HOME TRUTHS
A brilliant new novel reveals the hidden history of Japan’s Korean minority
Erica Wagner is swept away by a new novel that explores the struggles of the Korean immigrant community in Japan
There is tofu on the table, bright-pink pickled daikon radish, kimchee – the fiery Korean fermented cabbage that, once you get a taste for it, is completely addictive – and bowls full of fresh lettuce leaves. A handsome young man appears before us, fires up the barbecue, which is the centrepiece of our table, and presents a platter of gorgeously marbled raw beef. ‘I’m going to cook for you,’ says Handsome, and Min Jin Lee laughs delightedly. ‘That’s just fine by me,’ she says.
I’d never eaten Korean barbecue, or kimchee, before I met Min a decade ago, when her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was published. My admiration of the book turned into a real friendship – and I don’t usually interview my friends. But I’m breaking my rule because her new novel, Pachinko, is so remarkable. The story of a KoreanJapanese family, it begins in 1910 and moves forward towards the end of the 20th century, its characters the women and men who are never read about in books, who suffer for the whims of politicians and struggle to survive and make their way. ‘History has failed us, but no matter,’ the novel begins, and over the course of nearly 500 gripping pages, Lee works a near-miraculous act of rescue – all the while bringing to life a time and a place almost completely ignored in Europe and the West.
‘Most of the world is not recorded,’ Min says simply, as our slices of beef sizzle before us. We’re in New York’s Koreatown, at Kang Ho Dong Baekjeong, one of the city’s coolest joints these days. Korean food is having a moment – and films such as Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, adapted from Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, mean that Korean culture is becoming more widely appreciated, too. But the story that Pachinko tells is a revelation. Japan annexed Korea in 1910, as the novel states on its opening page, and what befalls its quietly heroic protagonist Sunja and her family down the generations is always linked to the complex, tormented relationship between those two countries. Koreans who moved to Japan in the years that followed became an integral part of Japanese society; but they were also an oppressed and often despised minority. This history is so moving, and so surprising, I am startled I have never come across it before; but Min herself is not surprised.
‘People who are despised don’t want to talk about why they are despised,’ she says. A former lawyer who majored in history at Yale, she says she has been musing on this novel for decades; an important part of the process was the four years she herself spent in Japan with her husband and son, during which time she was able to interview many Korean-Japanese. In those interviews, she says, a certain character came up again and again: a matriarch who supported her family by building a tiny business from nothing – for Sunja, in Pachinko, it is making sweets. ‘This happens all over the world,’ Min says. ‘And so I thought: so this is the story. You don’t understand the rest of the story if you don’t understand this.’
Min herself was born in Korea, and came to the United States with her parents and two sisters at the age of seven. Sitting with her now, in her elegant Margaret Howell shift and kick-ass Doc Martens, it’s hard to believe she wasn’t always a New Yorker. But dig a little deeper, and you will find that her work and her life are always informed by the immigrant experience. Pachinko takes its epigraph from Dickens: ‘Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.’
In its sweep and scope and emotional power, Pachinko echoes the great 19th-century British novelists Lee loves: not only Dickens, but also Eliot, Hardy, the Brontës. Its narrator sees the world of the novel with both clarity and true compassion, a rare combination these days. The sorrows and joys of Sunja, her husband Isak and their family are completely engrossing as the decades pass; now I’m just waiting for a 10-hour adaptation of the book to appear on our television screens.
Min Jin Lee learnt to be a novelist by reading those who had gone before her. She has said that as she read she discovered that ‘great fiction required not just lovely words or fine feelings, it demanded emotion, structure, ideals and bravery’. Pachinko gives its readers all these things – as well as a striking introduction to lives, to a world, they may never have seen, or even thought to look at. In our increasingly fractured and divisive times, there can be no higher purpose for literature: all in the pages of a book that, once you’ve started, you’ll simply be unable to put down.
‘Pachinko’ by Min Jin Lee (£18.99, Head of Zeus) is published on 7 February.