According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Min Jin Lee’s 2017 book, Pachinko is “Beautiful… Lee’s sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic.” This is on the cover of the book, and, being familiar with the Chronicle, I was excited when I saw it. Many of my friends, whose taste I do not doubt, have recommended the book to me. Being so well reviewed, I was excited to dive into this book during my year in literature.
I was disappointed to find that this book is straight trash. It lacks even a sliver of excellence. It is, by far, the worst novel I’ve read in my adult life. The only book I can think of that challenges this book for the title is The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. In hindsight, though, many of the problems with this book plagued that one, although to a much lesser extent.
These problems are primarily twofold: the writing is horrible, and the motivating ideology is bankrupt. As far as The Corrections goes, I’m not going to review that here. Pachinko is my concern. I’m satisfied with splitting this into two sections. One, I’ll quote paradigmatic sections of Pachinko. These exemplify the book’s awful prose. Second, I’ll explain the book’s underlying liberal ideology and how it offers an uninspired and meaningless narrative.
Awful Writing
The book is full of moments like this: (of course, spoiler warning).
Most Koreans in Japan had at least three names. Mozasu went by Mozasu Boku, the Japanization of Moses Baek, and rarely used his Japanese surname, Bando, the tsumei listed on his school documents and residency papers. With a first name from a Western religion, an obvious Korean surname, and his ghetto address, everyone knew what he was—there was no point in denying it. The Japanese kids would have nothing to do with him, but Mozasu no longer gave a shit. When he was younger, getting picked on used to bother him, though far less than it had bothered Noa, who had compensated by outperforming his classmates academically and athletically. Every day, before school began and after school ended, the bigger boys told Mozasu, “Go back to Korea, you smelly bastard.” If there was a crowd of them, Mozasu would keep walking; however, if there were only one or two assholes, he would hit them as hard as he could until he saw blood.
Mozasu knew he was becoming one of the bad Koreans” (243).
I laughed out loud when I read the last line. It’s one of the book’s cornier lines, but the whole situation is ridiculous. The young boy who is beat every day, or beats up other kids enough to draw blood. I guess blunt force trauma isn’t a thing in her world. But this paragraph appears in the book’s corniest chapter. The paragraph isn’t able to capture the chapter’s humour. Jin Lee doesn’t mind swearing in the book, but the chapter is the first that really focuses on this Mozasu. As you can see, she attempts to show that he’s not much of a rule follower; he’s a bit of a rebel, a bit of a bad boy. And the only real tool she employs to show this is to use excessive language in a way that’s absurdly earnest and juvenile. This boy is badass, because he swears.
She commonly resorts to similarly shallow techniques to convey her characters. I don’t know the precise reason, but, if I were to diagnose the crux of her problem, it would be relatively simple: show, don’t tell. As a qualification, I think show don’t tell is an overused criticism. It’s not a hard rule; there’s nothing wrong with explaining the interiority of a character, saying how they feel, or explaining something extra or meta narratival. It’s better understood as a guideline; it’s a good tool and measure of one’s writing, as well as one’s respect for the audience. Are you letting characters do things, are you giving your audience interpretive room, or are you forcing a character to fit the plot? Are you forcing a particular interpretation of events? It’s a guideline, more for the author than the audience.
Yet, Min Jin Lee is seemingly ignorant of the principle or she ignores it entirely. I am sure she has her reasons, but the result is sad. If the experience of reading the book were compared to the experience of watching a film, it would be analogous to a bad Netflix original film.
Let’s look at some more quotes.
“During one of their monthly lunches, Hansu had said that the leftists were “a bunch of whiners” and the rightists were “plain stupid” (276).
The context seems to imply that the author thinks this is some kind of profound political statement. As we will see in the second section, we’ll see more about the emptiness of her political criticism. But for now, check out her witty dialogue!
“She laughed. ‘Hey, Christians aren’t supposed to fuck before marriage, right?’” (419).
“Maybe you feel like having some pussy?” (420).
Every girl in this book is obsessed with finding out the status of their crushes virginity. She writes women like the men tumblr (rightly so) criticizes for how shallow they write their women characters. She’s obsessed with women’s boobs and sexualizing their bodies.
Another annoying part of the book, maybe the most annoying is how she italicizes and adds in random Japanese and Korean words. This may have been well intended, but it reads like a teenage written anime fanfiction attempting to be culturally sensitive. She randomly adds in, ‘nee’ after dialogue with sentences. I am unsure what positive function this serves. All it does is remind the reader that these people are speaking Japanese. However, it does this by reminding the reader of racist stereotypes of Japanese people. So it basically reminds the reader of the characters’ race by doing its best to associate them with lazy stereotypes of that race. Check out the following quote:
“’Oishi! Oishi! Mo-san, thank you so much,’ she said. “A handsome young man who can make sweets. You are perfect, nee?’” (248).
I could pick many, many more quotes, but I think that should be enough to show the flaws of the Jin Lee’s writing.
Ideological Bankruptcy
The ideology is bankrupt liberalism. It follows the same error in which liberalism invariably finds itself. It limits its critical gaze. Instead of looking at the wide ranging sociological influences on characters, it examines and values each character from an ahistorical vacuum. Characters are shaped solely by their immediate influences, and they are never given the opportunity to be interpreted from a wider lens.
Take the book’s scope for example. The book is almost five hundred pages long; it spans multiple generations and various world transforming events. Hell, look at the books’ focus. It’s focus is anti-Korean racism in Japan. She’s written a book on an entrenched, historical, and systematic oppression and racism; this book spanned five hundred pages, decades, and momentous world historical events. Yet, she avoids any and all historical explanations or origins for racism. She doesn’t even consider it much of a problem. Look at how she ends it, her conclusion to the problem.
“Then the whole Japan-is-evil stuff. Sure, there were assholes in Japan, she had changed or his feelings for her had changed. Hadn’t he been leaning toward asking her to marry him? yet, now, when she put forward the idea of marrying for citizenship, he realized that he didn’t want to become an American. It made sense for him to do so; it would have made his father happy. Was it better to be an American than a Japanese? He knew Koreans who had become naturalized Japanese, and it made sense to do so, but he didn’t want to do that now, either. Maybe one day. She was right; it was weird that he was born in Japan, and had a South Korean passport. He couldn’t rule out getting naturalized. Maybe another Korean wouldn’t understand that, but he didn’t care anymore.
Kazu was a shit, but so what? He was one bad guy, and he was Japanese. Perhaps that was what going to school in America had taught him. Even if there were a hundred bad Japanese, if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement” (471).
The problem of racism, and really everything turns out to be just ‘bad people.’ It’s that same liberal cop-out for everything. Racism can be solved with being colour blind. It ignores all systemic issues. It’s like Harry Potter. As Shaun has pointed out in his essay on the series, according to J.K. Rowling, there is no such thing as bad roles, or bad actions, there are only bad people. Min Jin Lee agrees. For her, there’s nothing wrong with being a banker, just as there’s nothing wrong with being rich. The only problem in this world is bad people; people who are prejudiced. If only everyone was nicer to others, and said ‘hi’ when they passed by on the street, treated everyone the same, then all the world’s problems would be solved.
If you want anymore proof she thinks this way, look at how she describes the problem of racism.
“’I worked and made money because I thought it would make me a man. I thought people would respect me if I was rich” (475).
The problem with racism is that, even if you become rich, people are still racist to you. What the heck, right?!
In short, this book is awful. Wild Swans did it better. Sure, it’s plagued by the same bankrupt ideology, but at least it was better written.