Pachinko: Motifs 2 key examples

At the same time, Pachinko holds up food as something of a double-edged sword. Dishes like kimchi or bone broth are staples of Korean identity and, in the context of imperial Japan, symbols that brand its members with ethnic otherness. Japanese high schoolers assault Sunja on her way to the market. Korean food cripples Noa with shame decades later as kids call him “garlic turd,” while the telltale “smells of garlic, shoyu, and the stronger miso” in the apartment building give away Tetsuo’s Korean identity. In the oppressive Japanese society, characters are what they eat.

But amid the novel’s famines and wars, food most powerfully expresses humanity’s practical, material needs. “In the end, your belly was your emperor,” Yoseb thinks to himself while mulling the household’s financial straits. As wartime shortages spread and budgets thin, food offers the only promise of survival. Yoseb’s job relocation barely spares him from the atomic bomb, but Tamaguchi’s sweet potato farm does. Yangjin and the boardinghouse scrape past the famine with donations from lodgers. Most notably, Sunja and Kyunghee provide for their hard-pressed family by selling kimchi at the market. Koh Hansu aside, their kimchi business opens the door to positions at Kim Changho’s restaurant and allows them to sustain the household. Pachinko makes food a marker of time, place, and life itself.

Trees bear record. As though taking up a pun, Pachinko turns to wood as it describes the heads of the Baek “family tree.” The novel likens Noa to a “young pine, straight and elegant.” In somewhat similar fashion, it compares Sunja to a “pale block of wood.”

But the novel develops wood’s association with history. In a novel where characters struggle to beat back their pasts, wood preserves what they cannot fully bury. At various points, wood subconsciously summons memories. The whorls on the pawnbroker’s desk inexplicably remind Sunja of Hansu, triggering the “endless recollection of the one person she wished to forget.” When Yoseb touches the “low acacia dining table” in his home, he thinks about his parents. In fact, wood may be the only other object—apart from the story itself—that withstands death, atomic bombs, famines, and new fortune. Even after he takes over the pachinko business and reaches dizzying heights of financial success, Mozasu makes use of the very same oak table that his dead brother studied over. Wood persists and endures in a way that few other of the novel’s people or things do.