by Min Jin Lee
When he was out of sight, Sunja dug a hole at the base of the tombstone about a foot deep with her hands and dropped the key ring photograph inside. She covered the hole with dirt and grass, then did what she could to clean her hands with her handkerchief, but dirt remained beneath her nails. Sunja tamped down the earth, then brushed the grass with her fingers.
She picked up her bags. Kyunghee would be waiting for her at home.
Acknowledgments
I got the idea for the story in 1989.
I was a junior in college, and I didn’t know what I’d do after graduation. Rather than ponder my future, I sought distractions. One afternoon, I attended what was then called a Master’s Tea, a guest lecture series at Yale. I’d never been to one before. An American missionary based in Japan was giving a talk about the “Zainichi,” a term used often to describe Korean Japanese people who were either migrants from the colonial era or their descendants. Some Koreans in Japan do not wish to be called Zainichi Korean because the term means literally “foreign resident staying in Japan,” which makes no sense since there are often third, fourth, and fifth surviving generations of Koreans in Japan. There are many ethnic Koreans who are now Japanese citizens, although this option to naturalize is not an easy one. There are also many who have intermarried with the Japanese or who have partial Korean heritage. Sadly, there is a long and troubled history of legal and social discrimination against the Koreans in Japan and those who have partial ethnic Korean backgrounds. There are some who never disclose their Korean heritage, although their ethnic identity may be traced to their identification papers and government records.
The missionary talked about this history and relayed a story of a middle school boy who was bullied in his yearbook because of his Korean background. The boy jumped off a building and died. I would not forget this.
I graduated college in 1990 with a degree in history. I went to law school and practiced law for two years. After quitting the law, I decided to write as early as 1996 about the Koreans in Japan. I wrote many stories and novel drafts, which were never published. I was despondent. Then in 2002, The Missouri Review published the story “Motherland,” which is about a Korean Japanese boy who gets fingerprinted and receives a foreigner’s identity card on his birthday, and later it won the Peden Prize. Also, I’d submitted a fictionalized account of the story I’d heard in college and received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. With that grant money, I took classes and paid for a babysitter so I could write. This early recognition was critical, because it took me so long to publish anything at all. Moreover, the NYFA fellowship confirmed my stubborn belief that the stories of Koreans in Japan should be told somehow when so much of their lives had been despised, denied, and erased.
I wanted very much to get this story right; however, I felt that I didn’t have all the knowledge or skills to do this properly. In my anxiety, I did an enormous amount of research and wrote a draft of a novel about the Korean Japanese community. Still, it did not feel right. Then in 2007, my husband got a job offer in Tokyo, and we moved there in August. On the ground, I had the chance to interview dozens of Koreans in Japan and learned that I’d gotten the story wrong. The Korean Japanese may have been historical victims, but when I met them in person, none of them were as simple as that. I was so humbled by the breadth and complexity of the people I met in Japan that I put aside my old draft and started to write the book again in 2008, and I continued to write it and revise it until its publication.
I have had this story with me for almost thirty years. Consequently, there are many people to thank.
Speer Morgan and Evelyn Somers of The Missouri Review believed in this story first. The NYFA gave me a fiction fellowship when I wanted to give up. Thank you.
When I lived in Tokyo, a great number of individuals agreed to sit with me and answer my many questions about the Koreans in Japan as well as about expatriate life, international finance, the yakuza, the history of colonial Christianity, police work, immigration, Kabukicho, poker, Osaka, Tokyo real estate deals, leadership in Wall Street, mizu shobai, and of course, the pachinko industry. When we could not meet in person, many spoke to me on the phone or answered my questions via e-mail. I am in debt to the following generous individuals: Susan Menadue Chun, Jongmoon Chun, Ji Soo Chun, Haeng-ja Chung, Kangja Chung, the Reverend Yean Won Chung, Scott Callon, Emma Fujibayashi, Stephanie and Greg Guyett, Mary Hauet, Danny Hegglin, Gen Hidemori, Tim Hornyak, Linda Rhee Kim, Myeong Gu Kim, Alexander Kinmont, Tamie Matsunaga, Naoki Miyamoto, Rika Nakajima, Sohee Park, Alberto Tamura, Peter Tasker, Jane and Kevin Quinn, Hyang Yang, Paul Yang, Simon Yoo, and Chongran Yun.
I have to note here that this book could not have been written without the significant scholarship of the following authors: David Chapman, Haeng-ja Chung, Haruko Taya Cook, Theodore F. Cook, Erin Chung, George De Vos, Yasunori Fukuoka, Haeyoung Han, Hildi Kang, Sangjun Kang, Sarah Sakhae Kashani, Jackie J. Kim, Changsoo Lee, Soo im Lee, John Lie, Richard Lloyd Parry, Samuel Perry, Sonia Ryang, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, and Mary Kimoto Tomita. Although I relied heavily on their scholarship, any errors of fact are my own.
I want to thank my friends and family in Japan, South Korea, and the United States for their love, faith, and kindness. Without them, it would have been impossible to write, revise, and rewrite this book: the Reverend Harry Adams, Lynn Ahrens, Harold Augenbraum, Karen Grigsby Bates, Dionne Bennett, Stephana Bottom, Robert Boynton, Kitty Burke, Janel Anderberg Callon, Scott Callon, Lauren Cerand, Ken Chen, Andrea King Collier, Jay Cosgrove, Elizabeth Cuthrell, Junot Díaz, Charles Duffy, David L. Eng, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Roxanne Fraser, Elizabeth Gillies, Rosita Grandison, Lois Perelson Gross, Susan Guerrero, Greg and Stephanie Guyett, Shinhee Han, Mary Fish Hardin, the Reverend Matthew Hardin, Robin Marantz Henig, Deva Hirsch, David Henry Hwang, Mihoko Iida, Matthew Jacobson, Masa and Michan Kabayama, Henry Kellerman, Robin F. Kelly, Clara Kim, Leslie Kim, Erika Kingetsu, Alex and Reiko Kinmont, Jean Hanff Korelitz, Kate Krader, Lauren Kunkler Tang, the Reverend Kate Latimer, Wendy Lamb, Hali Lee, Connie Mazella, Christopher W. Mansfield, Kathy Matsui, Jesper Koll, Nancy Miller, Geraldine Moriba Meadows, Tony and Suzanne O’Connor, Bob Ouimette, Asha Pai-Sethi, Kyoungsoo Paik, Jeff Pine, Cliff and Jennifer Park, Sunny Park, Tim Piper, Sally Gifford Piper, Sharon Pomerantz, Gwen Robinson, Catherine Salisbury, Jeannette Watson Sanger, Linda Roberts Singh, Tai C. Terry, Henry Tricks, Erica Wagner, Abigail Walch, Nahoko Wada, Lindsay Whipp, Kamy Wicoff, Neil and Donna Wilcox, and Hanya Yanagihara.
My early readers Dionne Bennett, Benedict Cosgrove, Elizabeth Cuthrell, Junot Díaz, Christopher Duffy, Tom Jenks, Myung J. Lee, Sang J. Lee, and Erica Wagner gave me their invaluable time, keen insights, and the necessary courage to persevere. Thank you.
In 2006, I met my agent Suzanne Gluck, and I remain deeply grateful for her friendship, wisdom, and goodness. I want to thank Elizabeth Sheinkman, Cathryn Summerhayes, Raffaella De Angelis, and Alicia Gordon for their brilliant work and generous faith. I am thankful to Clio Seraphim for her thoughtful support.
Here I declare my profound gratitude to my amazing editor Deb Futter, whose clear-eyed vision, superb intelligence, and exceptional care shaped this book. Thank you, Deb. My brilliant publisher Jamie Raab has supported my writing from the very beginning, and I am thankful to call Jamie my friend. I want to acknowledge the very talented people at Grand Central Publishing and the Hachette Book Group: Matthew Ballast, Andrew Duncan, Jimmy Franco, Elizabeth Kulhanek, Brian McLendon, Mari Okuda, Michael Pietsch, Jordan Rubinstein, Karen Torres, and Anne Twomey. I am very grateful to Chris Murphy, Dave Epstein, Judy DeBerry, Roger Saginario, Lauren Roy, Tom McIntyre, and the excellent salespeople of HBG. Also, many thanks to my fantastic copy editor Rick Ball. As ever, many thanks to the wonderful Andy Dodds, whose passion and excellence inspire me. I thank the exquisite Lauren Cerand.
Here, I want very much to thank these tremendous individuals at my UK publishing house for their faith and support: Neil Belton, Made
leine O’Shea, and Suzanna Sangster. Thank you.
Mom, Dad, Myung, and Sang: thank you for your love. Christopher and Sam: You fill my life with wonder and grace. Thank you for being my family.
MJL
About the Author
Min Jin Lee is the national bestselling author of Free Food for Millionaires, and has received the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. She has written for the New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, the London Times, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, and Food & Wine, among others. For more information, please visit MinJinLee.com.
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Reading Group Guide
“History has failed us, but no matter.” How does the opening line reflect the rest of the book—and do you agree?
In a way, Sunja’s relationship with Isak progresses in reverse, as her pregnancy by another man brings them together and prompts Isak to propose marriage. How does Lee redefine intimacy and love with these two characters?
“Their eldest brother, Samoel, had been the brave one, the one who would’ve confronted the officers with audacity and grace, but Yoseb knew he was no hero.…Yoseb didn’t see the point of anyone dying for his country or for some greater ideal. He understood survival and family.” What kinds of bravery are shown by different characters, and what motivates this bravery?
Compare Noa’s biological and adoptive fathers, Hansu and Isak: What qualities does each try to foster in Noa, and why? Whom does Noa most resemble?
What does “home” mean to each of the main characters? Does it ever change? In what ways does a yearning for home color the tone of the novel?
How do courting and marriage alter from one generation to the next?
Compare the ways in which the women of this novel—from Sunja to Hana—experience sex.
How much agency and power do you think Sunja really has over her life?
Sunja tells Noa that“Blood doesn’t matter.” Do you agree? What parts of the novel support or weaken Sunja’s claim?
Yangjin and Kyunghee agree that “A woman’s lot is to suffer.” Do you think the women suffer more than the men in this book? If so, in what ways? How does the suffering of Sunja and Kyunghee compare to that of Yoseb? Noa and Mozasu’s?
Much is made of Sunja’s fading beauty, as well as the physical appearance of all the women who surround her. What does this reveal about society at this time? Do you see this emphasis on female beauty reflected in present-day culture?
Throughout the book, characters often must choose between survival and tradition or morality. Can you think of any examples that embody this tension?
Many of the main characters struggle with shame throughout their lives, whether due to their ethnicity, family, life choices, or other factors. How does shame drive both their successes and failures?
The terms “good Korean” and “good Japanese” are used many times throughout the book. What does it mean to be a “good Korean”? A “good Japanese”?
“Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness.” Pachinko begins with the family of a humble fisherman that, through the generations—and through times of poverty, violence, and extreme discrimination—gains wealth and success. What were the ways in which the family managed to not only survive, but also eventually thrive? What is the relationship among money, race, power, and class?
“Wherever he went, the news of his mother’s death preceded him, wrapping the child in a kind of protective cloud; teachers and mothers of his friends were watchful on his behalf.” In what other ways does death act as a “protective cloud” in this novel?
Compare the many parent-child relationships in the novel. How do they differ across families and generations? What hopes and dreams does each parent hold for their children—and are these hopes rewarded?
Even in death or physical absence, the presence of many characters lingers on throughout the book. How does this affect your reading experience? How would the book have been different if it were confined to one character’s perspective?
Why do you think the author chose Pachinko for the title?
A Conversation with Min Jin Lee
What initially inspired you to write this novel? Why did you choose to focus on Korea and Japan during a time of war?
I learned about the Korean-Japanese people nearly thirty years ago when I was in college. I didn’t know anything about this community, which had its origins during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to1945. As a history major and as an immigrant, I was curious about the Korean diaspora, resulting from the invasions and destabilization of the once-unified nation. However, what really moved me to write this novel and to rewrite it so many times were the compelling stories of individuals who struggled to face historical catastrophes. Although the history of kings and rulers is unequivocally fascinating, I think that we are also hungry for the narrative history of ordinary people, who lack connections and material resources. The modern Korean is informed by the legacy of the Japanese occupation, World War II, the Cold War, and the Korean War as well as Confucianism, Buddhism, Communism, and Christianity. All these topics are reflected in this book, because they interest me, but I wanted to explore and better understand how common people live through these events and issues. These wars and ideas loom large in our imagination, but on a daily basis, such events and beliefs are illustrated concretely from moment to moment.
What was the process of writing such a long family saga like? Did you begin with that intention and a map of how the characters’ lives would play out, or did you work it out as you wrote?
I wrote a draft of this novel between the years 1996 and 2004, and it was called Motherland; an eponymous excerpt of it was published in The Missouri Review in 2002. But after I wrote the whole manuscript, I knew there was something wrong with it as a novel draft. Consequently, Motherland became the second novel manuscript I put aside, because it didn’t match the vision I had of the work in my mind. I was also working on Free Food for Millionaires, and although it was my third novel manuscript, Free Food for Millionaires became my first published novel in 2007. That same year, I moved to Japan with my family. In Tokyo and Osaka, I interviewed many Korean-Japanese. Through that process of gathering oral histories, I felt compelled to discard my earlier draft. In terms of plot, in my initial draft, I had started the book in the late 1970s; after my interviews, I realized that the story had to begin in 1910, and my character Sunja moves from Korea to Japan in 1933. To put it mildly, this was a traumatic realization, because I had to change everything and start again. I wrote a new outline with new characters, and Motherland became Pachinko. After I got over my initial shock of having to throw away a whole manuscript, I returned to my desk and wrote new chapter outlines. In short, I do work with outlines and maps, but I am in the habit of throwing away my outlines and maps when necessary. I don’t work very efficiently.
Why did you choose for the narrator’s perspective to switch from character to character, rather than focusing on one person’s experience?
Both Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko are written in an omniscient point of view. In both works, there is a narrator who knows the viewpoints of each character at all times. In Western literature, omniscient narration was the popular style in the nineteenth century, and it is my favorite point of view for community narratives. In both novels, I wasn’t interested in only one or two main characters. This bias may arise from my personality. I am normally interested in the minor characters as well as the major ones. In realistic fiction and especially in a book-length work, characters cannot exist alone, and certainly they are never in a vacuum. Naturally, the interplay of characters in setting and time affects
both plot and characterization. There are major plot lines, but minor plot lines should offer critical support to the story. If history so often fails to represent all of us, it is not because historians are not interested, but because historians often lack the primary documents of so-called minor characters in history. Interestingly, women have become at best the minor characters in history—although we represent half the human race—because we have left so few primary documents in nearly all cultures and civilizations. Also, poor and middle-class men of all races and cultures—although their lives were so often tragically sacrificed in war and labor—are often minor characters in history, because they too did not leave sufficient written evidence of their lives. I am drawn to novel writing using the omniscient point of view because this allows me to imagine and reveal the minds as well as the behaviors of all characters when necessary. For the kinds of books I want to write, I need an omniscient narrator. That said, I love to read first-person (singular and plural), second-person (singular and plural), and third-person limited (fixed or shifting) points of view. The twenty-first-century author has a lot of choices.
Did you consciously shift the narrative tone as you switched perspectives?
I think my narrator’s tone (by “tone,” I mean the attitude the narrator has toward the subject) does not shift much. More than anything, I wanted very much for the tone to be fair. There are remarkable narrators in great works of fiction that are wry (Pride and Prejudice), sarcastic and unreliable (Lolita), opinionated and high-minded (Jane Eyre), humble and curious (David Copperfield), and intellectual and world-weary (Middlemarch). “Fair” seems like such a simple word, but I think because my subject matter is so troubling and controversial, I wanted my narrator to be as objective as possible. Above all, I wanted the narrator to be sympathetic to every character’s plight. I will be forty-eight years old in November 2016, and as I get older, it is easier for me to imagine and appreciate many more perspectives—perspectives I may have disliked when I was much younger. Especially for this book, I wanted my narrator to be fair to each perspective because the Korean-Japanese are so seldom written about in English. I find that in life, even the most unsympathetic person has a clear delineation of his motives, however complex and unappealing, but to him, there is a moral clarity to his actions. I think part of my job as a storyteller is to recognize the congruity or incongruity of his motives and behavior and somehow still be fair to the character and to the reader. I think, especially here, if the narrator is fair, then the reader can decide what happened and what she feels about the story.
