Pachinko: Foil 7 key examples

Sunja and Etsuko experience contrasting circumstances. While both characters fall in love, they do so in ways that change their approaches to marriage. Sunja’s relationship with Hansu precedes marriage. She bears Noa in the expectation that Hansu would wed her, only to be cruelly disappointed when she finds her lover already married. But Etsuko’s affairs come during wedlock—she betrays her husband when the marriage grows loveless and stale. “All her life she had never expected this kind of loneliness,” the narrator recounts as they trace the arc of Etsuko’s infidelity. One woman falls in love with the hope of marrying, and the other falls in love to escape marriage.

This difference in their affairs informs their subsequent understandings of marriage. When Isak offers his hand, Sunja can hardly “comprehend his reasons”—the offer seems so generous that it seems to her like it would only come from an “angel or a fool.” But accepting the minister’s proposal means that “a painful sentence would be lifted from her mother, the boardinghouse, herself, and the child.” Marriage gives Sunja a second chance at redemption and a new life.

Etusko eyes her marriage to Mozasu with greater hesitance. For Mozasu’s Japanese lover, the commitment comes colored with ethnic concerns. To marry a Korean—a pachinko owner, too—would merely compound her shame. Her mother and sister urge her against the relationship, explaining that “pachinko gave off a strong odor of poverty and criminality.” Etsuko turns down her new lover’s rings and watches, fearful that an acceptance might ruin her children’s lives more than her affairs already have. What is a saving grace for one happens to be a scandal in the waiting for the other, and their respective attitudes add complexity to the novel’s portrayal of femininity.

In character, though, they stand worlds apart. Goro’s goodwill plays counterpoint to Hansu’s elegant ruthlessness. “Because he could be silly, it was possible to forget that he was a powerful businessman,” the narrator explains to the reader. The novel’s affable pachinko owner uses his money to uplift others: he establishes a reputation in the city for helping his fellow community members. Goro mentors Mozasu, opening the door to new opportunities for a protégé who would otherwise be entangled with the police, and he singlehandedly sustains Toyotama-san’s business with his uniform orders.

Hansu—who controls entire supply chains and runs money-lending operations—enjoys the power of an entirely different order. He beats women, tracks down Noa’s whereabouts, and continues to re-surface no matter how desperately Sunja tries to avoid him. Hansu seems all but inevitable—and selfish, too. “Choose your sons over everything else,” he warns Sunja in anticipation of Osaka’s imminent bombings, “leave the others if you have to.” By bending others to his will, he gives free rein to his desires.

By pitting Korean-American characters against Korean-Japanese characters, Pachinko underscores the complexity of the ethnic identity. Korean culture is no monolith, and the lovers spotlight the diversity of the diaspora through their individual experiences. Hailing from America, Phoebe does not regularly eat pajeon but also speaks better Korean than Solomon does. More importantly, she refuses to sympathize with Japanese society in the manner that Solomon does. She criticizes Japan’s “pervasive ethnic bias” and its social bigotry, all of which seem unbearable to her as a US-born Korean.

But cruel as it may be, Japan is home to Solomon. He tolerates the fingerprinting, double passports, and yakuza stereotypes because “in a way, Solomon was Japanese, too.” Solomon can no more criticize the country’s “curious historical anomalies” than remove a part of himself. “Even if there were a hundred bad Japanese, if there was a good one, he refused to make a blanket statement,” Solomon thinks. Phoebe cannot understand his relationship to the country, however earnestly she may try to. Both Koreans, Phoebe and Solomon have traced separate walks of life to arrive at conflicting conclusions. Their dispute complicates the novel’s portrait of the Korean identity, calling attention to the finer fissures and distinctions that run within.

Sunja and Kyunghee embody separate versions of femininity, part of which comes through the novel’s attention to their physical differences. Kyunghee is 14 years older but looks “younger” than Sunja. Her sister-in-law—“plain and wrinkled”—has meanwhile “never been lovely.” Kyunghee’s delicate, “fine features” distinguish themselves from the absence of delicacy in Sunja’s face and limbs. Sunja’s sister-in-law conforms to beauty standards while Sunja herself does not.

Importantly, these differences run more than skin-deep. As with appearances, Kyunghee and Sunja internalize female expectations in ways that contrast with each other. Pachinko counterbalances Sunja’s lost virginity and weary repentance with Kyunghee’s wifely obedience. Tempted to sell kimchi, the sister-in-law adheres to Yoseb’s heavy-handed commands instead and fulfills his ideal of a “rested and pretty housewife.” When she and Sunja get offered the position at Kim Changho’s restaurant, Kyunghee stands outside in fear of violating her husband’s wishes.

“Homely,” “penitent,” and eventually widowed, Sunja possesses an assertiveness that her sister-in-law lacks. Loss and shame liberate her from the expectations that bind Kyunghee. Sunja carts kimchi around the train station, negotiates with Kim Changho, and haggles with the pawnbroker when selling her pocket watch. The “girl with the puffy face” ends up with a kind of freedom that is unavailable to her counterpart.

These contrasts form the basis of their friendship: Kyunghee lavishes motherly love on Sunja’s children. As the first person “who’d listen to her plans,” Sunja also provides Kyunghee with a new companionship. In this pairing, the two women complement each other through their differences.

Arguably Pachinko’s most tragic figure, Noa never accepts his own Korean heritage. Sunja’s firstborn is consumed by shame over his identity. He carries his Korean roots “like a dark, heavy rock within him,” and he estranges himself upon discovering the true identity of his father. “Not a day passed when [Noa] didn’t fear being discovered” after retreating to Nagano, but his fear and self-loathing existed long before this. Acutely aware of his inferiority, Noa compensates by outperforming his classmates and diligently pursuing his studies. He pores through books and studies for exams, reared on the promise that this “excellence of character and workmanship” will make the hostile world “change its mind.” His self-loathing pushes him towards obsessive perfection.

Noa outgrows his past but not his own roots. The past comes circling back to haunt him as Hansu enters his life and Akiko pierces his illusions. He refuses to accept his ties to “yakuza blood,” taking his own life after Sunja rushes out of the car to greet him. In heartbreaking fashion, the first son succumbs at the hands of his self-annihilating hate.

Mozasu never escapes Korean stigmas but comes to terms with his identity. Sunja’s youngest son has “none of Noa’s formality,” rejecting his brother’s ethos of meek compliance and discipline. He rejects Japan’s cultural hostility and its social standards. Mozasu flunks out of school while Noa reaches Waseda. Where Noa tries “working harder and being better,” Mozasu just wants to “hit everyone who said mean things.” Mozasu embraces the pachinko industry—despite its connotations—and makes for himself a fortune. He accepts his heritage in a way that Noa never manages to.

By running the two brothers’ stories in parallel, Lee charts their different engagements with identity and showcases the complexity of the immigrant experience. She also uses this to intensify the irony of their fates: as they both try their hand in the pachinko business, the siblings’ differences make the final plot twist (Noa's suicide) all the more surprising.

If outward appearances are any indication, the novel positions its two men as a study of opposites. Isak plays a sickly counterpart to the exceptionally virile Hansu. Sunja’s illness-ridden husband “had been sick as an infant with serious ailments in his chest, heart, and stomach.” By contrast, her yakuza lover has the “broad shoulders and the thick, strong torso of a larger man.” While Hansu gracefully ages and even attends Baek family funerals, Isak suffers from tuberculosis and dies shortly after his release from prison. In presenting the two together, the novel places suave, masculine power immediately beside frailty and grace.

Sunja’s two men may be as different morally as they are physically. Almost selfless to a fault, Isak offers a model of superhuman grace. In the udon restaurant, he explains to Sunja that “[my life] wouldn’t have any meaning without putting it to good use.” Isak gives up his food to household servants, works for Pastor Yoo with little to no salary, and patiently suffers in prison when arrested by the Japanese. Stunning Pastor Shin and even his own brother, Isak marries Sunja. Amid Korean society’s deep social stigmas, Isak saves Sunja from disgrace and provides her an opportunity for a new life. Isak embodies a self-sacrificing idealism.

Whatever Isak represents finds its negative imprint in Hansu: Sunja’s first lover is self-centered to the same degree that her husband is self-denying. Earthly and cynical, Hansu gives voice to a nihilism that undercuts Isak’s pious idealism. As he explains to Kim Changho in the bluntest of terms, “I’m not a good Korean, and I’m not a Japanese. I’m very good at making money.” Money and survival may be the only truths in which Hansu believes as he exercises god-like force over markets, prostitutes, and the Baek family’s fate.

Granted, the yakuza himself goes great lengths to protect Sunja and her loved ones. Hansu provides restaurant jobs for Kyunghee and Sunja, transports Yoseb and Yangjin to safety, and provides for Noa’s education. But these acts of generosity have roots in self-interest or his physical attraction to Sunja. Isak offers to share his life with Sunja. Hansu provides for her, but if only to advance his own bloodline and sustain his lineage. “I will not let my own blood rot in the gutters of Ikaino,” he warns Sunja as he insists upon paying for Noa’s schooling. Pachinko stylizes Hansu as its primary anti-hero, mysterious and terrifying in his unbridled power.

The conversation exposes the differences between Hansu and his henchman, who part ways over politics. Kim Changho longs to return to Korea and utlimately does. In defiance of his boss’s orders, Changho leaves by train one morning to help with the country’s reunification. He subscribes to ideas about nationhood that Hansu—in his pragmatic cynicism—denies. “Patriotism is just an idea, so is capitalism or communism,” Hansu warns his subordinate, “but ideas can make men forget their own interests.” Hansu’s dispute pits his levelheaded realism against Changho’s national feeling. 

Aside from outlining the ideological or even philosophical differences between these two characters, though, this dialogue does something rather straightforward and simple: it exposes the vast disparity at play in the power dynamic between Hansu and the people working beneath him.