Pachinko

"Oh, you must! This has been quite a recent read for me. I avoided reading it for a while because so many people told me it was brilliant. I wanted to wait till the hype died down. It is fantastic. Again, it does what I like best, which is to immerse you in this world. It really does give you a history of modern Korea, told through the eyes of four generations of this family. You get so caught up in their lives that you really care what’s going to happen to them. Again, it’s about people with no power being put upon by people with power. The central character you start out with, Sunja, is a woman who is seduced by a Yakuza gangster. He’s rich and powerful. She’s never been treated nicely by anyone, so when he comes by and is very polite and flattering to her, she falls for him completely and has an illegitimate child. He has a family back home, but he’s got Sunja on the side. You expect him to be a complete baddie, but he’s not. I love the way that Lee weaves the story, so that you are taken from this incredibly poor area of Korea to Japan , which was the colonizing power. The Koreans were regarded as dirt in Japan. They were nothing. They occupied these incredibly poor ghetto areas of Osaka. There was no work for them, and they had to endure horrific bureaucracy and being carded everywhere. They couldn’t do anything, and they couldn’t be anything without the backing of rich Japanese people. The only jobs that any of them could get were in the pachinko parlors. Pachinko is a gambling pinball machine which, apparently, is a big part of the culture in Korea. There were parlors everywhere, and the Koreans worked in them, and all the poor Koreans would go and lose their money in them. It’s what kept the entire Korean economy going in Japan. It’s quite extraordinary. “If it’s done well, you feel you’ve learned something about the world at the same time” As with any illegal or semi-illegal enterprise, drugs and arms and all the rest of it come into it as well. Some of the people who got sucked into this world suddenly found themselves making money that they never expected to make and rising up through society. It was fascinating because it was a window onto a world that I knew absolutely nothing about. She made me care. I wanted to know what happens to the characters. When someone dies, it’s so heartrending. You think, ‘That’s not right. You can’t do that!’ But it’s life, and it’s what happens. I’m fascinated by the whole subject of colonialism, and the abuse of power generally—how some people think they’re better than other people and know better what they should have and do, but, at the same time, seem to make a lot of money out of them. It’s a perennial topic, which runs through a number of the books that I’ve picked. As a species, we keep doing this to each other. It’s quite a horrible thing to do to another culture, to try and squash it and impose your own views on somebody else and try and make them part of your world, to profit from. I don’t think there are. When I wrote my first one, The Tenth Gift , there were almost none. Obviously, there’s Paul Bowles , but he’s writing a very different sort of story to anything that I’m doing. I like big, sprawling, immersive, epic stories, and he is a gloriously spare, sharp, sardonic writer with a very specific view of Morocco. He’s very good, though. He knows his Morocco, and I know my Morocco. When I started writing, there wasn’t anything in the canon that I could go to. In a way, that was quite liberating. You think, ‘I really am on my own, and I’m really going to have to do the work.’ When I wrote the first of my historical novels, I knew nothing about 17th-century Morocco. You have to put in the yards, and that’s been a good process for me throughout all these books. Every single one of my historical novels starts from a basis of ignorance. I’m amazed by people who can write ten books set in the 15th or 16th century. It requires an amazing depth of knowledge to be able to do that, but I would get bored. I need to learn new things, and I need to tread new ground. T he Black Crescent is set in 1954-1955. In the early part of the 20th century, the French saw an opportunity to colonize Morocco. They didn’t call it colonialism; they called themselves a protectorate. It’s a nice distinction, but it doesn’t really hold up to any sort of scrutiny. It was quite a forceful colonization, though not as forceful as that of Algeria, which I wrote about in The Sea Gate . That was partly what sparked my interest in the fight for Moroccan independence. It had been rumbling on for a while, obviously interrupted by the Second World War, when there was no chance of trying to get out from under the French because everybody was in a state of chaos. When the French removed the Moroccan sultan in 1953, a real push for independence started to come from the grassroots. They formed an Independence Party that rose up from the people and started in Casablanca. Casa is a big, sprawling European city that was imposed on the coast of Morocco by the French. They razed what was there and built themselves a second Marseilles. It was a huge port to ship out all the riches of Morocco to France—all the phosphates, all the bauxite. Meanwhile, all the Moroccans got poorer and poorer, and ended up marginalized and living in shanty towns around the edges of the city because people who came in to work for the French had nowhere else to live. They’re called ‘bidonvilles’ which means ‘tin can cities.’ They’re these shacks literally made of old oil drums, joined together. They’re huge spaces and they’re still there on the outskirts of the main city. Moroccans couldn’t afford to live in the nice, posh apartments that the French built for themselves in the center, the beautiful, towering, white Art Deco architecture. When you end up with a very rich, occupying power having a lovely time wearing skimpy bikinis in a Muslim country—with huge swimming pools along the Corniche—and the Moroccans are doing all the work and living in incredibly poverty-stricken circumstances, you’re going to get some tensions and friction. Then, if you take the sultan, who is, in Moroccan culture, next to God, and exile him to Madagascar , that’s adding insult to injury. So all the elements are there for an uprising. Into this tension, I drop my poor protagonist, Hamou, a lad from a village in the Anti-Atlas Mountains, which is the village my husband and I live in for half the year. Hamou is a sweetheart, he’s very kind, he’s empathetic. He doesn’t want to do any hurt to anyone, he wants to do well, he wants to send money back to his family. He’s had an education, he’s done well, he’s a clever boy. But then he finds himself in the French police force, having to enforce their laws against his own people as it gets increasingly violent. I want the reader to stand with Hamou on that crossroads of a moral dilemma, and think, ‘What do I do at this point? My neighbors, I think, are involved with the nationalists. They may even be terrorists. And my employers are monsters.’ Through Hamou, we see the different points of view. We get caught in the middle, thinking, ‘The French have done some very nice things for Morocco, they’ve built schools and hospitals and railways. But they do this, this, and this. There’s the racism, there’s the exploitation, and they’re killing people and torturing them in the basement of the police station.’ Hamou has to make a choice. He can’t just stand on the sidelines because he’s literally being forced into making a choice. That’s where The Black Crescent comes from. I wouldn’t have been able to write it had it not been for Abdel, who had family members who were involved in the nationalist uprising. He also worked for ten years in Casablanca, so he knows the city like the back of his hand. The idea for this book came from a black-and-white photo I found online of this incredibly beautiful young woman standing in a clearly Moroccan setting with arches behind her. She’s got her hair up in a headscarf, but her shift dress is incredibly low cut and flimsy. And you think, ‘That’s not right.’ It’s a very modest culture. I dug into the origin of that photo and found out that she was a prostitute in what they called the Bousbir, in Casablanca. It was the new Bousbir that the French had established as a Disneyland of Morocco, where all their bureaucrats and military could go and have sex with local girls, eat, and party. It’s a fantasy Morocco that they made in this walled quarter. They had these women come in and they weren’t allowed out. That, for me, is like The Poisonwood Bible’s gardening metaphor. It’s not subtle, but this is what was going on in Morocco at this time—the country was being screwed. I was so fascinated by that photo because it’s so evocative and beautiful, and I wanted to know what happened. Nobody talks about prostitution in Morocco. It’s not one of the subjects you can talk about. Abdel would go and do research with academic papers written in Arabic, which I couldn’t read. Then we’d sit down and talk about it. I’d go through the French sources, and he’d have to help me with some of the translation. It was fascinating, because then we would talk about this and that. I would read the bit I’d written that day, and Abdel would say, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting, because this or because that ,’ and that would lead off in another direction. It became quite collaborative, which was a lovely way to write. As a writer, normally you’re on your own. You’re stuck with it, you’re there with your big problem sat in front of you, and you think, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to go with this.’ I could talk it out with somebody, and that was lovely. Also, when you’ve got somebody waiting for the next bit of the story, you get on with it. It makes me write. A little bit. Abdel grew up in a Berber village, and Hamou comes from that background as well. He was also very naughty. I wanted to take a rebellious lad like that and then squash him, which was basically what happened if you went into the French education system and training for the police. You take that young man who has all this to give, and you squash him into this little box. Because I know Abdel, I know how he would have embraced the education and the training to get on and do all the good things. And then, he would have gotten to a certain point and said, ‘No.’ I think that gives Hamou a source of real authenticity of character, because I know the person that he’s based on, and I know he would not overstep that mark."

"Japan’s bright, noisy pachinko parlors hide a dark secret. These pinball emporiums are run mostly by Japan’s Korean minority because for decades it was the only employment available to them. In Pachinko, Min Jin Lee traces the difficult history of Koreans in Japan through one family’s story. The saga begins before World War I in a small Korean fishing village, where a young woman becomes pregnant and is saved from disgrace by a man who offers to marry her and takes her to Japan. We follow her and her two sons as they struggle against discrimination, trying to gain respect in a hostile country. Min Jin Lee brings this corner of history to life in a tale that spans three wars and the growth of a multibillion-dollar business that offered Korean-Japanese a way out of poverty."

"Min Jin Lee because Pachinko knocked my socks off, and I was lucky enough to spend an evening with her at the Texas Book Festival."

"the masterly "Pachinko," by Min Jin Lee"

"I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is for anyone who enjoys stories about family, love and sacrifice."

"Min Jin Lee's "Pachinko" is a masterpiece. It is a complex epic story rendered with sensitivity and emotional nuance."

""Pachinko," by Min Jin Lee. I know almost nothing about it except that it's really good and it's epic, and I'm in that kind of mood."

"Pachinko is the novel I tell anyone who will listen about. It is a multigenerational, sweeping saga of Koreans in Japan. The prose is as edifying as it is absorbing. There are no easy, convenient endings for any of these characters but my goodness, how richly Min Jin Lee renders their lives."