Pachinko

“People are rotten everywhere you go. They’re no good. You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.” 

Hansu refuses to fall into the binary thinking of some Koreans, especially since the Japanese annexation of Korea, claiming that all Japanese are bad and all Koreans are good. He believes that good people can be corrupted once they have access to money and power, believing that money corrupts. Of course, Hansu is richer than most in the community, so he is both indicting himself as bad since his fortunes have far exceeded his poor beginnings. But it also can be seen as a rationalizing of his actions since he suggests that the way he acts is no worse than anyone else would be. However, Mozasu will later serve as a counterpoint to Hansu’s argument. Though he becomes incredibly successful, but he remains kind and generous. 

“I want only enough for the bride and groom’s dinner—for them to taste white rice again before they leave home.”

Before her daughter leaves for Japan, Yangjin wants to give her a parting gift. Yangjin is upset over the abrupt nature of the wedding, which was preceded by the pastor’s harsh interrogation of her daughter’s sinfulness and she wants to mitigate his sharp words and bring a bit of sweetness and kindness to her daughter’s life, especially since she doesn’t know when she will see her daughter again.

“From appearances alone, he could approach any Japanese and receive a polite smile, but he’d lose the welcome as soon as he said anything. He was a Korean, after all, and no matter how appealing his personality, unfortunately he belonged to a cunning and wily tribe. There were many Japanese who were fair-minded and principled, but around foreigners they tended to be guarded.”

When Sunja and Isak move to Japan, it is the book’s first depiction of the discrimination Koreans face living in Japan. Yoseb, Isak’s brother, looks Japanese. Throughout the book, references are made about the similarities in Korean and Japanese physical appearances, making it difficult to tell the differences between the two, thus emphasizing the artificiality of racial distinctions. But Yoseb’s Korean accent gives him away as Other, and hearing such marked language makes many Japanese see him as a stereotype, the crude dangerous Korean. 

“Yoseb sounded hopeful—yes, life in Osaka would be difficult, but things would change for the better. They’d make a tasty broth from stones and bitterness. The Japanese could think what they wanted about them, but none of it would matter if they survived and succeeded.

Despite the discrimination that the Koreans suffer in Japan, Yoseb does not want to see himself and his family as victims. They are strengthened by their feeling of togetherness; soon, they will be a household of five, once the baby is born. They are happy to have each other and ready to turn any hardship to success. Yoseb cannot anticipate the troubles and tragedies that will befall their family, difficulties that will later turn him to “stone and bitterness.”

“Isak knew how to talk with people, to ask questions, and to hear the concerns in a person’s voice; she seemed to understand how to survive, and this was something he did not always know how to do. He needed her; a man needed a wife.” 

Sunja needs Isak, yet Isak sees that he too needs her. There are two types of characters in this novel: the idealistic and the practical. Sunja is practical, learning from her parents how to survive. Isak is much less practical and more idealistic; he knows that compassion is needed to make life bearable. Six years later, before he dies, Isak’s goodness and compassion overwhelm Sunja. She is grateful that he never judged her and instead tried to understand her.

“The world judges girls harshly for improprieties—and even accidents. It’s wrong but, but it is the way this sinful world works.” 

Pastor Yoo tries to defuse the tension between the siblings by empathizing with the sister’s desire to support her family by accepting the gifts of her Japanese boss. But the pastor also warns her of the dangers that she is vulnerable to if she continues on that path. Women are judged more harshly than men for their sexuality and lack of “purity,” paralleling Sunja’s situation, where her pregnancy put her at risk of ostracism from her community. Her pregnancy threatened to doom her as a social outcast until Isak offered to marry her. When the siblings leave, the pastor becomes blunt and coldly practical. He says the sister must leave her job immediately or become pregnant by the boss, who then “will throw her away” (118). 

“Hoonie had witnessed his neighbors lose everything after borrowing a small amount of money to buy seedlings or equipment; when the moneylenders were through with them, his neighbors would end up giving them all their crops on top of their initial loans. Sunja’s father had loathed moneylenders and had warned her often about the dangers of debt.” 

Sunja’s practicality about loans was learned from her father Hoonie, who learned such practicality from his own parents. Unfortunately, Yoseb, rather than appreciate her sacrifice and her cunning, instead condemns her for not being ladylike and more concerned with traditional gender roles, rather than financial survival. 

“Printed columns of words about the war floated in front of his eyes—Japan would save China by bringing technological advancements to a rural economy; Japan would end poverty in Asia and make it prosper; Japan would protect Asia from the pernicious hands of Western imperialism; and only Germany, Japan’s true and fearless ally, was fighting the evils of the West. Yoseb didn’t believe any of it, but propaganda was inescapable. Each day, Yoseb read three or four papers to glean some truth from the gaps and overlaps.” 

Yoseb recognizes the propaganda flooding the Japanese newspapers during the 1930s—manipulative words meant to galvanize the public at the start of World War II. And yet the newspapers represent his only access to the political power structure in Japan. He must read critically, looking for contradictions and gaps in order to figure out the truth. Of course, the end of the war will prove just how wrong the newspapers were.

“For Sunja, Isak’s arrest had forced her to consider what would happen if the unthinkable occurred. Would Yoseb ask her and her children to leave? Where would she go, and how would she get there? How would she take care of her children? Kyunghee would not ask her to leave, but even so—she was only a wife. Sunja had to have a plan and money in case she had to return home to her mother with her sons. So Sunja had to find work. She would become a peddler.”

Before Sunja left Korea, her mother gave her advice to always have money for emergencies and that she must always be thrifty because having kids requires a lot of unexpected expenses. When Sunja’s husband is arrested, she has no time to mourn their situation. She immediately prepares for the unknown future. She cannot rely on others and instead must ensure her family’s survival. So, she goes into the market, yelling “delicious Kimchi,” enduring insults and stares, and refusing to come home until she has sold all the kimchi in her jar.

“Sunja wrung out the hand towel she was using to bathe Isak above the brass basin. Fresh welts from recent beatings and a number of older scars covered his wide, bony back. She felt sick as she washed his dark and bruised frame. There was no one as good as Isak. He’d tried to understand her, to respect her feelings; he’d never once brought up her shame.” 

Isak, with his bruised and beaten body, can be seen as a Christ figure, and Sunja’s gentle bathing of him recalls a pieta sculpture of Mary holding the beaten and lifeless body of Christ after he has suffered and died on the cross. As Sunja cleans Isak’s body, she can only think of Isak’s goodness and how he never shamed her, despite the unusual circumstances of their marriage. 

“Mozasu knew he was becoming one of the bad Koreans. […] Noa said that Koreans had to raise themselves up by working harder and being better. Mozasu just wanted to hit everyone who said mean things.” 

Mozasu grows up believing that there are two kinds of Koreans: good and bad. Such binary thinking makes him think that he can never be good. Noa is a “good Korean,” and attempting to follow in Noa’s successful footsteps is too difficult to consider. So Mozasu contents himself with believing that he must be “bad.” In the end, this type of binary thinking destroys Noa because he cannot maintain his good Korean pedestal once he finds out Hansu, a yakuza (gangster), is his birth father, thus losing his connection to the good Isak. Meanwhile, Mozasu is able to surmount such thinking. Despite being in the “bad” pachinko business, he is honest and generous, always making sure to take care of his workers and family. He survives, and Noa does not.

“Maybe the Jews have a right to have their own state, but I see no need for Mirah and Daniel to have to leave England. I think this nobility argument or a greater nation for a persecuted people is a pretext to eject all the unwanted foreigners.” 

Noa is at Waseda University in Tokyo, enjoying the opportunity to study literature and read books all the time. Akiko, the speaker here, shows Noa that he doesn’t have to revere the great authors he reads but can instead stand up to them and criticize their ideas. He is riveted to hear the beautiful Akiko’s interpretation of George Eliot’s book, Daniel Deronda, and to hear the compelling connection to the situation of Koreans living in Japan.

“She knew Koreans who had returned to North Korea and many more who had gone back to the South, yet she could not muster any affection for either nation. To her, being Korean was just another horrible encumbrance, much like being poor or having a shameful family you could not cast off. Why would she ever live there? But she could not imagine clinging to Japan, which was like a beloved stepmother who refused to love you, so Yumi dreamed of Los Angeles.”

Yumi has suffered much. Her parents are alcoholics, her mother working as a prostitute and her father a pimp. She desires to escape that lifestyle, bringing her younger sister with her. Her Korean identity is tied to the shame she has for her family. But she does not embrace Japan, which refuses to embrace her, so her goal is to move to the United States, where she does not have to feel trapped by her past. 

“Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn’t himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated.”

Akiko scorns her parents for their racist attitudes toward Koreans, but Noa realizes that Akiko is just like her parents, despite her “I think it’s great you are Korean” attitude (307). In fact, it’s her focus on Noa’s difference that makes him realize he can never be with her. She will always see his Korean identity first. She will always see him as other, as foreign, when all Noa wants is to be seen as himself. 

“All my life, I have had Japanese telling me that my blood is Korean—that Koreans are angry, violent, cunning, and deceitful criminals. 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. It would have been better if I were never born. How could you have ruined my life? How could you be so imprudent? A foolish mother and a criminal father. I am cursed.”

When Noa discovers that Hansu, the head of one of the largest yakuza (or gangster) organizations in Japan, is his birth father, he is devastated. Noa has always tried to be a “good Korean,” despite the Japanese racist beliefs that all Koreans are “bad Koreans.” But once he finds out his connection to Hansu, it’s unbearable to him. He must break all connections to his family and reinvent himself as Japanese in order to become “good” again. Interestingly, he chooses to work in the pachinko gambling business, a “bad” business that he always looked down on for its reputation. 

“A curse is a terrible, terrible thing. And a curse with a moral power is the worst! Tada Kasuke was unfairly persecuted when he was just trying to save all the good people of Nagano from the exploitation of those who lived in this castle! At his death, Tada Kasuke uttered a curse against the greedy Mizuno clan!” 

This minor incident shows Noa’s charming young son as he wants to learn about castles and curses. But it also hints at a darker theme running through the novel. There are many figurative curses put on characters. Noa is cursed by his connection to his shameful birth father. Noa’s wife, Risa, suffered a curse when her father committed suicide and brought shame on the family. Etsuko’s children suffer a curse when she commits adultery and brings shame on the family. And, as Noa tells his son, it’s very hard to reverse a curse.

“If you kill yourself, our high school next year will have one less filthy Korean.”

The middle school student who kills himself, Tetsuo, is mentioned in only one chapter of the book. Haruki must complete the paperwork that a retiring detective had started, so he must visit Tetsuo’s family. After the visit, Haruki is haunted by the boy’s death. In a way, the whole book is haunted by this story. Many characters are able to rise above the vicious anti-Korean attitude, but many others, like the middle-school student, succumb and are destroyed by it.

“Noa did not drink alcohol […] [and] lived like a middle-class Japanese family in a modest house.” 

Hansu has discovered Noa in the midst of his supposedly normal Japanese life. Noa has always wanted to be seen as human, not Korean. He does not want to be judged according to his racial identity. And yet, he has chosen one by pretending to be Japanese. He associates “human” with Japanese, having lived all his life hearing that Koreans were sub-human. This hatred of his own culture leads to a self-hatred. When Sunja comes to visit him, potentially exposing his lie, he cannot live without the normalcy and passing for Japanese that he has worked so hard for. Rather than reconciling with his mother and family and telling his wife and children the truth, he chooses to kill himself. 

“She had no right to expect her children to hold the aspirations of other middle-class people—to graduate from Tokyo University, to get a desk job at the Industrial Bank of Japan, to marry into a nice family. She had made them into village outcasts, and there was no way for them to be acceptable anymore.” (Book 3, Chapter 9, Page 393)

Etsuko blames herself for her children’s inability to succeed. Her adultery and divorce has brought shame on her family, making them unacceptable.

“It is hopeless. I cannot change his fate. He is Korean. He has to get those papers, and he has to follow all the steps of the law perfectly. Once, at a ward office, a clerk told me that I was a guest in his country. […] Anyway, the clerk was not wrong. And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.” 

Here, Mozasu captures the situation of Koreans in Japan. They cannot change the way they are treated by the Japanese. Their fates are determined by the whims of the local ward; if the government officials choose to deport Solomon, they can deport him, even though he was born in Japan and lived there all of his life. But rather than see themselves as victims, Mozasu wants his son to survive, and to do so, he must adapt, just as Mozasu has done all of his life. 

“Sunja had made a mistake; however, she didn’t believe that her son came from a bad seed. The Japanese said that Koreans had too much anger and heat in their blood. Seeds, blood. How could you fight such hopeless ideas? Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe in such cruel ideas.”

All her life, Sunja has heard the deterministic language of “bad seed” or “bad blood.” Her mother, in her dying words, has blamed Noa’s death on the bad seed of his birth father, Hansu. But Sunja is tired of such language. She knows that relying on such cultural stereotypes makes change impossible. Noa believes that he can get people to see the good in him, despite his Korean blood, putting the burden of conformity on himself. He works harder than others to prove himself “good” and Sunja realizes that maybe she should have taught her son more about the reality of their world, a world in which “good” and “bad” are intertwined.

“Sometimes, when I was pretending to be asleep, I’d catch him praying for me in that chair. I don’t believe in God, but I guess that doesn’t matter. I never had someone pray for me before, Solomon. […] I don’t understand the Jesus stuff, but it’s something holy to have people touch you when you’re sick. The nurses here are afraid to touch me. Your grandmother Sunja holds my hands, and your great-aunt Kyunghee puts cool towels on my head when I get too hot. They’re kind to me, though I’m a bad person—” 

Hana is dying of AIDS. The doctors don’t want her there and the nurses are afraid to touch her. But it is Solomon’s family, his father, his grandmother, and his great aunt who bring her comfort and compassion in her final days. There is no judgment for the life she has led but instead the comforting touch of their hands and the prayers they say for her.

“Then the whole Japan-is-evil stuff. Sure, there were assholes in Japan, but there were assholes everywhere, nee? […] Kazu was a shit, but so what? He was one bad guy, and he was Japanese. Perhaps that was what going to school in America had taught him. Even if there were a hundred bad Japanese, if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement. Etsuko was like a mother to him; his first love was Hana; and Totoyama was like an uncle, too. They were Japanese, and they were very good.”

Solomon represents the last generation in this book, and he is yet another example of how this remarkable family has been able to survive generation after generation, despite the hardships and tragedies that have haunted them both in Korea and in Japan. Their survival has been a testament to this family’s ability to adapt to the changing circumstances of their environment. Part of this adaptive ability is their knowledge that lives are complex. People are not just good or bad. Phoebe judges all Japanese as bad, but Solomon’s experiences show that life is not so simple. He has found love and compassion from Koreans and Japanese, from friends and family, and he will not allow his experiences of discrimination to destroy him.