Pachinko

by Min Jin Lee

“No one will rent to the Koreans. As pastor, you’ll get a chance to see how the Koreans live here. You can’t imagine: a dozen in a room that should be for two, men and families sleeping in shifts. Pigs and chickens inside homes. No running water. No heat. The Japanese think Koreans are filthy, but they have no choice but to live in squalor. I’ve seen aristocrats from Seoul reduced to nothing, with no money for bathhouses, wearing rags for clothing, shoeless, and unable to get work as porters in the markets. There’s nowhere for them to go. Even the ones with work and money can’t find a place to live. Some are squatting illegally.”

John moved on to the others, encouraging the reserved students to talk to each other as well as to the class. He wanted the Koreans to speak well; he wanted no one ever to look down on them. He had left his beautifully comfortable life in Princeton, New Jersey, because he felt sorry for the impoverished Koreans in Japan. In his wonderful childhood, filled with the warmth of his loving parents, he had always felt bad for the Koreans who had lost their nation for good. People like Moses and Yumi had never been to Korea. There was always talk of Koreans going back home, but in a way, all of them had lost the home in their minds for good. His parents had adopted him alone, and he had no known siblings. Because John had always felt so happy with his parents, he’d felt guilty that many others hadn’t been chosen the way he was. Why was that? He wanted to know. There were unhappy adoptions, to be sure, but John knew his lot was better than almost anyone’s. “Chosen” was always the word his mother had used with him.

The boy had decided to leave them, and his departure was punishment. Yoseb could understand the boy’s anger, but he wanted another chance to talk to him, to tell Noa that 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.

Koreans born in Japan after 1952 had to report to their local ward office on their fourteenth birthday to request permission to stay in Japan. Every three years, Solomon would have to do this again unless he left Japan for good.

When she told her friends in New York about this curious historical anomaly and the pervasive ethnic bias, they were incredulous at the thought that the friendly, well-mannered Japanese they knew could ever think she was somehow criminal, lazy, filthy, or aggressive—the negative stereotypical traits of Koreans in Japan. “Well, everyone knows that the Koreans don’t get along with the Japanese,” her friends would say innocently, as if all things were equal. Soon, Phoebe stopped talking about it with her friends back home.

In Tokyo, I was researching, interviewing, and writing all the time; I was also profoundly homesick and melancholy in a way I had never been before. I missed my family and my friends deeply, and I felt cut off from everyone back home. I enjoyed living in Tokyo very much, but it was difficult, too. Living in Tokyo, I missed America very much; I yearned for the openness, hospitality, and optimism of Americans. I missed the ease of conversation that Americans can have with strangers. In New York, I am more guarded and private, but in Tokyo, I felt a kind of intense and immediate kinship with my fellow Americans. The epigram for Book III comes from Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, where he writes of a “horizontal comradeship” which must be necessarily imagined in a nation. I felt this horizontal comradeship strongly with Americans when I lived abroad. I had lost my birthplace once when I moved from Seoul to New York as a child, and living as an adult expatriate in Japan reminded me again of what my characters who lost their birthplace experienced in Pachinko.