Pachinko: Book 3, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

In 1969, Noa has been living in Nagano, passing as Japanese, and running the business office of Cosmos Pachinko for seven years. He has paid Hansu back for his Waseda education and continues to send money to his family. He has finally decided to follow through on his boss’s advice that a man of his age and position should be married.

Noa is attracted to a woman named Risa Iwamura, the head filing clerk at Cosmos. Her family, too, is touched by scandal: when Risa was a teenager, her father, a doctor, had dispensed the wrong medication to some patients, leading to their deaths. Her father then killed himself, leaving the family “both destitute and tainted.” Risa is considered to be unmarriageable because of this tragedy.

Both Noa and Risa have been lonely for a long time, and when they marry, they develop genuine affection for one another. Soon, Risa becomes the highly competent stay-at-home mother of four children; though she has been expelled “from the tribe of ordinary middle-class people, she had effectively reproduced her own tribe.”

Though Noa loves his family, he is careful around them—he doesn’t see his life as a “rebirth,” as he carries his Korean past “like a dark, heavy rock within him.” He lives in constant fear of discovery. He continues to read his beloved English literature, but otherwise maintains no ties to his younger self.

One day Noa’s family takes a trip to Matsumoto Castle, Japan’s oldest existing castle. When the tour guide explains that the castle is thought to be cursed, Noa’s six-year-old wants to know what a curse is. He tells Noa that if he put a curse on someone, he could always reverse it. Noa tells his son that it isn’t so easy to reverse a curse. Then he takes the children for ice cream.