Review: “Pachinko” is a sweeping epic of multigenerational loss that’s strangely hard to get lost in
“Pachinko” isn’t the most obvious choice for an American TV adaptation. Spanning 80 years, Lee’s Korean American door-stopper, a finalist for a 2017 National Book Award, begins in the 1910s, an era of Korean history few Americans are familiar with. It also deals with intra-Asian bias, a subject little understood in the West and one that mostly seems to get trotted out in discussions of race and racism as a cudgel against members of Asian diasporas.
Through two twists of fate, Sunja ends up in Japan. Both come in the form of handsome, slightly older men. Hansu , a powerful, Japanese-allied businessman, sees in the freckled, never-schooled 16-year-old the same potential that transformed him from a dreg of society to a feared man about town. Isak , a sickly and idealistic pastor from the fallen Korean aristocracy named after the Old Testament’s sacrificial son, sees himself as Sunja’s possible savior, too, in more ways than one.
Here’s where I’ll happily confess that “Pachinko” is one of my favorite novels of the past decade. It spoke to me so much in part because it illustrates a suspicion I’m sure I share with many children of immigrants — that I will never understand the turbulent existences of my grandparents, let alone my great-grandparents, nor how they persevered through everything that they did.
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