I’ve delayed writing this blog post for months for no other reasons than laziness and absentmindedness, and now, I’m not certain I remember why I enjoyed reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee as much as I did. I find myself sighing at it lovingly when it catches my eye from the bookshelf. I suppose this is the case with all (good) historical fiction, but I was truly surprised at how much I learned from reading this sweeping story of a family making their way–surviving, thriving–in Korea and Japan during the Second World War.
I could practically smell the fish in the markets, and feel the stickiness of the rice in my mouth throughout, and my legs would ache in empathy for the matriarchs of every generation whose labour (not only domestic) never seemed to cease. Lee is very good at this particular kind of writing that grabs hold of you and refuses to relent. By the end, the metaphorical use of Pachinko parlours for the Korean experience in Japan is crystal clear, even amid the generation of wealth and trauma these characters accrue in equal parts over the decades narrated.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve willingly read a book this length (nearly 500 pages!), and I would easily have read another 1,000. There are problems, of course, but none worth pointing out, at least not by me.