one sitting, I understood exactly why he'd insisted.
I am, by disposition and by training, wary of the word "epic." Academic study of Asian history teaches one to distrust grand narrative the way a sailor distrusts a calm sea. Yet Pachinko earns the word, and does so by the least epic means imaginable: it tracks four generations of a Korean family from the wind-scoured fishing village of Yeongdo, near Busan, through the hostile back streets of Osaka's Ikuno district, and finally into the glittering indifference of modern Tokyo, without once raising its voice. It is, if you'll permit me a coinage, a domestic epic — a saga fought almost entirely in kitchens, market stalls and boarding houses, rather than on the battlefields and in the parliaments that Western historical fiction generally prefers.
Consider the single bowl of white rice that opens the book's true emotional register. Under Japanese occupation, white rice was a luxury withheld from Koreans, who were expected to subsist on barley and millet. When Sunja's mother begs a merchant for just enough to feed her daughter on her wedding night, the serving of that rice becomes an act of quiet, devastating defiance — a rebellion wrapped in steam, never once announced as such. Lee's prose throughout is remarkably restrained, almost forensic in its refusal to weep on the reader's behalf; she simply records the labour, and lets the labour do the weeping for her.
Historically, the novel is an invaluable record of the Zainichi experience — ethnic Koreans in Japan stripped, for decades after the war, of nationality, obliged to carry alien registration cards, and fingerprinted as a matter of routine suspicion. Barred systematically from respectable corporate and professional life, many found their only viable trade in pachinko, the chaotic vertical pinball game that gives the novel its title, and which remains, to this day, an industry historically dominated by ethnic Koreans precisely because so few other doors were left open to them.
The genius of the metaphor is that it refuses to sentimentalise. Somewhere in the novel's later chapters — I shan't quote it directly, but its shape has stayed with me — a character reflects that the parlour owners adjust the pins every morning to guarantee that the house wins, and that the players return anyway, day after day, sustained by nothing more than the bare possibility of being, for once, the lucky ones. It may be the truest sentence in the book, and Lee never once raises her voice to deliver it. For the Zainichi, the whole of life was rigged in precisely this fashion — legally, socially, economically — and yet the coins went on being fed into the slot, because the alternative to playing was simply to stop existing.
What fascinates me most, however, is the curious transatlantic — or perhaps trans-Pacific — divide in how the novel has been received. In America, where it was a finalist for the National Book Award and a genuine popular sensation, Pachinko reads as a validation of the immigrant myth: suffering redeemed, eventually, by grit and material success. It is a comforting shape for a Western readership, because it suggests that history's wounds can be worked through, and ultimately closed.
In Korea, the response has been notably more muted. Many Korean readers find Lee's depiction — composed in English, for a Western audience — somewhat museum-like: beautifully researched, but lacking the raw, unresolved edges of lived memory. This is, I think, largely a matter of Han(한) — that peculiarly Korean sorrow which is not a wound to be healed by triumph, but a condition to be lived alongside indefinitely. There is also a harder political truth the novel necessarily simplifies: the Zainichi community itself remains split between Mindan, aligned with the South, and Chongryon, aligned with the North, a fracture far too intricate for any single narrative to hold whole. To render a story universal, one must occasionally sand down the very splinters that made it true to those who actually lived it.
Reading of the Zainichi children forced to carry their registration papers loosened a memory of my own that I had not visited in years. It returned me to a hushed Sunday evening in Edinburgh, the spring of 1977 — which places the memory, uncomfortably, further back than I generally care to admit, though if my mirror is to be trusted I remain remarkably spry for a man now closer to sixty than to fifty. I was nine, sitting cross-legged on our floral carpet before a heavy wooden television set, watching the BBC's broadcast of Alex Haley's Roots.
To call it a shock to my tartan-clad sensibilities would understate the matter considerably. Watching Kunta Kinte whipped until he accepted the name "Toby" was my first genuine confrontation with the organised cruelty of history, and I remember the ache of it quite physically, as though grief that wasn't mine had nonetheless been posted directly to my chest.
The following morning at school, I found myself looking across the playground at David Stuart Gayle, the only Black boy in our year, son of a Jamaican-born doctor who had settled in Edinburgh. We had, until that week, simply been two boys who shared a fondness for football and stolen sweets. That morning, something passed between us that neither of us, at nine, had the vocabulary to name — only the dim, sudden understanding that David carried an inheritance I, by pure accident of birth, did not. I crossed the playground, handed him half my shortbread, and we stood there saying nothing at all.
That silence never entirely broke, though it grew, over the decades, into something sturdier. David is a barrister in London now; I am whatever it is I have become in Edinburgh. When he comes north we still meet at the pub on Rose Street — the very corner, as it happens, where Seok-won had handed me Pachinko a month before. We rarely mention the television broadcast that first bound us. We have never needed to.
Pachinko is, in its essentials, the Roots of the Korean diaspora: both books perform the unglamorous, exhausting work of giving names and faces back to people history preferred to leave as statistics. When I finally rang Seok-won to report back, he was quiet for a moment, then asked only whether I had wept while reading it. I told him no. He knew, of course, that I was lying, and had the decency not to say so.
Ex Oriente, Lux.
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh