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Most people told you their thoughts in words and later confirmed them in actions.
“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.”
You saw all sorts of things in a church where forgiveness was expected.
“But a God that did everything we thought was right and good wouldn’t be the creator of the universe. He would be our puppet. He wouldn’t be God. There’s more to everything than we can know.”
“The Lord continues to be committed to us even when we sin. He continues to love us. In some ways, the nature of his love for us resembles an enduring marriage, or how a father or mother may love a misbegotten child. Hosea was being called to be like God when he had to love a person who would have been difficult to love. We are difficult to love when we sin; a sin is always a transgression against the Lord.”
“Yes, of course. If you love anyone, you cannot help but share his suffering. If we love our Lord, not just admire him or fear him or want things from him, we must recognize his feelings; he must be in anguish over our sins. We must understand this anguish. The Lord suffers with us. He suffers like us. It is a consolation to know this. To know that we are not in fact alone in our suffering.”
Sins couldn’t be laundered by good results.
Girls think they’ll have the upper hand because these kinds of men seem so pliable, when in fact, the girls are the ones who end up paying bitterly for their mistakes. The Lord forgives, but the world does not forgive.”
Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
The rich do not care about politics; they will say anything to save their skin.
“I’ll take care of myself and my people. You think I’d trust my life to a bunch of politicians? The people in charge don’t know anything. And the ones who do don’t care.”
All these people—both the Japanese and the Koreans—are fucked because they keep thinking about the group. But here’s the truth: There’s no such thing as a benevolent leader. I protect you because you work for me. If you act like a fool and go against my interests, then I can’t protect you. As for these Korean groups, you have to remember that no matter what, the men who are in charge are just men—so they’re not much smarter than pigs. And we eat pigs. You lived with that farmer Tamaguchi who sold sweet potatoes for obscene prices to starving Japanese during a time of war. He violated wartime
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Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism. But ideas can make men forget their own interests. And the guys in charge will exploit men who believe in ideas too much.
“Listen, if people don’t like you, it’s not always your fault.
Fill your mind with knowledge—it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.” Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.
Although, if you like everything you read, I can’t take you that seriously. Perhaps you didn’t think about these books long enough.”
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. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn’t care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn’t care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be, to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn’t possible. It would
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She could not see his humanity, and Noa realized that this was what he wanted most of all: to be seen as human.
a man must learn to forgive—to know what is important, that to live without forgiveness was a kind of death with breathing and movement.
No, he had wanted to tell Tetsuo’s father, how can I prove guilt for a crime that doesn’t exist? I cannot punish and I cannot prevent.
“Is it so terrible to be Korean?” “It is terrible to be me.”
In life, there was so much insult and injury, and she had no choice but to collect what was hers.
“We’re all criminals. Liars, thieves, whores—that’s who we are.” The girl’s carbon-colored eyes looked hard and ancient. “No one is innocent here.”
And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
Somewhere after being sorry, there had to be another day, and even after a conviction, there could be good in the judgment.
Should she have taught her son to suffer the humiliation that she’d drunk like water? In the end, he had refused to suffer the conditions of his birth. Did mothers fail by not telling their sons that suffering would come?
When things get difficult, it’s easy to leave.
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 ideals.
What did Joseph say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery when he saw them again? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”
Yes, some Japanese thought Koreans were scum, but some Koreans were scum, he told Phoebe. Some Japanese were scum, too.
You gotta know this by now, that people here, even the non-Japanese, say the dumbest things about Koreans, but you gotta forget it. When I was in the States, people used to say stupid-ass crap about Asians, like we all spoke Chinese and ate sushi for breakfast. When it came to teaching US history, they’d forget the internment and Hiroshima. Whatever, right?”
“If you do well at anything, you gotta pay up to all the people who did worse. On the other hand, if you do badly, life makes you pay a shit tax, too. Everybody pays something.”
“So then the success tax comes from envy, and the shit tax comes from exploitation.
The tax for being mediocre comes from you and everyone else knowing that you are mediocre.
There’s nothing fucking worse than knowing that you’re just like everybody else. What a messed-up, lousy existence. And in this great country of Japan—the birthplace of all my fancy ancestors—everyone, everyone wants to be like everyone else. That’s why it is such a safe place to live, but it’s also a dinosaur village. It’s extinct, pal. Carve up your piece and invest your spoils elsewhere. You’re a young man, and someone should tell you the real truth about this country. Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in
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Anyway, you can be polite about it, but that’s fucked up. I’m Japanese but I’m not stupid. I lived in America and Europe for a long time; it’s crazy what the Japanese have done to the Koreans and the Chinese who were born here. It’s fucking bonkers; you people should have a revolution. You don’t protest enough.
It’s a filthy world, Solomon. No one is clean. Living makes you dirty.
“Japan will never change. It will never ever integrate gaijin, and my darling, here you will always be a gaijin and never Japanese. Nee? The zainichi can’t leave, nee? But it’s not just you. Japan will never take people like my mother back into society again; it will never take back people like me. And we’re Japanese!
“There are good people in the banks, too.” “And there are good people in pachinko, too.
Her equanimity, which had seemed so important in the States, seemed like aloofness and arrogance in Tokyo.
Sure, there were assholes in Japan, but there were assholes everywhere, nee?
Even if there were a hundred bad Japanese, if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement.
There was more to being something than just blood.
But people will always say things. They will always say terrible things, no matter what. It’s normal for me. I’m nobody.
There was consolation: The people you loved, they were always there with you, she had learned.
