"SWEEPING MULTIGENERATIONAL SAGA" is the phrase that recurs in the reviews excerpted on the paperback edition's cover and opening pages, and it is true enough. The phrase got me wondering: do novelists still go in for multigenerational sagas? There were more around, I think, a hundred to a hundred-and-fifty years ago or so--Mann's Buddenbrooks, Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. One Hundred Years of Solitude would count, certainly, but I am having a hard time thinking of more contemporary examples.
The main family in Pachinko is the Baeks, represented in Part One (of three) by two Korean brothers, both Christian converts. (The family name is a fairly common one in Korea, "also often spelled Paek, Baik, Paik, or Back," according to Wikipedia). The main action begins, however, with Sunja, daughter of a couple that keeps a boarding house in Busan (also spelled "Pusan"), who is seduced and impregnated by a Korean businessman, Hansu, visiting from his main base of operations, Osaka, in Japan. The businessman is married with children and won't leave his wife for Sunja, but the younger Baek brother, Isak, selflessly does offer to marry her. Together they move to Osaka, where Isak's older brother Yoseb lives with his wife, Kyunghee.
And so it goes. Isak and Sunja have two boys (including the one fathered by Hansu), who grow up, have children of their own, and so on, and as chapter follows chapter we soon have a multi-generational saga. A key thread to this saga is the difficulties of being Korean in Japan, which turns out to be not much easier for the second and third generations than it was for the first, owing to what seems like a deeply-entrenched Japanese prejudice against gaijin, foreigners, even when the "foreigners" were born in Japan, are native speakers of Japanese, and have no intention of living anywhere else.
The family establishes itself and becomes prosperous thanks to pachinko parlors. This game is never explained in the novel, but apparently it is rather like pinball, but with slot-machine-style payouts (the house always wins in the long run, of course). Pachinko is legal but a little disreputable, since (as with legal gambling in the USA) organized crime (the yakuza) has a history of getting involved. The Baeks stick with it, however.
Pachinko turns out to be a thematic thread of its own, since playing a game that always ends up favoring the house is a bit like being Korean in Japan: that is, the odds are always a bit against you, and disappointments will be frequent. We do want the Baeks to pull through, though, and by and large they do, difficult though it has been. The novel's final scene, in which Sunja, now a grandmother, visits her husband Isak's grave, is very affecting.
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