Pachinko in Reading with Style

Oct 23, 2017 Maia rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: 2017

Starts with beautiful writing of people and paces, but once they get to Osaka it jumps years with each chapter and gets rushed, sketchy and dull. Each chapter is an Important Pivotal Life-Changing Event! which yet just feels like a normal moment. A lot of Deus-Ex-Machina plot intervention, which is set up early on and paid out logically, but leaves the book not being 'one ordinary immigrant family's story' but 'the magical benefits of having a rich sponsor help you get through life who also has Starts with beautiful writing of people and paces, but once they get to Osaka it jumps years with each chapter and gets rushed, sketchy and dull. Each chapter is an Important Pivotal Life-Changing Event! which yet just feels like a normal moment. A lot of Deus-Ex-Machina plot intervention, which is set up early on and paid out logically, but leaves the book not being 'one ordinary immigrant family's story' but 'the magical benefits of having a rich sponsor help you get through life who also has inside political knowledge'. I think that disappears about where i am (four-fifths of the way through) but it makes the plot trite. The plot, which if you read women's love-lit is called 'rags to riches', is itself trite - so 'every night his mother ironed his shirt so he looked nothing like the other immigrant children in rags' etc, it's the 'good exceptional hardworking immigrant' story. Nobody ever complains, they all work twenty hours a day without getting back problems or effects from chronic lack of sleep, blah blah - very little internal vision, justified by 'she rarely talked to her mother' ie i'm not going to show you what she's thinking or feeling.

If i was counselling myself, i'd say: get it from the library, read to the chapter where Isak meets the Pastor and Hu, which is also good, then stop, after that the payoff is too low. It's not a terrible book, but it's not a very good one, and the promise of the start, where everything is felt and explained and related, is dropped. It's as if the author was working, not to a plot but a word count, and suddenly realised they only had 200 pages for 80 years and better do four pages a decade from now on. It really is that sketchy. I'm just miffed, because it started off so good. The author needed to finish writing it properly. Or just stop earlier?

There are no women in the novel, the state of whose breasts we aren't informed of, though to be fair, it's always complimentary, never misogynistic, and there's a certain whore/mother divide going on, with mothers being longsuffering and uncomplaining.

Looking back from the end, i liked the start because it was a simple, pretty tale of simple, pretty people and when it got more complicated and urban i went off it. I stand by the sketchiness and the bad writing, and add that characterisation never gets very real, but it changes as it goes: the pivotal life events are followed by terrible things that happen to you because you're Korean. There is some pretty writing and some insight. It wasn't bad, just disappointing. Also, what did happen to Ayume(?) after she found out her husband was gay? She just disappeared in the book ...more

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Jan 22, 2018 Megan added it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, radiating-affinities, noteworthy-reads-2018, historical-fiction

Oh, omniscient narration, please don't ever die out!

This is a family saga above all, and I don't think it's the book to convert readers who don't already like the long sprawl and sometimes maddening focus of family sagas, but I enjoyed it a lot. It focuses on ethnic Koreans in Japan during the 20th century, and one of the book's strengths, I thought, was its diversity in characters and a whole range of ways that ordinary people managed to live through (or in some cases, not make it through) hist ...more

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Jan 10, 2019 Rosemary rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I loved this historical saga about ethnic Koreans in Japan. From visiting Korea I knew something about the Japanese invasions and colonisation there, but I never thought much about what life would have been like for Korean people who migrated to Japan. So this was fascinating for me.

Sunja is seduced by a rich man who visits her village on an island off the south coast of Korea in the 1930s. Pregnant and discovering that he is married, she refuses his offer to be his kept mistress and instead mar ...more

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