August 9, 2024
I said I was going to read Pachinko, and I did. I first cracked it open, or I guess, downloaded it, then clicked on it before heading to the beach on a Friday (what a life). The beach-book-reading attempt was a dismal one—in terms of actually getting started—but at least it was scenic! I got maybe a chapter or two in, and then I didn’t touch it for another week.
I picked it up again about a week ago from when I first started writing this on July 13, 2024. I would get through the book in chunks over the course of the next few nights. This is probably one of the best books I’ve read. I spent a good few minutes weeping. I hope to return to it as my life unfolds and I enter new stages of life. It tugged all the right strings for what it is and for what my life is right now. The amount of life you’ve lived seems proportional to how much you can appreciate this book, but respecting the physics of time, you’ll appreciate it most at the age you're at right now. The life I’m referring to hasn’t been that long, but I think I would have experienced this book much differently at 13, and I’ll probably experience it much differently at 65.
Before reading it, I had already gone down a series of (independent) rabbit holes. I became more familiar with Japan’s annexation of Korea, introducing a new ethnic group—the Zainichi Koreans. A turbulent geopolitical time coupled with the era-agnostic trials and tribulations of the self, the family, and everything in between.
As a note: having some more historical context was really nice, but I probably could have gone without it and you could too. I think that the book probably would have hit just as hard. I think being aware of the situation is important in wanting to be aware of what's going and has gone on in the world, and I obviously wouldn’t undermine the importance of that, independent of whether I read this book or not.
I have several unfinished books, but this one was sprinted relative to the trajectory of my progress on the others. I came across the title in an interview with Karen Hao on Interact’s “In Conversation” interview. She said she “cried so many tears,” and so did I.
490 pages, 58 chapters, 4 generations; with each chapter and section devoted to a new extension of the blood line. Patterns of life experience begin to reveal themselves—first loves, births, and the inevitable deaths. Cathartic. You can insert yourself in the stages of life that are the most familiar to you, and that’s so beautiful. I think I have to return to this book in a few years, then in a few and decades, and reexperience it again: I'm nearly certain I'll feel and recognize new things with each revisit. I hope I do.
Noa’s death was probably one of the more painful moments. Noa would be called an “illegitimate child.” His biological father, Hansu, is a wealthy Japanese businessman. Noa is studious, he gets accepted to study English literature at Waseda University, and his father wants him to succeed and fights to pay for his schooling. Noa has this redemptionary life trajectory. He’s the older brother, remembering more and experiencing more. He’s the most Japanese ethnically but when you take the aforementioned into account, he's also more Japanese in that he has lived more life as one.
I viscerally remember reading about how we found his father in his home after returning from school. The author describes this man, a stranger, on their kitchen floor before revealing his identity. The man is in a decrepit state, unrecognizable until he’s not. Noa wants to help him before he knows that it’s his father. Noa’s 8. He assumes this man, his father, is a beggar. He puts some of his savings near the man. Then, the author reveals that this is Isak—his father. His adoptive father, Isak, doesn’t recognize him, but he comes around to acknowledge the fact that when Noa calls him his father, he is, in fact, his father. Isak is imprisoned for refusing to perform Shinto rituals, is a devout Christian, and he is sent away when Sunja is pregnant with Mazuso (what a beautiful name): Noa is really young. We learn what his father is thinking and the memories of his child, his former life, the boy standing in front of him begin to return. After forceful encouragement, Noa goes to school the next day after his dad tells him to go. Isak reminds him of the privilege that it is being a student, that he didn’t get the privilege to attend when he was a child.
This book managed to capture the chapter-flipping of life, as Sunja started as the daughter of the boardinghouse owner. I even saw her mom, Yangjin, get a little crush and take the lead on caring for Sunja’s future husband as he suffered from tuberculosis. I read as she let lust take over and Hansu take over her, but it was in a relatable adolescent way. It cemented in my mind this image of a moral, burdened, but still “normal” teen who had to grow up too early, and then by the end of the book; she is an old woman with grandkids. I think in our lives, we even see our past selves as characters in a book rather than who we are, and not only who we were, but here’s a book that shows something different, and it’s exciting.
Another point to make is that I think the author embeds religion in a lovely way. Up until a few years ago, I was pretty ignorant and didn't appreciate the religious diversity in East Asia. Tangentially, the names are wonderful, and the Abrahimac ones that are transliterated were as well. Take Yoseb and Noa, for example.
I can’t capture how good this book is, but the reads and ratings speak for themselves. It’s intense growing up with a character in the way the book forces you to do. It captures the conflict of growing up, but remembering who you were, seeing that in your children and grand-children; but also realizing that the maturity you’ve developed makes many of your choices no longer tasteful ones; you also forget what it’s like, and in this case, the world you live in, just looks so, so different decade-by-decade.
Canadian schools, but I can only speak for Ontario ones, have mandatory Indigenous education; it’s integrated into our English classes. We read many of the traditional classics in my freshman year, but they faded out of the curriculum year by year. I think it’s a very interesting era to live in that my schooling could be changed in this way, but that’s a tangent. Motivations can also be disputed, should it be left for history class?
Still, some themes were very recurrent in all of these books: the intergenerational trauma of students being put in residential schools, them being released or “graduated” and trying to re-integrate into a society that didn’t fully accept them, wanted them to be something else, forced them to be. Their kids are left with parents who just had everything stripped from them and they have these childhoods with their own terrors. And as a reader, it’s not always easy to empathize, I guess, or understand. Parents will often, if not always, have kids who lead very different lives than they do. Often, it’s by choice, but it’s still hard. The things you took seriously because you lived to care about them are just rules of courtesy that your kids have to follow.
Anyway to wrap things up, let’s look at the last chapter where we reach the last generation to share their stories in the book. We have Solomon: Mozasu and Yumi’s son whose story just felt so clear and real. Solomon speaks English, he starts his career in Tokyo—modern Tokyo.
There’s this Youtuber (who I love) and she seems to have grown up in New Jersey and Tokyo. She’s on a gap year from Princeton and in her videos I see Tokyo and it’s just like the metropolitan; it’s modern, there’s malls, cityscapes, a fashion week, it's where trends form, it's the home of the techno-contemporaries, and so on.
Mozasu goes to Columbia after living in Japan his whole life and going to English-speaking schools. He grows up in this upper-middle class life. At university he meets Phoebe and she’s Korean-American, a second-generation immigrant, which is an identity trait that I strongly identify with.
After graduation, Solomon and Phoebe move to Japan, and they clash in reconciling their national histories. And, it’s really interesting because the fade of cultural narrative doesn’t seem so there until this chapter. Their kids, especially if they’re raised in America or somewhere else, will have even more distant memories of their (recited) cultural pasts.
In all, what a world that I get to marvel in dead trees: I'm glad I do and thankful that I can.