Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Why Pachinko is a Must Read Book : the game of life

AUTHOR: Lee Min Jin | GENRE: novel, family, historical | PUBLICATION: 2017 | OVERALL RATING: 5★/5

I had this book in my "to-read list" for so long, but never had the chance to either buy it or borrow it from anywhere. Somehow I kept avoiding this huge book because I didn't know what to expect. But last month I saw it at the library and didn't think twice about getting it and reading it. I didn't imagine how deeply it would have marked my soul. I am not even kidding if I say that the exact second I finished the book I wrote on my personal journal my thoughts and started with "I think I just read the best masterpiece ever in my life". 

Min Jin Lee follows the story of four generations of a Korean family as they migrate to Japan during the 20th century, beginning with the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1910. The story tells the hardships and challenges that Sunja has to face when she chooses to move to a foreign and hostile country to secure her family's future. The book develops through the lives of her children and grandchildren showing a family who desperately tries to find its place in a society that treats them as permanent outsiders. 

I literally ate the whole book in less than a couple of weeks, and not because it was a race but because I felt so into it and so deeply stuck in the story that I just wanted to know what the end would have been. 

I have to admit, no spoilers of course, that it left me with a bittersweet taste, not because of the ending but because of the realizations and the thoughts you carry out of the story. The immediate feeling I had in my chest was the emptiness and a burden at the same time, and it felt weird because you can't have both. But somehow this book gave me this strange feeling that if I think about it or read my words one more time, I can feel it again. 

I think that the book is the exact reflection of how a human being lives in a society. And you might say, of course human beings live in a society... and this is surely true, besides the fact that we never live completely happy in a society. There is always a rotten side of this society that challenges our lives and our well-being, right? And this is not someone's fault, it is just the way we've always been and how we've always lived. So it is kinda normal to us, right? 

I felt this book as the mirror of "human nature", and I am not going to say that it shows "how the world works" but mostly that it shows how we make the world like this, so it feels like the  concept about human nature fits perfectly in this. 

The thing is that, the book gives the perfect insight into the concept. This is for sure just my humble personal opinion, but I feel like there are two main core themes driving the whole narrative which are the social alienation and how poverty breeds exploitation and opportunism among human being. 

The book highlights how life for Koreans is deeply and extremely hard in a country where they are not welcomed and where they can't feel accepted even when trying. They don't belong anywhere because they were forced to leave their home country during the occupation but they didn't feel at home in Japan either. For me, the perfect character who  perfectly embodies this topic is Sunja, a young woman who sees her life taken away and turned upside-down by circumstances that she didn't choose for herself. She never belongs to where she lives. 

The second theme I mentioned is slightly connected to another topic I feel like is very well presented in the book: the action driven by desperation. The story highlights the society during that historical period, talking about the Yakuza and the gambling with the Pachinko game. Even the most genuine and pure human being can be driven away from the right path if the necessity shows up. And this is a normal side of the human nature. Poverty, discrimination, hardships really challenge the human beings and lead them to where they never belonged but were forced to be. Even the beloved ones sometimes are ready to turn their backs for their own well-being and this is more common than we think. 

Needless to mention again that Sunja was my favorite character in the book, and not only because she was the main character for a lot more than half of it, but because I empathized with her determination and her desire of achieving a better life from the very beginning. She never gave up, she never fought against something she couldn't get, but she still did her best until the very end. 

I hope that by saying so I am not giving spoilers because this book, besides the synopsis I gave you above, deserves to be read blindly without expectations, but I really want to express one more thought I had after finishing it all. 

I thought and rethought about the main reason why the author titled this book Pachinko, but just after finishing it I got the answer. Someone might not know this game, so I will give a very quick explanation: it is very popular Japanese gambling game that resembles a vertical pinball machine. Players launch hundreds of tiny steel balls into a maze of pins, hoping they land in winning slots to score more balls, which can then be secretly exchanged for cash. The main trick? You can't win the game, because as it happens many times, most of the gambling game rooms are also rigged. This might be the metaphor of the whole book, which is also the metaphor for life: they all try hard but there is no way you can win at the end, because the rules are stacked against them no matter what. All the characters wants something and they chase them with all their might, who wants success, who wants dignity, who wants a place to belong, or a way to redeem themselves... they always payed the highest price even just for existing. 

The funny side is that there are two ways, from my perspective, to read this book: finishing it all as if it is an historical family novel, or reading it knowing that everything that is said is mirroring something about that specific society but also about the world we all live in. The writer gave me goosebumps because nothing was explicit, nothing was said right away. You can catch things through people's eyes, through meanings and behaviors that characters, even shown once in the whole book, can express and highlight. It is not a book of social commentary presented in the most open and explicit way possible. Because after all, it's still a family novel. 

I felt completely captivated by the story and how the writer powerfully spoke about so many different topics, but with the softest touch ever. It is not hard to read, to follow or to understand, I feel like it is the best book to read when you want something that gives you a very deep insight of some themes that we unfortunately experience everyday. Because, besides the fact that it is set in almost a hundreds of years ago, it is still so contemporary. In fact, it addresses very well timeless issues that we still see in modern society. 

Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes - there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hoped that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to ve in the game? 

Thank you for reading this far. I'd like to know if you read this book already or if the review caught your attention.

See you next time :)

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