Book review

Note: This is a book review I had posted to my GoodReads account a couple of days ago. I want to reproduce it here in its entirety, given that I want this site to represent my writing. Here it is.

I feel that a standard book review that I would write does not apply for what I believe I need to say about Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. As I read the book, I wondered at the style of narrative that the author used. From a third-person perspective, it was told, but the viewpoint was one of the characters, and that person whose thoughts were told changed throughout the book. It even changed for a moment at the end of a scene. People who had extremely minor roles in a scene might be the voice of the narrator.

This literary technique allowed me to be more objective in my own assessment of the characters. Even if I could emphathize with a character, reading what another character felt at the moment jolted me into re-assessment, in such a way that I was challenged to question my own assumptions.

Pachinko tells the story of a few generations of a Korean family, starting in a small coastal islet near Busan, and following a migration to Japan, where most of the story is told. The time period is from 1910 to about 1990, or most of the twentieth century.

With meticulous care, the narrator describes how a teenage girl cleaned clothes of the boarders living in her mother's house, or how sisters-in-law, who often called each other 'Sister,' cared for there husbands in a very traditional life-style. It is told with respect, even honor in the execution of daily tasks done well.

At one point after reading, I wrote the following in my personal journal:

"Reading Pachinko, told in such a sensitive way about how the various Koreans saw others or their situation, I tried to put my own life and our situation in perspective. Doing things for the welfare of our children, comparing how well we are doing to what the protagonists are going through in the book. It is good to slow down and think, to try to get another perspective."

The treatment of Koreans in Japan is a sort of understory, reflected in events such as the fingerprinting of a fourteen-year-old boy as a form of registration, not as a citizen of Japan, but as a foreigner allowed to live in the country. This for a person who had been born in the country, and whose parents had also been born in Japan.

I've always appreciated reading about the social and personal effects on people subjected to conditions not under their control in various parts of the world. I say 'appreciated' because it was so different from my own upbringing that the stories have stayed with me throughout my life. The first-ever story I read was of a boy in a concentration camp during World War II. The scale of cruelty and inhumaneness was much greater in that case, yet we continue to find numerous instances of inhumane acts or indifference towards people, at no fault of their own, in real life. Having the Korean's experience in Japan told in a powerful way is one of the reasons I loved this book.