Pachinko
Pachinko
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Min Jin Lee on Pachinko
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A boy’s death, thirty years unansweredThe book’s origin is a single moment in a nearly empty lecture hall. Lee was nineteen, a Yale junior, and had gone as a favor to a friend. The American missionary at the podium described a thirteen-year-old Korean boy, born in Japan, who had jumped from the roof of his apartment building. His classmates had written in his yearbook that he should go back to where he belonged, that they hated him, and the words “die, die, die.” The boy does not become a central character in the novel; he appears only briefly, seen through the eyes of a sympathetic Japanese detective. But the question his story forced on her proved impossible to set down.
When I was nineteen years old, I attended a lecture about the Korean Japanese people in which I heard a very terrible story about a little Korean boy being bullied and being motivated to kill himself by his peers. And that story was burned into my brain and I really couldn’t forget it. [paraphrased from audio]
She carried the question for thirty years before the novel was done. The length of time is the measure of how seriously she took it.
The book was still answering that question four years after publication. When anti-Asian violence surged in 2021, Lee connected what she was watching in real time directly to what had driven her to write in the first place.
My sense of outrage is triggered again and again and again right now… I wrote this book as an act of activism.
The novel’s opening line, “History has failed us, but no matter,” is not a lament. Lee spent years finding the right words to make the argument she had been circling since that lecture, and when she finally wrote the line, she understood it as a two-part claim: an indictment and a refusal to be stopped by it.
‘History has failed us, but no matter’ serves as my thesis statement. I believe history has failed almost everybody who is ordinary in the world, not just the Korean-Japanese, who are the subject of Pachinko. I am also arguing that the discipline of history has failed. It is not that historians aren’t doing their jobs but rather that the memory of history has been reconstructed by the elite, because the overwhelming majority of ordinary people rarely leave sufficient primary documents; they do not have others recording their lives in real time. The phrase ‘but no matter’ is a statement of defiance. It doesn’t matter that history has failed us because ordinary people have persisted anyway.
How she wrote it
Two drafts, two decades, one city that changed everythingThe first draft took seven years and was finished before Lee ever set foot in Japan. She had read dozens of academic texts on the Korean Japanese (zainichi, meaning ethnic Koreans who have lived in Japan across generations) and written a complete manuscript she called Motherland. She described it at a PBS Books event as “really angry” and said it lacked “the love that was true” [paraphrased from audio]. When her husband’s job moved the family to Tokyo in 2007, she arrived intending to revise that draft. The interviews she conducted with Korean Japanese people in Tokyo and Osaka made revision impossible. What the fieldwork cost her structurally was the entire architecture of the book.
In my initial draft, I had started the book in the late 1970s; after my interviews, I realized that the story had to begin in 1910, and my character Sunja moves from Korea to Japan in 1933. To put it mildly, this was a traumatic realization, because I had to change everything and start again.
Starting over also meant reconceiving the novel’s entire center of gravity. The protagonist of the first draft was Solomon, a young financier who now appears near the end of the book as a relatively minor figure. Sunja, the first-generation matriarch who anchors the saga, did not exist in Motherland at all. The shift from one character to the other was also a shift in scale that frightened Lee.
I initially had written this book from 1996 to 2003 and it was not an epic...it was meant to be a book about Solomon, who appears at the very end of the book now and is a minor character. And then after I moved to Japan in 2007 and I interviewed all these Korean-Japanese people, I realized that I got it all wrong and the only way this book and the story would work is by making it an epic. And I was terrified, because I didn’t have that kind of ambition.
The interviews did more than reroute the plot. They overturned the assumption Lee had carried into the project: that a community defined by exclusion would define itself by victimhood. What she found instead reshaped the emotional register of the entire novel.
After I moved to Japan, I interviewed dozens upon dozens of Korean Japanese. I was interested in what ordinary people do when those who are in charge are out to lunch. And when [those] leaders and elites are out to lunch and they make shit decisions, what do ordinary people do? They look for water, shelter, food, and they watch out for their families.
bloomsite.wordpress.com, “Q&A with Min Jin Lee: On History, Survival & Intimacy | Bloom”The title itself came from the same fieldwork. In nearly every interview Lee conducted, someone had a family member who had worked in a pachinko parlor (a type of mechanical gambling arcade that became one of the few industries open to Korean Japanese workers under Japan’s discriminatory labor conditions). She visited parlors, interviewed owners, and studied the machines until the image crystallized into something structural.
Pachinko became an organising metaphor for my story. I wanted to explore the idea that life is like trying to win a game, which may have been designed to make the player lose.
The form of the novel, its wide-angle omniscient narration moving across four generations and dozens of characters, was a deliberate craft choice rooted in Lee’s reading of nineteenth-century fiction. She had trained on those novels precisely because she wanted to write the kind of social narrative that could hold a whole community rather than a single consciousness.
In Western literature, omniscient narration was the popular style in the nineteenth century, and it is my favorite point of view for community narratives.
The personal thread
Her father’s city, her mother’s city, and the question in betweenLee’s interest in displacement across generations was not only historical. Her father came from Wonsan, a city now in North Korea; her mother from Busan, in the south. The question the novel asks, what it means to be Korean when the country itself has been divided and its people scattered, was also the question of her own family. She wanted the novel to push that question past any single, settled answer.
I wanted to complicate the sense of what it means to be Korean in a diasporic world. This question must be asked and answered by everyone now in a transnational world where we are linked and connected.
The urgency behind the novel was also a commitment to historical visibility. The Korean Japanese communities Lee wrote about had been present in Japan for generations, but their stories had not traveled. The historical record had left them out. She saw the novel as a corrective, a way of insisting on a presence that official memory had not preserved.
I want my readers to see people like the people in my book as fully human, connected with history, persecution, and culture. I also want my readers to see that we were always here.
bloomsite.wordpress.com, “Q&A with Min Jin Lee: On History, Survival & Intimacy | Bloom”What she wants us to sit with
Fiction as border crossingLee has been open about wanting the novel to do something to its reader, not merely to inform them. At the Dayton Literary Peace Prize ceremony, she named her agenda without apology. The joke carried a serious mechanism: fiction as the technology by which a reader becomes someone they had never expected to be.
I do have an agenda — to make you all Korean.
She described that mechanism most fully in a video essay recorded for KBS, where she moved from her own reading life to what she hoped Pachinko would do for someone who picked it up knowing nothing about Korean Japanese history. The argument is not that empathy follows information. It is that literature enacts a crossing that information cannot.
Through literature, I have become Russian, and French, and Muslim, and Israeli, and Palestinian...Through literature, we cross borders. And we become united with the selves we did not know that we could be. And we become reunited with the selves that we have lost. [paraphrased from audio]