Book Review: Pachinko

Book cover art

Pachinko is a game of chance. Rigged each morning so that only certain machines will win, the public comes en masse to try to win big. Very few win it all.

It’s an apt metaphor for the family Min Jin Lee has created with her beautifully-crafted book, Pachinko. The story of a Korean family who moves to Japan, it primarily follows Sunja as she navigates being a poor Korean, a single mother, and an even poorer Korean expatriate. The book switches narration often between characters, but Sunja serves almost as a touchstone for the reader. She is a young Korean girl who becomes pregnant by a man who is already married. When a missionary proposes to her in exchange for saving his life, she moves to Japan with him to work in a church. Unfortunately, Japan is not the most welcoming place to those it has colonized. Sunja and her husband face endless bigotry as they try to make a living, as do Sunja’s two sons and, eventually, their sons.

This is a novel about female strength. Not in an overt way, but like its female characters, it quietly pushes and successfully shares its ideas. Sunja’s mother has a motto: “a woman’s lot is to suffer”. Continually, the women in Pachinko are the ones holding everything together and keeping the family in its varying forms afloat. When her brother-in-law forbids it, Sunja and his wife create and run a successful business that keeps the family from starving. When the family must seek shelter during World War II, the women work for their keep on a farm safe from the bombs, ensuring the continuation of their bloodline.

Continuously, these women work for the bare minimum, but do so for the benefit of their entire family. They are truly the backbone of what is outwardly a matriarchy, providing when the men fail to do so and quietly being the reason the men end up succeeding. They do all of this in a country that, quite honestly, hates them. Sunja’s sons deal with bullying and discrimination at school, leading to an exploration of identity. Noa, for example, spends most of his childhood wishing he was Japanese and feeling conflicted about his Korean ancestry.

Pachkino tells the story of one family, but it is a portrayal of a part of history that is not shared with the West. Many Korean families that were told that Japan would bring them prosperity only to be severely disappointed. Min Jin Lee has made a fantastic, moving, and important book.

Update: For the past year, Pachinko has been my go-to whenever someone has asked for a book recommendation. I’ve yet to hear someone say they’ve been anything but thrilled with it.

Author Min Jin Lee

Book Review: Scandalous Women

While at Heathrow Airport in London, waiting to board my flight back to the States after several fantastic months travelling and studying in Europe, I found myself in the worst situation known to any reader.

I had nothing to read.

Thankfully, there was a shop with books only a few feet away, my plane was delayed, and I had a few British pounds I needed to spend before returning to the land of the dollar. Into the shop I went.

Amongst all the bestsellers and YouTuber books was a section about history. As I’d just spent three months going to historical sites, I was drawn to this section in particular. On the shelf was a book that caught my eye: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women. Bingo.

Elizabeth Kerri Mahon’s short, historical book is very enjoyable. Firstly, it’s about some pretty badass women, which I will always enjoy in any capacity. Joan of Ark, Cleopatra, Calamity Jane, and Ida B. Wells are only a small selection of the historical figures covered.

Second, it tells the truth about these ladies. Cleopatra gets the reveal she deserves. After centuries of old men turning her into a sex symbol, she gets the credit she is due as a statesman and leader of her country. The woman was willing to do anything to keep Egypt independent, and she was able to succeed for quite a significant period of time. And then she was erased from history by men who were threatened by her. Ask anyone who Cleopatra is, and they’ll reply that she was the lover of Mark Antony. Ask them about her skills as a leader, and you’ll often come up with nothing.

Can you tell I’m now a big fan of Cleopatra?

Finally, the book is short. The stories are nicely condensed, which is good considering the stories start to really blend together by the end.

The ratio of white women to women of color in the book is a little staggering. The section that features the most women of color, “Amorous Artists”, takes quite a while to reach. Even the section called “Warrior Queens” has only Cleopatra listed, when in fact there are countless queens around the world whose stories could have been referenced.

The issue with this lack of diversity is not only that there are people whose stories are missing, but also that the stories we get begin to sound similar. Most of the women were born into poverty, found love and fortune, then lost it and ended up alone and desolate. There are only so many stories I can hear about the same situation in one single book. Asian and African women are completely missing. I attribute that to a lack of intense research, as a quick Google search will pull up plenty of scandalous, pioneering women who stand out from both of those continents. I feel like the book missed an opportunity to talk about women who aren’t quite as well-known in the West, but notorious in other geographic regions. I would be insanely interested in reading something like that (suggestions).

Scandalous Women is an interesting work. It covers so many periods and countries (in the West, mostly). The book is great on many accounts, but I did begin to feel the stories were repeating themselves. Beyond the stories themselves, the writing style wasn’t that sophisticated (I’m a firm believer that slang doesn’t belong in anything written in third person, especially in a historical book).

Still, I would definitely read another book by Elizabeth Mahon. She takes an interesting look at history that historians are only now bringing to light. These are women that actually had immense power and influence, but have often been pushed aside for the male figures, or to extol their sex appeal. Mahn provides a refreshing change.

Tolstoy

Barnes & Noble Classics edition

Right now, at this very moment, I am 300 pages into the over 700-page Anna Karenina. It’s a monstrous book, and probably could function quite effectively as a doorstop, but here’s the thing: it’s wonderful.

Tolstoy is intimidating. His novels are giant, with ten or more main characters each, and everyone has a first name, nickname, and several family names. He uses them interchangeably, and many characters even have the same name. It’s like he wanted us to be confused.

But once you sift through, say, fifty pages, you get one of the most stunning portraits of characters you may ever encounter. Because it’s so long, each character is fleshed out to the extreme. You know their hopes, their dreams, and their failings. Tolstoy’s skill is switching tones to match whatever character you’re reading at the time.

Alexey tends to have long, rather boring, paragraphs where he considers state matters, who might’ve bested him lately, and anything to do with work. His wife is hardly in his thoughts, except when he is being embarrassed by her and must coldly and mechanically work out how he will maintain his good reputation.

In contrast, Vronsky’s thoughts are full of Anna and money. These are his primary concerns, and when you’re reading the character, you’re reading what seems to be his actual thoughts. He loves Anna desperately, but is heading into dire straits at this point of the novel, trying to reconcile his feelings with the fact that his family disapproves and is withholding much needed cash.

Tolstoy’s ability to transport a reader into a character’s mind is absorbing, not to mention wonderfully skillful. It moves you through pages that could be considered dense, or maybe wordy, with vigor. With true excitement.

His characters are flawed. So flawed—but you care about them anyway. Anna has (spoiler) at this point told her husband she is in love with another man. She begins passionately, feeling relieved that everything is in the open. She feels freed. Many authors would stop their heroines’ development there. Not Tolstoy. As Anna begins to consider what she’s done, she becomes terrified. Things that aren’t “supposed” to matter to main characters matter greatly to her. She second guesses herself when the social standing she’s always enjoyed is threatened, and is enormously tempted to take Alexey’s offer that things can just “return to how they were” when he brings up her beloved son. Love has not put her in a bubble where nothing matters. Anna wants to continue to benefit from her high place in society and from Alexey’s protection.

All the same, she’s angry at his indifference, while being ashamed of herself for her infidelity in a twisting cacophony of emotions. It makes Anna one of the most interesting protagonists I may have ever read. It felt like Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Harry is feeling hurt, isolated, targeted while feeling guilty for lashing out at his friends. It’s a complex swirl of feelings that are so human, you forget the character is fictional.

But she is, at heart, a heroine, and realizes that despite the lure, she can’t go back to how life was. Beyond Vronsky as a person, she feels for the first time in a long time. She enjoys that passion in her heart, and maybe even the drama, because it adds some kind of excitement that has been absent from her life. Rather ignored and belittled by her husband on a day-to-day basis, she finds it’s impossible to go back. She makes a difficult decision that some readers condemn her for, but that you also fully understand. Because you don’t want her to go back, either.

Even when you know what happens in the end.