Maybe 2.5 stars? I’m really ambivalent about this book, so this is gonna be a long one.

First of all, of course it’s always important to give a voice to what the author calls “historical victims”: in this case, Koreans in Japan. It’s a story that doesn’t get told much, if at all; meanwhile, novels about Japanese internment and about Chinese-Americans are becoming more popular. And as a child of immigrant parents I know how important and insight-provoking the generational view can be; I usually love stories that center on a single family or small community. The changing situations and values over time are always really interesting to see, and I particularly enjoyed the culture shock (for lack of a better term) that Phoebe displays toward the end of the book. Pachinko itself was a strong and well-chosen symbol of the whole experience, the prejudice/discrimination and desperation for any way to support your family (among other complex themes).

But. The perspective seemed to jump around a lot (case in point: Haruki and Ayame might be family friends, but they don’t belong to the family and their role isn’t so critical that it needs a chapter), and I felt detached from a lot of the chapters focusing on the middle generations (I liked the early parts in Korea, and I particularly enjoyed Phoebe’s perspective because it was so different).

Part of it is that all the characters sound exactly the same; while I certainly acknowledge and appreciate how difficult it can be for an author to really “diversify” their own voice to make the characters distinct, in spite of some very different emerging viewpoints there was a sameness about the novel’s tone. Also, it felt really similar to the token-representation Asian immigrant novels I had to read in elementary/middle school (Journey to Topaz I enjoyed; Of Nightingales That Weep, not so much) — the simple syntax, slightly stilted dialogue, seemingly arbitrary deployment of Japanese and Korean terms without much context or explanation.

I also didn’t really like the focus on stereotypical femininity and women’s sexuality. Women were described through a male-gaze lens (with focus on ass and tits, to use the novel’s language) even when seen through the eyes of another woman; “it’s part of the culture” is not an excuse for the objectification and perpetration of gender roles when the author’s tone and treatment thereof show where they personally stand. All the female characters were either dutiful and demure (Kyunghee, Yumi, Ayame) or shameless temptresses/bitches (early Sunja, Hansu’s wife, Hana) — the exception being Phoebe, but it was just too little, too late.