'Pachinko' explores the dark legacy of Japan’s colonisation of Korea

nisei

In the black market, your birth and background meant nothing. You could be an ex-military man. You could be nobility. Japanese . . . Korean . . . It didn’t matter. Your birth or background meant nothing. All that mattered was your physical strength, and my father knew how to live by violence. But later on, when the war ended and everything returned

Masa saw himself as an outsider in Japanese society, much as Adam did when he moved from Indianapolis back to Kibbutz Nir

Despite Makiko being, in the present tense, my closest living relative, the bulk of our shared experiences were in the past, from another planet. In that sense, spending time with Makiko meant living in the past.

The Makioka Sisters,

Like Fowler at the end of The Quiet American, she is looking for someone to whom she can confess her guilt, own her complicity. But when she admits her deed to her father, Juan Pablo, she gets adulation in return. Klay’s prose is stirring and precise:

While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different

The chasm between the girl Mama had been raised to be and the woman she had become seemed impossible to cross.