Pachinko discussion

[Jane]

I'll be traveling tomorrow, so I thought I'd post this link and a few comments today. I loved this novel, and wasn't sure I would. I loved the straightforwardness of the prose. It doesn't get in the way of the story unfolding or the characters becoming who they are. I loved the four generation span of the book as well. In an interview, Lee speaks of the research she did on Korean history, sociology, politics, economics, etc. After months of reading, Lee says she tried to forget everything so that her research would infuse the novel rather than burden the reader. Did she succeed for you, or did you find that you were aware of the writer's research? Here's a link to that interview (there are several interviews she's given since this has become such a popular novel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnd_r... I'll be back on August 16.

[Sherry, Doyenne]

I loved this book, too, Jane. I thought all her research dissolved into the story without my feeling that I was being lectured to. I learned so much, but learned it by being immersed in the culture and in the story. I had no idea that Koreans were treated so badly in Japan, almost the equivalent to Jim Crow in America. I appreciated how she layered the story, almost like sedimentary rock. It took a while to get to why the book was called "Pachinko," but I liked that slow build-up. I liked how the game was a kind of metaphor for life. Change one peg, there's a different outcome. Change one action in a life, and life changes.

[Barbara]

Oh, I like your description of the pachinko metaphor, Sherry. I got that it was a metaphor for the cultural prison for Koreans in Japan. But, I like your detailed interpretation.

I really fell into this story. I normally underline a lot and/or take a few notes especially when I know that we will be discussing the book here. However, I have only one underline early on when the author says this about Hoonie's mother and father: "If it were possible for a man and his wife to share one heart, Hoonie was this steady, beating organ." After that, I was turning pages.

I knew that Japan had warred with and annexed Korea. I also knew about the Japanese soldiers using Korean "comfort women", essentially sex slaves. I'm sure that was why Hansu kept warning Sunja about taking the "easy" jobs that were being offered to the Korean women by the Japanese. Also, that is probably what happened to the two maids that worked in Sunja's house. But, that was the extent of my knowledge.

I did need to keep checking back to the previous chapter to see how much time we had skipped but that was easy to do. I also tried to stretch out the reading because it's a long book and I gave myself too much time, not realizing what a page turner it would be. So, occasionally I forgot who characters were but usually remembered quickly. And, no, I didn't think about the writer's research at all. I was too involved in the characters and story.

[Barbara]

Jane, thank you for that interview with Min Jin Lee. I know there are other interviews with her online but this was really in depth. It's incredible that she first started trying to do this in 1989 when she was 19 and has persevered. She said that her problem initially was that she was angry about an injustice and too much of her writing centered on that and was "boring." Once she met more Korean/Japanese people and found her story, the whole process started to fall into place. This fits for me because the story and the characters were what I loved.

She also talked about these prejudices against Korean people still existing in Japan in 2018. I found that really startling. Of course, who am I to judge when there are so many prejudices in my own country?

[Ruth]

Life and other obligations being what they are, I’m only a little way into this monster. And there’s yet another book I need to finish for my in person group, so don’t expect anything cogent from me for a good while.

[Mary Ellen]

I started this book too late and am just a bit into it - the tubercular minister Isaak is just recovering at the boarding house - but I really am enjoying it.

Barbara, I was very taken by the line about Sunja being the beating heart of her parents' marriage as well. And I was struck by her reaction when she realized that her lover is not the person she thought he was: she is very upset in having let her father down, not both her parents, and not her still-living, constantly working mother. (Of course, he was a great guy and loving father: a real contrast to her lover, whom I nonetheless find an intriguing character!)

[Jane]

I loved Hoonie as well. He begins the book on a mythical note. It seemed to me as though it was going to be fairy-tale like throughout. Thinking back, this is how Sunja sees him in large part because of how the people in her town saw him and continue to talk about him. Her mother too idolizes him. The author is presenting the view the town and his closest family have of him. If you think about it, there are many, many ways in which people act as Pachinko "pegs" changing each other's fates. Think of Sunja and her oldest son. This symbol seems to me a hinge for the book.

[Jane]

Here's the review I wrote when I first read it. I included some passages from the book that struck me. The passage which includes the definition of the game Pachinko seems to explain very clearly the connection between the story and the game:

Pachinko is a wonderful story of four generations of a Korean family who emigrates to Japan before World War II. The lives of family members are affected by love, poverty, war, education, religion, marriage, class and anti-Korean sentiment in Japan during the years up to 1990’s, when the narrative closes…but doesn’t actually “end."

I loved the simplicity of the narration, and the complexity with which the characters came to life for me. Nearly every character is flawed in some way---by passion, greed, the desire to please a parent or spouse, anger, nationalism, or the longing for a home.

It’s an apt book to read now as we read accounts of the detention of immigrants in our own country, each of whom has a unique web of connections and longings, aspirations, suffering, dreams and suffering which are part of the fabric of their individual stories.

Min Jin Lee wrote this story over thirty years and in the “Acknowledgements” pages and during this time , she moved with her husband to Japan where she met many Korean Japanese and realized that she’d gotten the story wrong. “Many of them were historical victims…but none were as simple as that. I was so humbled by the breadth and complexity of the people I met, that I put aside my old draft, begun in 1989, and started to write the book again in 2008, and continued to write and revise it until its publication in 2017.”

I felt that these were characters who’d been lived with…not fabricated. These are suffering, good hearted, conflicted, jealous, heartbroken, vengeful people. Over the span of the book I was captured by their lives and stories as they unfold over the years between 1910 and 1989. The writing seems spare in certain ways, but the sentences are thick with meaning, history and emotion. It caught me gradually, over time as I read. The final effect was and is stunning.

Books and home are important throughout, so the epigraph from Charles Dickens is perfect: Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one: stronger than magician ever spoke or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration." Think of those words as you read this book…or today’s news.

Some quotations from the book...don't read if this kind of thing SPOILS A BOOK for you!!!

Friendship is another important theme. In one scene, Mozasu, who has been teased by bullies at the Japanese school he attends, watches another new child, also Korean, being bullied. Mozasu tells the new boy he will sit with him during recess “so he doesn’t have to watch Haruki try to to talk to these assholes one more time. ‘Truly?’ Haruki said, smiling. Mozasu nodded, and even when they were men, neither one ever forgot how they became best friends.

And here’s the section that helped me understand the title: Mozasu couldn’t imagine being so quiet all the time; he would miss the bustle of the pachinko parlor. He loved all the moving pieces of his large noisy business. His Presbyterian minister father had believed in a divine design, and Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn’t control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope.” 297

Phoebe loved being with Solomon’s family. It was much smaller than her own, but everyone seemed closer, as if each member were organically attached to one seamless body, whereas her enormous extended family felt like cheerfully mismatched Lego bricks in a large bucket. 455

Later when Solomon visits Hana in the hospital:
“I have missed you so much . If I’d never left you that summer…Well, I would have made you marry me. I would have ruined you though—I ruin everything. I ruin everything.

[Larry]

You all have captured everything that I loved about this book. I studied and worked on Japan for about 40 years and what amazed me the most was how incredibly well a Chinese-American captured the experience of Koreans in Japan, with the intentional brutality combined with the mindless discrimination examined in so many ways, while love is examined in its many different dimensions in the story. Are Koreans still treated that way? Yeah, somewhat. The brutality is less, but the mindless discrimination still goes on. It's not as bad as the continuing Japanese discrimination again Burakumin (she mentions them a few times in the book ... just another thing that Min Jin Lee gets right. See the Wiki on Burakumin to understand this Japanese underclass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin ), but it's bad enough. Japanese are strange about whom they will discriminate against. They carry on this discrimination against Burakumin and Koreans for centuries while they recruit women from the Philippines to come and marry rural Japanese farmers and give them citizenship after a few years.

Jane has called the prose "straightforward" and the writing "spare" in her two posts, and I think that those two words are incredibly apt in explaining her style. It's not elegant at all, but I think she wants it to be exactly like it is.

I also like the way she captures the influence of the yakuza while saying very little about this part of Japan. Would a yakuza keep quiet for decades about his "connections." Yep, totally. Would a yakuza beat a girl senseless because she irritated him? Yep, totally.

I visited a pachinko parlor one time in Shinjuku's Kabukicho, the redlight district run mainly by yakuza. An Assistant Secretary of Agriculture visiting Japan wanted to go there, and I went along to keep him out of trouble. The pachinko parlor was a lot safer than a lot of other places to go there, but generally speaking, you can stay out trouble pretty easy in Tokyo if you don't go looking for it. And just because you enter Kabukicho doesn't necessarily mean you are looking for trouble, So one pachinko parlor, one restaurant, and one bar ... and then safely back to our hotel.

(More info on Kabukicho here: http://jpninfo.com/35232 Especially this: "Remember, in Japan, gangs and the mafia are legitimate, and the Yakuza is officially recognised as a real organisation. So make sure you keep yourself in check at all times and avoid making trouble, especially if you are drunk. In fact, the Yakuza and the Japanese police are working hand in hand to ensure security in their areas. In some cases, the police even have to ask the Yakuza for help with cases.")

I've toyed with the idea of reading Min Jin Lee's earlier book,Free Food for Millionaires but it sure doesn't have the great reviews that Pachinko has. Have any of you read that one? I might add that it wasn't the reviews that drew me to Pachinko, however. My wife read it when it first came out and has been urging me to read since then. I should listen to my wife more.

[Jane]

Larry, I love your post. My son taught Middle school in Japan through the Jett program. He became fluent in Japanese. When he entered the Asian studies program at Berkeley, they agreed. He was fluent in "Middle School" English. He is somewhat of an outsider and loved the outsiders in Japan the most. He connected with street kids and several Koreans (also outsiders) that he tutored in English and Japanese. He made good friends--the school gardener was one of his favorite, but he always felt judged by the other teachers. This book caught some of what he told me about his life in Japan, but I agree, it has gotten better. I think this is a book he'd like to read at some point. He's a new dad now. And an older new dad. At 41, he has his first post doc job...after two master degrees and a 6 yr. doc. I kept thinking of him as I read.

[Larry]

Jane, great story about your son. You may be interested in a book that I read about five years ago, about a teacher from the UK teaching middle school in Ono, a town in Fukui Prefecture. It's For Fukui's Sake: Two Years In Rural Japan. I wouldn't say it's great, but I enjoyed it a lot. I do think he focuses a lot more on teachers and less on students than I would have desired. But it does capture to a real degree how different rural Japan is from urban Japan. It's still available for free if you're a Kindle Unlimited member.

[Lyn]

Jane and Larry: I enjoyed and agree with your descriptions.

I became quite engaged with and absorbed in these characters, and was introduced to a form of racism I had not really known before (Japanese against Korean). Because I am a woman, I was also quite sensitive to the sexism ingrained and accepted in society at that time.

I have a silly, nagging question, and it is about the character of Noa, who I particularly liked (he seemed to take after the father who raised him) until he judged his mother harshly and abandoned his family (when he learned of his biological father). Noa gives the reason that he cannot accept money from a gangster when refusing continuing college money from his father..., and yet Noa always knew he was accepting money from a gangster (and did so gratefully until he learned it was his father), so this explanation makes no sense. And even though his mother explains that she didn't know he was married and cut off the affair when she learned he was, he judges her harshly, she who spent her whole life working hard to make things better for him. Then when his mother years later finally finds him, but tells him that she will not reveal that he is not Japanese (he has pretended to be Japanese), he kills himself anyway, abandoning his children, this also making no sense. Noa pretends to have a greater morality, but with his actions really doesn't, it seems to me. Were Noa's actions done to create drama, do you think, or was he just supposed to be a severely messed up person?

[Sherry, Doyenne]

I was shocked and saddened by Noa's suicide, but after the shock wore off, I wasn't surprised. He was so strict with himself, all that studying, all that behaving himself. I think he was planning it all along, that as soon as his father found him he would shoot himself. I think it was a matter of pride, or shame or an odd combination of the two. It reminded me of the ritualized suicide of hari-kari, to preserve honor in times of defeat. I know that is a Japanese thing, and he was Korean, but I think he absorbed a sense of personal responsibility carried to the extreme.

[Larry]

And I was also shocked by Noa's suicide, especially knowing how it would hurt his mother. But people do these these inexplicable things. I had an intern from Nagano, the city where Noa had gone to live. (She was at American University for a year.) We had a lovely evening when her mother and aunt came with her to our house for dinner. Her family had been running a ryokan (a country inn) for about 15 generations. Tomomi, the intern, was the only one who spoke English, but there was still great conversation about food and gardens. And that gets me to the matter of women in Japanese society. Women are incredibly discriminated against within Japanese organizations. The scandal last week of the Tokyo Medical School changing scores to allow more men to enter and disadvantage female applicants is just typical. But a woman could run something like a ryokan probably with few problems. And women almost always control the finances of a household. Throughout Japan, men invariably turn over their paychecks to their wives, and are then given an allowance for them to use as they want to. (I do doubt that this goes on in a yakuza family.) Many of those same men will beat their wives if they are unhappy about things. (Spousal abuse remains a huge problem in Japan. Official statistics for 2015 show that 25 percent of men still abuse their wives. And those are the official statistics.) Beyond strange.

Sherry, yep. Noa and Mozasu became thoroughly Japanese in their own respective ways.

[Mary Anne]

I mostly loved this book, but Noa's suicide was the one aspect that I disliked. Admittedly, I do not like it when a main character of a book commits suicide: it seems like a certain cruelty to the reader, or gratuitous shock factor, has been employed. Of course, intellectually, I know that suicide is like that for the survivors, but when it happens in a book I'm reading, I find I must walk away from the book for a few days to let my anger at the author pass.

How realistic is it that Noa would have access to a gun? It seems like a very American way of committing suicide.

Beyond Noa's suicide being hard on the reader, I felt the total cruelty of the act on his mother and extended family, who raised him with nothing but love and tenderness. He was not able to muster even a small amount of forgiveness for his mother, his shame was that extreme.

Nevertheless, I did give this book 4****. I will hear Min Jin Lee speak in the Spring.

[Larry]

Mary Anne wrote: "How realistic is it that Noa would have access to a gun? It seems like a very American way of committing suicide. ..."

Pretty unrealistic. No civilians can legally own handguns, and it's very hard to acquire illegal ones. Rifles have gotten harder to own since 1971. Only shotguns are really allowed and they require training and annual visits from the local police. In one recent year, the number of homicides by a firearm was only two for all of Japan. Even yakuza generally don't own or use guns. A few decades ago, there were a few wars of one yakuza gang against another using guns and the crackdown on them was so hard that the yakuza decided to just not use them. The role of yakuza in Japanese society is strange for Westerners to understand. The large yakuza gangs have headquarters with their insignia openly displayed on the building, and some even used to have newsletters. A lot of their activities are indeed like the mafia, but they tend to follow the unwritten rules much better. The police are quite content to let them deal---sometimes harshly--with small time criminals so the police don't have to bother. I have explained this to people by saying that the Japanese really don't like disorganized crime and that they tolerate organized crime to suppress the other kind.

[Ann D]

I have been on vacation visiting family and came back to this great discussion on PACHINKO, which I also loved.

Jane, that interview with Min Jin Lee was wonderful. Not only did it help me understand how she went about writing and rewriting the book , but it introduced me to a very engaging woman whom I would love to meet in person. She has a nice sense of humor.

Larry, thank you so much for the information you have added to the discussion. I spent a couple of years teaching Japanese adults in Japan in the mid-seventies, but your experience is much broader than mine.

I do remember frequently walking by Pachinko parlors full of "salary men" who were absolutely mesmerized by the game. At that time I was also surprised by the discrimination against Japanese women, although I was always treated very well by the Japanese students and people I worked with. I know things have improved on that score but I have also read that now many women are forgoing marriage altogether in order to have more independence. Traditionally, women were expected to be subservient to men and to be completely responsible for the children and housework.

The discussion on Noa's suicide was really thought provoking. When I was in Japan I remember being shocked by the number of suicides, particularly students who couldn't face the shame of failing their exams. Shame is a big part of Japanese culture. Ruth Benedict wrote that in Western culture that place is taken by guilt. The difference is emphasizing what others think about you, as opposed to directing the negative feelings at yourself. Maybe that's because the group is much more important in Japanese culture and Americans value their individualism.

Noa could accept being Korean-Japanese as long as he thought that he was the son of a beloved Christian minister. When his girlfriend deduced his father was really a yakuza (gangster) and Noa finally realized that his mother and aunt had lied to him all his life, he decided to reject the Korean part of him altogether and pass as Japanese.

As Min Jin Lee has said, purity of blood is very important to Japanese. and Noa was raised in a Japanese society. Child adoption of even Japanese children by Japanese adults, for example, is very uncommon. Japanese used to tell me that they thought it was very kind of Americans to adopt Asian babies but adoption wouldn't work in their country.

Noa felt himself tainted by his Korean blood. At the same time, his mother's visit must have aroused conflicted feelings about his rejection of her. I can understand why he committed suicide, given his mixed Japanese/Korean culture. From an American perspective, his suicide can be difficult to understand.

[Sue]

I am about a third through the book and have read many of the comments here, stopping only because there is information I’m not ready to know yet. So far I agree with what I have read above. The style of writing, straight forward and simple, is perfect for these people who live such straight forward lives, even in the face of what is really oppression and abuse. Each character has something about them, some aspect of personality, that differentiates them from others who may seem so similar. And these characteristics are drawn easily and lightly.

I’ll be back when I’m nearer the end. Right now, in my reading, the church members are in prison and Sunja is making an apparent success of her market business.

[Sue]

I have finished the book now and read all of the c

[Sue]

Sorry for posting the partial comment in error.
I have finished the book now and read all of the comments and I agree with Ann’s thoughts about Noa’s suicide. I saw it as a result of the shame he had felt for various reasons for years. He had always been able to separate himself at school from his Korean identity (to some extent) by the strength of his intellect. He also lived a very solitary life outside his home. When he lost, or gave up, his family supports, there really was no option left for him but to take the road some had already assumed for him. He “became” Japanese.

When his mother spoke with him that day, she couldn’t stop herself from adding small steps, small tasks she wanted him to do...meet his young nephew, visit the family. Each request must have been a dagger into Nao who no longer considered himself Korean and could not afford to allow his new family or co-workers suspect his truth. I believe he killed himself out of shame for who his real family was and therefore who he was, Korean, and because he could not live with that fractured identity again as he had when he was young.

I also felt sorry for his wife. It was mentioned that she was a widow when Nao met her, the wife of a suicide and therefore undesirable. I can’t imagine what her place in society would be with two husbands who committed suicide. The only difference now...she is a mother.

And I wondered about the gun too. I recall something about shooting lessons when the boys (Nao and Mazuso-sp) were young, I think, but I’m not sure it’s from this book.

[Larry]

I read the weekend edition of the Mainichi Daily (one of the most widely read Japanese newspapers) and today's edition had a story titled, "Prince Akishino questions use of public funds on religious Imperial enthronement rites." This reminded me of two things with respect to the Japanese Imperial family. The first is that while almost all Japanese think of themselves as being both Shinto and Buddhist, except when they get married when they prefer a "sort of" Christian wedding ceremony, the Royal family is different. By law, the Emperor and his family are by law supposed to publicly follow and perform Shinto ceremonies, but privately they practice a form of Shingon Esoteric Buddhism. It's another example of things not being what they seem to be in Japan.

But even more surprising is this is that the Japanese royal family is of Korean origin. That's been widely known among archaeologists who have studied early Japanese history, and Emperor Akihito himself openly admitted this in 2002. See the Guardian story below. But only one Japanese paper reported this admission, and Japanese just really ignore this revelation. So the situation of Koreans within Japan remains largely unchanged.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/200...

[Sherry, Doyenne]

Larry wrote: "I read the weekend edition of the Mainichi Daily (one of the most widely read Japanese newspapers) and today's edition had a story titled, "Prince Akishino questions use of public funds on religiou..."

Very interesting, Larry.

[Jane]

Larry I was so surprised by the Korean heritage of the Japanese Royal Family. I do think that the secrecy that overshadows the lives of the characters in Pachinko. It seems to have a huge impact on Noa and his family.

I'm not sure how many members in this group know about The Tournament of Books. There's a big tournament on the site in March during the time of the NCAA tournament. There are brackets in the book tournament, just as in the basketball tourney. I think the TOB is a wink to that bracket structure. Here's a review by one of the tournament judges. It describes the importance of money, work and either lack or excess of wealth in the lives of the books' characters. I more typically think about family and psychological connections when I read novels...but in novels work and money are (or should usually be) central. They certainly explain Noa's life, the possibilities that opened to him because of his biol. father's money, and his shame when he realized the source of his success. Here it is:

"Pachinko is about such meaningless interconnectedness, constructed by ego and abstraction and coincidental convergence, and how the meaninglessness is held and created collectively, like currency, meaning the only source of meaning is actually the interconnectedness itself, as arbitrary and impossible to explain as it is. And yet this book explains it. Lays it all out. Yes, it is about Koreans in Japan, about immigrants, about Korea occupied by Japan and Korea before the wars, about poverty and striving—yes, multigenerational epic historical sweeping whatever everyone has said about it. It’s about the meaning of nation. But that doesn’t tell you anything. I sat in my chair and I didn’t unpack a box or hang anything up or eat or think any petty stupid circular thoughts about favors or currency or writing. I didn’t think about what Min Jin Lee was doing. I forgot myself, and I forgot that a book is a made thing. I underlined sentence after sentence. In 479 pages, I wrote three question marks in the margin. I never wrote an x. When I finished the book, I immediately sent a text message in the imperative to one of the smartest, most emotionally woke people I know, to whom I have never recommended a book: Read Pachinko, is all I said.

The book is about money, how it rules lives and determines fates. The book is about work, but work is about money. Life is about money. Money is fake. But if you have it, that fake thing, you can make your real life better.

'Sunja opened a blue tin of imported butter cookies and put some on a plate. She filled the teapot with hot water and floated a generous pinch of tea leaves. It was easy to recall a time when there was no money for tea and a time when there was none to buy.'

This is how you live, preparing food, making tea, and always in the presence of your past. In awareness of it.

The book is about how destiny is a glamorous ageless gangster who impregnates you with your entire future against your will and in the fullness of your ignorance. How you will be responsible for decisions you made without any facts or resources or assistance, how for much of modern history most people have had no good choices in every next situation. How your life is controlled by strings you can’t see and forces you wouldn’t condone, but that is irrelevant because you are irrelevant. Your relevance is a creation of your mind, and if it extends beyond that it is only in the ways that, and because, you have given up your relevance for the sake of those you care about. It has taken me 18 years of trying, and working, and proving myself, and all the coin I had to spend, to fling us, me and my daughter, into our scornable rental in this sunny valley where she can go to the first school of the eight she has attended that I would not call mediocre, that I would call very good, and everything behind me somehow went into that, and into her, and still who knows if it will benefit her, if she will thrive, if it will mean anything. That’s what Pachinko is about. It’s about how you do something out of a base but human motivation and you have an unexpectedly sublime experience, and how you do something out of what you think is a noble motivation and it goes unnoticed or hurts someone. It’s about how you have no control, nothing makes sense, and life is suffering, and how all that, together, is incomprehensibly beautiful. Read Pachinko.

Merritt Tierce for Tournament of books

[Barbara]

What an incredibly insightful look at some of the themes of this book, Jane! Thank you for posting it. I am learning so much from this discussion. Thank you, Larry and Ann, for your information about Japanese culture. I know next to nothing about it.

[Gina]

Jane wrote: "Larry I was so surprised by the Korean heritage of the Japanese Royal Family. I do think that the secrecy that overshadows the lives of the characters in Pachinko. It seems to have a huge impact on..."

Thanks for the information for Tournament of Books. I have never heard of it.

[Ann D]

Very interesting posts, everyone. Thank you.

[Larry]

Jane wrote: "Larry I was so surprised by the Korean heritage of the Japanese Royal Family. I do think that the secrecy that overshadows the lives of the characters in Pachinko. It seems to have a huge impact on..."

Jane, it is a beautiful statement about what is important in this book. And I would also say that though it's nice knowing some background about Japan, the important part of the book is found in the book. I think that this statement would easily lead others into wanting to read the book.

There is one sentence in that statement that made me think of one other thing. The sentence is this one, "How your life is controlled by strings you can’t see and forces you wouldn’t condone, but that is irrelevant because you are irrelevant." If you have ever seen a pachinko machine, you see how the balls just drop randomly down, hitting one peg after another, moving in totally unpredictable directions. The players have no control, as opposed to a pinball machine. And many of the things that happen to the characters in Pachinko are like those balls in a pachinko machine.

Here's youTube video of an old style Pachinko machine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RTg8...

[Jane]

Larry, thanks for the pachinko video. I'm confused by the sentence you quoted from Merritt's review. Do you think the sentence describes the random workings of pinball rather than pachinko? I didn't. I loved the passage in Pachinko in which the man who operates the Pachinko parlor shows how he knocks some of the nails to alter the possibility of winning.

[Larry]

Jane, nope, I was unclear in my words. I definitely think that the words describe pachinko.

[Jane]

I just finished Ha Jin's book, The Crazed, which is a novel that takes place in China during the time when student protests and brutal responses by the Chinese army were taking place. This isn't the core of the novel, but Chinese life and the aftermath of Mao's rule infuses the novel. I liked Pachinko so much more. Perhaps it was because we got to follow a family over so many generations, perhaps it was the loving tone...even when the characters weren't totally lovable. Has anyone in this group read Waiting by Ha Jin. I did like that book, also written in a very plain straightforward style. There's a thickness that Pachinko has. The pacing, the character development, the intersection of family and politics, that felt much more appealing to me. Appealing is the wrong word. It felt maybe more empathetic? more loving? Anyway, books have felt thinner to me since reading this one. Does anyone get that?

[Ann D]

I read Waiting which won the National Book Award in 1999. I had to check out the plot summary on Wikipedia to refresh my memory. The plot revolves around a doctor who rejects his village wife and waits for years to marry his girlfriend. When he finally succeeds in getting a divorce and marries her, he remains unsatisfied.

As I remember, I thought the book was interesting on an intellectual level and for what it revealed of Communist China, but the story didn't grab me.

I agree with you that Pachinko was very different. Many of the characters were flawed, but they seemed all too human and the author made me care what happened to them.

In some respect the book reminded me of those big 19th century novels I used to read. Plot was so much more important in those days and the authors' primary goal was story telling. Pachinko was like that for me.

[Barbara]

I haven't read anything by Ha Jin but reading both the publisher's and Ann's description, I think I get a slight sense of it. I often read books and feel that they are saying something important but I am at a bit of a remove from it. I had the exact same sense of Pachinko that Ann and Jane are describing. While I was reading it, I told my husband that I hadn't completely fallen into a book in this way in a long time. Jane, when you describe it as thickness, I get it. There is a depth to it in terms of everything that goes into a good story -- character, setting, plot, connection between all of those. I'm feeling inadequate about that description too but it definitely hooked me throughout.

[Jane]

I not only loved the book; I loved the discussion. Thanks to everyone who joined in the conversation.

[Mary Anne]

Jane, I love what you said about thickness/thinness. One area where this is so clear is in the character development. In Pachinko I can visualize almost all of the characters. I really get a good feel for what the person is like. All too often in other books, this is not the case at all.

I may have to apply the thickness meter to all my future reads!

[Jane]

Thanks, Mary Anne. I think it probably applies to different books in different ways...character, plot, historical "thickness" psychological "thickness." I just felt that I was walking into a world rather than a book.

[Mary Ellen]

I finished Pachinko two days ago and am very grateful to Jane for suggesting it and for all who voted for it! One of the best books I've read this year, with many characters who became very real.

Perhaps because the closer things come to my own time, the less they fascinate me, but I did feel the Solomon/Phoebe story was less engaging and a little rushed. I wondered at Solomon's willingness to give up on investment banking so quickly and to take up Goro's advice to go into the pachinko business (are we supposed to see this as the family's fate? or perhaps symbolic of Koreans in Japan being "stuck," unable to get into the mainstream of society?).

I thought the stories of Hana and her mother were a good counterpoint to the main thread of Sunja's family saga: they reminded us that Japanese as well as Koreans in Japan, can find themselves trapped by societal expectations.

Thanks again for a great discussion!

[Sheila]

The author has last week been interviewed on BBCs Women’s Hour to mark the book launch here I think. Interesting interview and comments here so have it on my TBR list

[Sheila]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000...