Pachinko: Flashbacks 1 key example

Pachinko seamlessly switches from following the minister to following his future wife. In this instance, the slight temporal adjustment allows the novel to pick up passing details and develop different narrative strands. Having just mentioned that Sunja “was pregnant,” it now turns back the clock and retells the story from her view. The flashback traces her romance with Hansu, letting the reader in on a secret that had been shared only between Sunja and her mother. Pachinko’s free-floating narrator slips into Sunja’s consciousness for a glimpse of her mushroom-gathering and laundry meetings with her lover.

This play on time is part of a novel that largely skips through it. Pachinko walks its reader across four different two-decade-long books that trace Korean-Japanese relations through the 20th century. It delivers its sprawling historical account in largely episodic slices: Isak vanishes to prison and returns, haggard and close to dying. Mozasu takes over the pachinko business, then becomes a father chapters later. The novel slows and speeds itself to accommodate the narrative needs of its characters, allowing the reader to experience time in a different way.