Pachinko, A Book Review

                 

                    “History has failed us, but no matter.”

A compelling family saga spanning four generations, Min Jin-Lee’s Pachinko begins in 1910 in Japan occupied Korea, and ends in 1989; the year Lee got the idea for this epic tale. Pachinko opens with the story of Hoonie, the club-footed and cleft-lipped man marrying a fifteen-year-old in Yeongdo a small fishing village in Busan, Korea. It is their daughter Sunja who carries the story forward as she grows up helping her mother in their boarding house. In due time Sunja falls in love with the rich Koh Hansu, an older man who dotes on her and lavishes her with expensive gifts but his affluence comes from dubious quarters. Sunja falls pregnant, but Koh Hansu already has a wife and three girls in Japan - a truth Sunja only learns after she's carrying his child. Luckily for Sunja, Baek Isak a sickly but a compassionate protestant priest offers to give the child a name and a new life in Japan. Sunja follows her husband, a man she barely knows into an inhospitable country, and as they begin their life in Japan together with Yoseb and Kyunghee, Baek Isak’s brother and sister-in-law, a future full of adversity awaits for them but not without a few snatches of happiness.

Undeniably an engaging read, Pachinko is the kind of book that comes by only once in a while. Lee’s eloquent and smooth storytelling keeps the reader thoroughly engrossed. At the heart of it, two resilient women Sunja and Kyunghee, whose indomitable spirit to live with courage and fortitude under adverse circumstances is the kernel of the story. Lee walks us through the history of Korea and Japan through her characters, and she does it with great finesse. What struck me most about this novel was the outrageously inhuman treatment the Koreans received at the hands of the Japanese during the Japanese occupation. One couldn’t even hold on to their names. The advantage laid in being more Japanese and the Koreans in Japan did everything to be Japanese which tore them apart from their countrymen who wouldn’t have them back in Korea. Another thing that struck me about Pachinko was how the male characters with all their complexities, their inadequacies and their failings, highlight the unflinching tenacity of Sunja’s and Kyunghee’s characters, and even Sunja’s mother Yangjin’s character. Lee’s women struggle, suffer irreparable heartbreaks, but they do not get bent out of shape which is the strength of this 531 pages monolithic work of staggering brilliance.

A sweeping journey through the history of adversity between the Koreans and the Japanese during the Japanese occupation, the division of North and South Korea, and it’s repercussions on the proletariat, Pachinko is a heart burner.

As Lee points out, history always fails the low working class readily sacrificed in the strife between two great powers. 

The House by the Graveyard

Up here in the hilly countryside, where the land is restless, the landscape is always shifting.  The house that stood on the hill yesterday seems to have sunken a few inches. The plates within the mounds and hills are constantly shifting and every year during monsoons, the land slips and slides claiming many lives. Up here, the fog shrouds the land in a way that one hardly notices a shift here and a drop there. Up here, the fog casts an ineffaceable gloom under which the living walk in a silent cortege while the ghosts of the past rise and mingle with the milky air.

 For nine-year-old Rega, her tiny house perched on a small plateau overlooking the graveyard is her lifeline. She was born in that house and in all her nine years of life, she has known that she will never leave this place. The two-storeyed ramshackle is small with several tiny rooms allotted to the siblings. The biggest room belongs to their parents, and as they’d have it,  they have a new addition to the family every year. Rega the eldest, has four young brothers and sisters under her and her mother is expecting again. There had been more than four after Rega and two above her who hadn’t survived the unforgiving winter that seeped through cracks on the walls and from under the doors sucking the life out of infants.

The house is derelict and rickety, and at night when the wind blows, it heaves and creaks and moans. The house overlooks a graveyard, stooping like an aged watchman, watching over the lonely departed whose earthly remains are either interred or cremated on the ground below. A vast plain that stinks of rot and death. Haphazard stone blocks mark a grave here and there and whitewashed tombs stand out oddly like scant teeth inside an old mouth.

On a day like this, when the fog breathes through the trees and creeps into every small crevice and crack, the graveyard is obscured behind the thick white pearly churning, covering everything within it and beyond it. On a day like this, when little children are better off sitting at home by the flickering candlelight poring over a book or by the roaring fireside, their jaws hanging low, listening to sinister tales spun by the elders, of days long gone when ghosts outnumbered the living, Rega is out in the woods nearby looking for Pretty, her goat. Her mother had given them each an animal from their small farm to look after, and while her sisters had got three hens each, her youngest brother the rooster, she had Pretty to take care of. Pretty is due to give birth any time and she has wandered off into the overgrowth below the house in the morning with a huge belly jiggling around her. At around late noon when the daylight begins to diminish, her siblings collect the hens and the rooster and put them in their pens. Their mother serves weary men - on their way back from town after selling the days vegetables, dairy products and eggs - who stop by her shop for tea and snacks. They still have a long way to go before they reach their homes further down in the valley, but for now, they sit and enjoy the small respite.

Rega passes the graveyard and enters the woods beyond, looking for Pretty. Her tiny heart trembles a little and it’s not the graveyard she’s frightened of. It’s the tall dark trees that loom over her and whisper over her head as though conspiring against her.  It’s the long winding road that is slowly being swallowed by the dark on the other end that plucks at her nerves. On a day like this, it’s natural for one’s thoughts to wander into dark places inside the head and lift that curtain of what if?

What if something unnatural, something unsightly is waiting behind the trees or at the end of the path?

“Prettyyyyy! Prettyyyyy!” She calls out but the fog rushes in muffling the sound of her voice as she opens her mouth. Rooks fly high above cawing, headed to their nests but other than that, there is a still, compact silence around her and she thinks it strange because the woods are usually never bereft of sound.

“Pretty, where are you? Here girl, come here.” She tries again. Nothing. Heavy silence sits upon her and a voice inside tells her to turn around and run homewards but the thought of the heavily pregnant Pretty tears her heart and Rega knows that she must find her. The wind carries the fog from the hills above and engulfs Rega in its cold wet embrace blinding her and although she is used to the weather and the antics nature plays, she is aware of a presence just a few inches from her.  She is used to imagining ghosts amid the mist hovering in the air, swirling, feetless, but growing up above the graveyard she knows that there are no sinister spirits, only sad lonely ghosts, longing for a glimpse of a world they once were a part of.  She has seen them many times sitting on vestiges of old forgotten graves and she knows that there is nothing frightening about them. But this presence, waiting, watching behind the dense fog is something else. It’s not something that has risen from the dead but from something living, something threatening, something perilous. Rega takes a few steps backwards in the growing darkness when she hears a bleating further down by the bush. 

She sprints towards the direction of the sound and in the middle of a thorny bramble she finds Pretty. She has pushed herself under the overgrowth somehow and has given birth to a fine young calf. Rega tears her way in through the bush, thorns stabbing her, ripping through her hanju and grazing her skin but the pain doesn’t bother her, neither does the danger that darkness brings along. The only thought she has is that mother is going to be happy to see the new-born calf. This means extra income with goat milk and goat cheese and that would please mother very much. The calf would grow up and contribute in its own way. She picks up the slick little body and cradles it between the folds of her chuba, and beckoning Pretty she starts walking towards home. 

As she reaches the landing where she had sensed the presence, Pretty snorts, her entire body becoming rigid. She has sensed it too. Daylight is receding fast and the dense brume swirls and froths, turning darker in shade as the colour of the night blends into it. Pretty’s flanks contract, and breathing heavily, she lets out thick white beams of vapour from her mouth and nose. Suddenly she raises herself on hind legs and sprints towards the direction of the house leaving the calf and Rega behind.

Rega gathers the hem of her chuba in one hand and rushes behind Pretty who has disappeared in the haze. She runs as fast as she could, the tiny kid pressed against her small flat chest. She reaches the graveyard and sprints through it,  looking neither left nor right. Silent graves stare blankly at her and weary old ghosts sitting on the headstones watch her, cheering her on to hurry, like spectators in a race, waving their armless sleeves in the wind. Encouraged by the cheering, she races ahead but something is at her heels, something thick and viscous tangling itself around one of her ankles. She has no time to stop and examine. She must run before it’s too late. Finally, further above, she sees a dull glimmer of a torch burning through the dense murk. She knows she’s close now. Through the accursed fog she can make out the silhouette of the crooked roof and uneven windows glowing yellow from within, glowing with life and with hope, and she knows that she is home any minute.

“Rega!” Her mother is looking down from the window, holding the flaming torch high above her head.

“Quick child! You had us all worried.” Her mother’s voice is a blessing and small bubbles of happiness burst inside her. She is finally home safe and she has a welcoming surprise to share with everybody. She wouldn’t trade this moment for anything in the world even if it meant that she’d have to encounter the stygian danger again, the one that threatened to eat her whole.

The night is dark and the wind savage. The fog presses against the window panes trying to get in but failing.  Her brothers and sisters have all rolled like snails and cashews in the corners of their beds deep in sleep, blankets kicked away. The pale light of the dying embers flickers in the fireplace. A stream of cold wind pushes through the cracks and Rega lies under a thick warm woollen blanket, waiting for sleep to visit her. She listens to her mother’s sonorous breathing behind the thin wall that separates them and smiles. 

The house is old and rickety but it is their safe haven, their respite from the grim world outside. The house holds all of them within its belly, wanting to shield them from savage storms of life. But then, up here, where the fog and the wind and the rain reign, the land shifts and slips quietly and sometimes when the day breaks, a house has disappeared in the night, a family has joined the brood of ghosts in the graveyard down below, and the world moves on, clueless, blind and unstirred by the drudgery of the less fortunate. 

A shadow of a little girl peeking out of a lonely shabby cottage overlooking the graveyard can sometimes be seen by porters and carriers on the way up to town. But they know better. It’s only the shadow from the past.  A trick played by the fog.