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isobelleposts · 2 years

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Korean Immigration in 'Pachinko' - Book Review

The cast of Apple TV Original Adaptation directed by Kogonada

'Pachinko' was without a doubt written so gracefully and seamlessly. Although there were times when I put the book down and didn’t feel so much urge to pick it up again, I still can’t deny the fact that this was one of the most well-written pieces I’ve ever read, tackling several relevant and worldly issues. Written so precisely as if these characters and the lives they’ve lived were real at some point in time, Min Jin Lee succeeds in making her readers stop and think about the world.

Kim Min-ha as Sunja, selling kimchi in the busy markets of Osaka

CHANGE

Throughout the book, we find ourselves hoping for change just as much as the characters do. It seems to be that negative change that wipes the life out of your body appears faster than lighting, and the change that everyone hopes for comes unnoticeable through time. The book proves what we should all know, which is that racism and injustices do not only occur among different races, but sometimes and for decades now, through different nationalities, gender, and social and economic status and beliefs.

That evening, when Noa did not call her, she realized that she had not given him her phone number in Yokohama. In the morning, Hansu phoned her. Noa had...

Page 385 of 'Pachinko'

Book lll: Chapter 8 and the words that followed that line crushed my heart.

"I am carrying your child."

Page 47 of 'Pachinko'

This book made me think a lot what ifs. What if Sunja had not met Hansu? What if Isak had went to Osaka on his own? What if Noa's mother did not visit him in Nagano? Through the course of a few months, Sunja's life had took a major turn and changed everything around her, and it felt real.

Lee Min-ho as Koh Hansu in the Apple Original Adaptation of 'Pachinko'

PRIVILEGE

One recurring topic that keeps coming to me the more I read this book is privilege. Koh Hansu was not born in privilege, being a Korean and a poor one at that. But it does not excuse the amount of damage his gained privilege later in his life has caused others whom he once stood in the same economic status with.

Hansu hit the girl's face so hard that blood gushed from her pink mouth. - Noriko was ruined.

Page 344 & 345 of 'Pachinko'

Noriko was such a small character in the book (mentioned in only three pages), but it felt necessary that she was added because it made me think of the that one second you could be smiling, and the next you realize that the thing you were smiling at brought you to the hells of earth. It made me think of how much change could happen in a second while the cause of it or beholder of privilege remains unharmed.

I’d say that Pachinko isn’t much for enjoyment and excitement, but a lesson. You read it to learn in an entertaining and beautiful way about the history of Korea and Japan starting with the life of a young woman named Sunja, whose life changes drastically because of man of privilege and her decision to not fall under his power. The book covered topics I haven’t been able to encounter much yet or at all in other books, and maybe so because I need to expand my palate more, but nonetheless, this three-generational story will have you thinking and sympathizing not only for the characters but the lives and years they were inspired by in history.

Author of 'Pachinko', Min JIn Lee, at a DeMott lecture in 2019 Ahmerst College

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Min Jin Lee is no stranger to spreading political and social awareness to topics that need to be raised, whether its through her books, social media outlets, or press conferences and lectures. With her books ‘Free Food for Millionaires’ and ‘Pachinko’ both about Korean immigrants, Min Jin Lee has made her name known for giving a voice to the struggles of Asian immigration, which is scarcely tackled in the media.

"Above all, I wanted the narrator to be sympathetic of every character's plight. I will be forty-eight in November 2016, and as I get older, it is easier for me to imagine and appreciate many more perspectives--perspectives I may have disliked when I was much younger."

A Conversation with Min Jin Lee, page 494 of Grand Central Publishing's 'Pachinko'

Min Jin Lee is found admirable for all the perspectives and timelines she had to put herself through to write these sensitive topics in a historically accurate way, by interview Korean-Japanese men and women of their experiences, and taking her time to understand the weight of these stories, among others.

There is no denying that the preciseness of this book and its every line made it so beautiful and stand out from other books.

(Click HERE for Writing Commissions)

by Isobelle Cruz, 25/10/2022

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holywitchlady · 2 years

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#pachinko #final episode #koh hansu #lee minho #actorleeminho #kdrama #history books #fatcher #kids

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this-is-youniverse · 2 years

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Pachinko (2022)

#pachinko #kdrama #quotes #koh hansu #noa

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queenofnabooty · 2 years

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FINISH HIM!

#pachinko #pachinko appletv #koh hansu #needed to see all three of these moments next to each other... just beautiful #he is so bad at getting the last word lmao

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sousrantings · 2 years

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I'm such a clown for falling in love with Isak again watching the Drama. Oh, well, I've put myself in harm's ways...

#pachinko #koh hansu #sunja #baek isak #japan #min jin lee #apple plus #kdrama quotes #kdrama #kdramadaily #korean #quote

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coffeewithcutcaffeine · 11 months

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Also, now I need to know what Koh Hansu's irezumi look like. We never get to find out in the novel, so they better show us in season two.

#pachinko #koh hansu

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michthebay · 2 years

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#just finished watching pachinko on apple tv+#i enjoyed the adaptation so far but i can now definitely see why min jin lee decided to step away from the production of the show #the kimchi market scene got me in tears #it's fuck koh hansu all day every day #the fact that kyunghee's character gets less development on screen versus anna who barely appears in the books is pretty unfair #this show was snubbed any of the main emmy categories which is Stupid and Dumb bc the editing and acting were so so good #personal #pachinko

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wroteonedad · 10 months

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Discussing 'Pachinko' (2017)

Reading. One of those things that I love the idea of doing, but ultimately also the one thing I never really getting round to doing. Reading has been the one thing where I have always said, 'I'll read tomorrow' and then tomorrow just never comes. When I do read, I usually forget everything that had happened prior to when I picked the book up which is usually about 6 months before. Pachinko, the second novel by Min Jin Lee, did not have that effect on me. I hate to say it, but I have been reading this novel for over a year, and all of a sudden I am obsessed with it, near to the point that I simply cannot put it down.

It was one of those books that I'd picked up on a whim while visiting the bookstore, a book with a cover that I was visually drawn to straight away. I knew nothing about any aspects of Korean and Japanese history featured and I knew nothing about the author. I think I understand now.

Pachinko is theoretically three novellas within one book. Each section of the book represents the next generation of the family or a whole new branch of family life. As the novel begins, it feels more focused on Sunja, the daughter of a crippled fisherman in a boarding house which resides near the sea in South Korea in the early 1900s. It feels like for this section of the book, Sunja is carrying all of the hard work and caring that comes with the boarding house. Her back must hurt from carrying the weight of this boarding house on her shoulders. So during this section, Sunja ends up meeting Koh Hansu as a blooming adolescent to which she ends up falling in love and falling pregnant with his child. Hansu is a rich fluently Japanese speaking man and later in the novel, it is revealed he is actually part of the yakuza and that is how he has managed to make his fortune. The yakuza is the Japanese version of the mafia.

Sunja quickly finds out after making love to Hansu that in his eyes she is nothing more than a mistress and finds that he is already married to a woman in Japan and has daughters with her, not slay. She quickly asks him to no longer be apart of her life and she is left with the devastating realisation that she now has to disappoint her family, falling pregnant and not being married. This of course is a huge deal in the early 1900s and is enough to be deemed not good enough to be a part of mainstream society.

Baek Isak then visits the boarding house on his way to Osaka where he is visiting his brother. Yangjin discusses with the tuberculosis ridden man how Sunja has fallen pregnant with another man's baby and Isak decides to marry Sunja because he believes that he will die soon from all of the illnesses he has had in his short life. He promises to care for Sunja until the very end. The only problem with Isak is is that he is like a Victorian street urchin and is constantly sick with something,,, this is something that Yangjin considers that could be a problem for Sunja in the future. The newly wed couple then move to Osaka where they live under the same roof as Isak's brother Yoseb and wife Kyunghee.

Sunja gives birth to her firstborn with Koh Hansu, Noa. She is also working a job and sold a watch that Hansu had given her in order to make enough money to survive, much to Yoseb's disapproval.

Book 2

The novel jumps further in time to a world where Sunja now has Noa and Mozasu (Isak's birth son). Noa becomes the more academic of the two brothers, spending much of his time learning Japanese and reading.

Not long after Mozasu is born, Isak gets caught reciting The Lord's Prayer when everyone is supposed to be worshipping the emperor and he is quickly thrown into prison; which is absolutely insane by the way. They leave the guy to rot away in prison for quite a chunk of time and only release him when he is on the brink of dying so he is able to see his family for a short period of time before perishing.

In the time that Isak is in jail, Sunja and Kyunghee open up a stall at the market where they sell their own homemade kimchi. The business does well and the two are approached by an owner of a restaurant who pays them to cook for their place. In a time where Japan gets struck by World War II and everything begins to become scarce very quickly.

A few years later the restaurant is forced to close due to the War, which is also conveniently the time that Hansu decides to re-enter Sunja's life.

That night he tells Sunja that he is actually the owner of the resturant and that he has been manipulating their family all of these years as well as tracking them all down. He knew that Sunja had sold the gold watch that he gifted her all those years prior. The absolute fiend for controlling people then decides to send the entire family over to a country house in the middle of nowhere where they would spend the rest of the time in the war working. He makes a bunch of accusations and false claims to Sunja telling her the family need to leave straight away because their home probably wouldn't be there by tomorrow. He also decides to reunite Sunja with her mother Yanjin and pretty much drops Yoseb back off to the house later in the war after he becomes horrifically injured from all the bombings.

When the worst of the war passes, the family returns back to Osaka where Noa and Mozasu continue studying. Noa ends up leaving to go to university in Tokyo where he studies English Literature while Mozasu ends up dropping out of high school where he gets relentlessly picked on for being Korean to the point he was fighting all the time and after the night of being picked up by the police over it, he then begins to work in Goro's pachinko parlour,,, to which he ends up getting promoted. He falls in love with Yumi, a seamstress who wants to live the American Dream, except they have a child together and Yumi ends up dying in a car accident shortly after.

Noa on the other hand, is sleeping with a girl who makes comments about how she finds it weird that Hansu is Noa's mentor and is paying for everything, she accuses Hansu of being the real father of Noa and that is how he finds out Isak was never his father after all. The same night, he goes for dinner with Hansu where he learns everything, as well as all of his history in the yakuza. Noa is ashamed of this, he is honest with the way he feels like he can't live with himself knowing that his own blood is corrupt. He returns him to have a go at Sunja for not being honest with him, drops out of university and runs away. He sends both his mother and Hansu money every single month to go towards lifestyles and to pay back for his university experience, he feels as if he owes it.

Book 3

The main synopsis of this section is to discuss Noa and Mozasu now that they are both adults in their 40s with children. A school friend of Mozasu, Haruki ends up having the most insane plot twist in the story. The man works as a policeman and has an entire gay plot, despite him being a well beloved man as well as having a wife and children.

Hansu being Hansu decides to hire private investigators so he can locate where Noa is residing. At this point he has one son and three daughters with his wife, he is now considered a Japanese resident and also runs his own pachinko parlour in Japan. When Hansu tells Sunja about this she wants to find him immediately. They drive all the way to the correct area where Hansu tells Sunja it is not a good idea to speak to him and that they should wait longer before making any form of physical contact. As soon as Sunja sees her son, she comes rushing out of the car to speak to him. Noa tells Sunja about his family, the disgust that comes with being Korean and how he has to lie to everyone about who he is because his boss hates foreigners and his wifes mother would not allow him to be around if they found out he was Korean. He promises to call Sunja that night and when he doesn't, Sunja innocently thinks it is because Noa no longer has the home phone number anymore. In actual fact, he took the whole seeing his birth parents again very, very badly.

Mozasu becomes a rich man, rich enough to literally hire famous singers to attend his son Solomon's birthday party, so if you're looking for a fictional sugar daddy then you've come to the right place. Sunja's mother Yangjin passes away after giving Sunja one last mouthful about how awful Hansu was and that Noa deserved his fate because he was born 'a bad seed'. At her funeral in the following chapter, it was revealed that Mozasu's partner Etsuko has a daughter who had had an abortion a chapters prior had then moved in with the family and spends the entire funeral trying to make a move on Solomon? I think that Hana is a character that needs to be studied in the history books.

Fast forward a few years after Yangjin's funeral and it feels like Mozasu, Sunja and Hansu simply don't exist where the book begins to revolve around Solomon's blossoming from adolescence into early adulthood where he shags his future stepsister ???? Many a time, moves to New York for university, falls in love with Phoebe and then moves back to Japan with her to begin his post-grad job. He becomes a major gambler and tries to save not like other girls Hana who becomes an alcoholic and flees from everybody she ever knew until she tries to rekindle her flame with Solomon over the phone when he's still in New York. I've said this before in the paragraph above, but Hana NEEDS to be studied. Other than her complicated relationship with her mother, how did she end up like this? Every time I read about what she's doing, I end up feeling like that picture of Ben Affleck looking stressed out and smoking.

As the end of the book hits, Solomon's life literally falls apart. He ends up working for a big banking company where his boss Kazu wants to buy a property from a Korean woman so he can demolish it for the land he wants for a golf course. She refuses because she doesn't want to sell to a Japanese person so asks Solomon to do it for him. He approaches his father where he can get a guy who knows a guy help to achieve the deal he wants. Ironically two days after getting the land, the 93 year old lady passes away peacefully from a heart attack, however Kazu places the blame on Solomon and the yakuza and fires him from his high up position.

Meanwhile Hana is dying in the hospital in Tokyo from a disease passed on from a man which is never really fully disclosed. I imagine it would have been from her years of hostessing and battle with alcoholism. She tells Solomon how she was always in love with him and that after being sacked from his job that he should pursue his fathers pachinko parlour and run that because fuck what any Japanese person thinks of the yakuza background basically.

At a family weekend, Solomon's family are asking him about when he is going to marry Phoebe over a home cooked Korean dinner, but discusses with his father how she couldn't get a job in Japan and he couldn't work in New York without a visa. The relationship between the two shortly ends up breaking apart when Phoebe ultimately decides that they both want very different things and packs all of her bags. She leaves the next day. The night before she was in tears and angry, but the next day? A confident girlboss ready to conquer the world.

The end chapter discusses how Mozasu has been using the same desk for over 30 years and ends up as a well respected tax payer, Sunja visiting the grave of Isak to speak to him and deliver gifts and confirming that Noa had killed himself because he wanted to be 'normal'. His father Hansu is under 24 hour hospital care with good doctors over his cancer.

There were a lot of things that I felt towards this book. I feel sometimes with books, especially when a lot of the background is focused on major events in history, they can feel very focused on that rather than the characters. This was not the case with Pachinko, rather it was made apparent that all of these historic events were happening and this is what all of the characters were doing in response to all of it. Every character represented had strong developments and it felt so wonderful to grow up with them, for things in their past to haunt them, but also for them to look back at things they could have changed if they went back to that time period. The book is a super easy read, there weren't many words I didn't understand too which feels like an added bonus. It does not feel like it is over 500 pages long (which it is) and what I am most upset about is that Hansu didn't die after all of the torture and trauma he left for the family.

#min jin lee #writing #pachinko #book club #book review #literature

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nursemasters · 2 years

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Koh Hansu you piece of shit

#i hate him #pachinko #haven’t watched the show yet #i know lee minho plays him #why

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spaceoperetta · 2 years

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As someone who read the book the surprise Koh Hansu backstory episode was a surprise! Loved how it was immediately identifiable as set even further in the past with the aspect ratio. And the way it looked like an old school movie!

I knew about the great kanto earthquake but not the other parts

#pachinko

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wherethehellismysupersuit · 2 years

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Thoughts on Pachinko

I have to say, i was intrigued at the start because it had a lot of big names in it. Youn Yuh Jung, who’s character i admired in Never Twice, Lee Minho and Jung Eunchae, who had previously worked together in Eternal Monarch, and Han Jun Woo, whom i’ve seen in Be Melodramatic. The dramas were more romance based and slice of life oriented, but i was willing to give this a shot.

I saw the first episode, finished it, and immediately bought the book and devoured it in like 3 days. It’s not the type of book i usually go for, but Min Jin Lee has this beautifully simplistic way of writing events that mesh together heartbreakingly. Although i do admit the writing falters a bit in the end (this is just my opinion), I would strongly advise you to read it to get a look into the life of Zainichi Koreans, and do some research about Japan’s colonialisation and the atrocious war crimes comitted.

The story is centered around Sunja (Kim Minha), a young girl born in Korea in 1910. She is her family’s rainbow child, to phrase it in modern terms. The shaman her mother visits while pregnant with her eerily prophesies that the child will survive, and lead forward a new generation.

We see her grow up; her father’s fondness for her, her mother’s tough love influencing her to be as cheerful she could be in their lifestyle. It gets taken away by the death of her father, which is the starting point for her frankly difficult life.

Then Koh Hansu (played brilliantly by Lee Minho. I have to give him props for making me hate him on sight and yet giving me an insight into his world) enters the picture and casually preys on a 16 year old girl, getting her pregnant. After knowing he is married, Sunja makes the decision to not live life in the shadows, and rejects him after his infuriating comments. She meets Baek Isak (Noh Sanghyun), a kindly pastor who marries her to save the unborn child from being born without a father.

They move to Osaka, and the racism is stark and frequent. I did some more research on this, thinking they had slightly dramatized it, as all media does, and i was horrified at the crimes they committed. Forced labour, comfort women, the list goes on. Here’s the wiki link, if anyone needs it. Even present day Koreans living in Japan are considered Special Residents, not people who have lived there for over a century or more. Many anti Korean groups also are active, targeting korean schools and the people.

Jung Eunchae had been my girl crush ever since she played a the villainous, (but hot) prime minister in Eternal Monarch. I feel like she shined in the few scenes she was given, but i suspect we’ll see more in the S2. My only complaint was they kind of highlighted Baek Yoseb’s (Han Jun woo) more misogynistic qualities, but you do have to remember this takes place in the 1940s.

Showing Hansu’s side of the story was a bold choice not present in the novel. I did like his scenes with his dad, and the Yakuza man who i assume became his father in law later. But then again, no matter how hot you think Lee Min Ho is, his actions are bad. period.

The last episode legit moved me to tears, and i’m not really the kind of person who cries easily no matter what my tumblr shows. Props to all the child actors, props to Hana (Mari Yamamoto) for being a manipulative lil shit and yet making me feel sad, props to Etsuko, (her mother, played by the lovely Kaho Minami), Mozasu (Soji Arai). Although i feel like they focused a lot on Solomon’s story, whose actor Jin Ha i’m not too keen on, but the hospital scene was beautiful.

The episode ends with Korean women who came to japan in the time period, and their stories and their smiles, behind which lie several tragedies, must be remembered.

It is not a story you should read if you want a happy ending. Like in my previous review, i want to reiterate that emotionally, noone really gets a happy ending. i won’t further explain, cause that’d be spoilers.

Now that i’ve cleared my overfilled head, i liked S1, despite little flaws. I hope they continue to keep the production and story line just as great in season 2.

#pachinko #pachinko spoilers #long post #she has risen from the grave 25 21 put her into

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