“History has failed us, but no matter,” writes Min Jin Lee, author of the latest novel Pachinko. “This is my Ceaser statement,” she says “I was really trying to argue that history has failed ordinary people around the world, because we are not documented, we are not recorded and we don’t understand what has happened to us, to all of us, because so many people did not leave primary documents. If it is not historians or bad people or leaders, we cannot know anything about them. If you are illiterate, for example, people do not know anything about you unless they leave some real time stories.”
That motivated Lee to write a story of four generations which not only told the saga of their personal lives but also that of the Koreans who lived in Japan. “This is the story of poor people who were forced to move. I was really interested in trying to figure out what their stories were like. I believed that they were victims. And then I met so many of them who were descendants and I realised they were not victims, they were incredibly fierce and intelligent and very adaptive.”
Lee built her novel on a lot of research, “I did a lot of academic research and then secondary research. Then I lived in Japan. There I met the Korean-Japanese and realised that all the books I had read were great. They had a really serious point of view but they did not really capture the personality of the people. I thought fiction can do that. Fiction allows you to expand people’s point of view and also allow for contractictions because people are so contradictory.”
That is not the only insight Lee brings to her book. She tells us that she went to the very poor villages in Korea, where her story begins and found,”…I was a lot of times dumbfounded by the complexity and variety of the Koreans in Japan. And then I met the Koreans in Korea and found variety there too and I realised even I was guilty of having a monolithic view.”
Lee’s characters are born from her meetings with different people. “I find people really fascinating and I take composites. So I don’t actually have a character that comes up in my head. Usually they come from interviews with different people and certain characteristics come up…” Lee uses multi character narrative,” Since I wanted to write a social realist novel, I wanted to tackle immigration, homeland, the identity in a whole community and in that sense I could not be limited to one or two characters. So I had to have this huge panorama. I really like it. I like minor characters very much. I have always felt like a minor character so I feel very confortable talking about them…In the US we talk a lot about individuals. Individuals are really important but what is more important is how we connect to each other.”
