Pachinko (2017) Review

"A woman's lot in life is to suffer."

Even a small character is the hero of their own small story. Pachinko has a huge cast of characters, and many, many of them are artfully given their quick, tender moment in the spotlight.

Many of the novel's Korean characters are forced to battle the currents from birth til death, but they still manage to carve out lives, often -but not always- unhappy, in the raw fracture between their homeland and their adopted one. They're stuck, but they're not immobilized.

"Have you eaten?" is famously one way that Koreans ask each other "how are you?", and as the cast survives first Japanese colonial occupation, then imperial defeat during WW2, the answer to that question is sometimes precarious. And when things are well in the family's life as post-war Japan rises economically, it is often the noblesse oblige of their lifelong unwanted underworld benefactor buttressing their climb up the ladder.

The characters are given a slice of the pie, but it's a very narrow one. The novel's eponymous pachinko parlors are ultimately the cultural carve-out to wealth for the family, but equality, and opportunity, and finally respect prove as hard to win as the gambling machines are themselves.