npr book review pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

‘Pachinko’ by Min Jin Lee is a historical fiction that utilizes a unique plot narrative that resonates with all people in terms of family bond, struggle for survival, and the will to reclaim one’s identity in a strange world.

About the Book

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Epic and compelling, ‘ Pachinko ’ by Min Jin Lee takes the reader by hand for a mixed ride filled with joy and family bond, pains and sorrow, denial and discrimination accustomed to being in a land far away from, and outside, one’s area of protection.

A Sweeping Tale of Four Generations of a Korean Family

Min Jin Lee’s masterpiece ‘ Pachinko’ follows the story of a poor Korean family down to its fourth generation in what is a mixed ride of love, loss, and struggle to find oneself in a stranger’s land.

Sunja becomes the all-important central character connecting all four generations of a Korean family. She is the beautiful daughter of Hoonie, a man born disabled, who, unlike her three senior siblings, survives and grows into a strong woman and later the matriarch of the Baek family.

She has a tough start to life as Hoonie her father passes away when she turns 13, and by 17 mistakenly becomes pregnant for Koh Hansu, the handsome and rich fish dealer who’s also a dangerous gang member of the ‘Yakuza’. Hansu rejects to marry her making her life a disgrace and a living hell.

Sunja rises through the disappointment to raise her children Noa and Mozasu until they become responsible people in a (foreign) Japanese society that treats non-natives with biases and discrimination. Min Jin Lee uses her experience as an immigrant to tell such a relatable and emotional story in ‘ Pachinko.’

A portrayal of True Family Values, Love, and Survival

For the most part, Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’ is a novel that beautifully exhibits a tremendous amount of true family love, loss, and the gumption for survival that it portrays in a four generational tale of a Korean family.

The reader sees These epic combinations come to play from the start of ‘ Pachinko ’ with Hoonie’s aging parents who are forced to shower their only son, Hoonie – born with disabilities, with love and affection, survival values, and ethics – just the right quantities that he needs to take care of himself is a cruel world for when they are no longer there to protect and provide for him.

Hoonie, despite his disabilities (as he was born with two disorders in cleft palate and clubbed foot), does well to transfer these survivalist values, love, and affection to his miracle child, Sunja – who also transmits the same to her children and grandchildren.

An Emotionally Aggravating Loss to Generational Characters

When it comes to deaths and losses one finds the reader’s emotion is being aggravated on several accounts – thanks to the many instances of emotional deaths of characters each page is made to grapple with.

From Hoonie’s two brothers dying from illness to his aging parents passing away three years after he marries Hoonie himself. Sunja’s three senior siblings down to Baek Isak, Hana, and Yumi die a poetic death so that her son lives, and then there is Noa’s painfully unexpected suicide hitting us just right when he was larger than life and had more reasons to live for.

An Insight Into The History of ‘ Zainichi ’ Koreans

At best, ‘ Pachinko ’ is one of the few books that give the readership a short, yet complete insight into the history of the start of the ‘ Zainichi ’ race that still exists today in Japan.

‘ Zainichi ’, as a Japanese word, roughly translates to mean a new foreigner, and is designated by Japan to non-citizens to remind them that they will never become one of them. They are then met with systemic discrimination, ostracization, and dehumanization.

The reader learns from the book ‘ Pachinko ’ that the history of ‘ Zainichi ’ is traced back to around 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan.

How much of a good read is Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’?

Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’ is without a doubt a good read and this has been proven by the number of high-profile reviews it’s gotten from top publications and personalities, such as Barack Obama.

How successful was ‘ Pachinko ’ post-publication?

Upon its release, ‘ Pachinko ’ immediately caught the eyes of the literary committee because of its historically insightful storytelling of Asian ethnicity. The book also was runner-up for the 2017’s National Book Award.

Is ‘ Pachinko ’ based on a true historical account?

Min Jin Lee included research for the final draft of ‘ Pachinko ’ by interviewing real-life Koreans who lived in Japan to get their experience and thoughts, however, this doesn’t make the book a true-life account and so is still considered a fiction.

Pachinko Review

Book Title: Pachinko

Book Description: Min Jin Lee's 'Pachinko' is an epic tale of a Korean family's endurance through colonialism, earthquakes, and WWII.

Book Author: Min Jin Lee

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Grand Central Publishing

Date published: February 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Number Of Pages: 504

'Pachinko' Review: A Multigenerational Epic on the Racial Feud between Korea and Japan.

‘ Pachinko ‘ by Min Jin Lee is a sweeping four-generational epic based on the survival struggles of a poor Korean family in the midst of social and economic hardship brought upon by colonialism, earthquake, and World War II. The thrills of the story are neverending as it is a joy to the reader. It’s revealing and proves itself an abridged version of an interesting, yet untold history shared by Korea and Japan. With ‘ Pachinko ‘, there are so many life lessons to learn, and some of them are about value for family, others are on survival strategies and approaches to fitting into a strange, far away land outside of the home. The reader doesn’t have to understand the Korean language or be Asian to harvest from the wealth of interesting historical information portrayed in the book by Min Jin Lee.

• An abridged history of the racial feud between Korea and Japan 
• Teaches vital life lessons on survival strategies and family values 
• Easily readable, as stories flow into each other with seamless transitions
• Story is slightly one-sided, leaving out the Japanese accounts
• Too many less significant characters 
• Enormous inclusion of ethnic prejudices and ostracization

About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

Cite This Page

Onuorah, Victor " Pachinko Review ⭐ " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/min-jin-lee/pachinko/review/ . Accessed 12 April 2024.

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‘Pachinko’ Review: K-Drama, American-Style

Min Jin Lee’s best-selling novel about the harsh lives of Koreans living in Japan is turned into a glossy family saga for Apple TV+.

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By Mike Hale

In Japan, millions of people are addicted to the pinball-like arcade game pachinko . Around the world, millions more may soon find themselves addicted to a soapy, bittersweet television series called “Pachinko.” Just as pachinko-parlor owners delicately adjust their devices’ pins and cups to keep gamblers in the seats, the makers of “Pachinko” have expertly tweaked the machinery of their story to produce a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

Premiering Friday on Apple TV+ with three of its eight episodes, the series is based on the 2017 best seller by Min Jin Lee — sometimes faithfully, more often with a tenuous connection, if any, to the book’s events, themes and tone.

Opening with the portentous line “History has failed us, but no matter,” Lee’s novel chronicled the harsh existence of four generations of a Korean family living in a fiercely racist Japan, relegated to poverty and unable, because of discriminatory laws and international politics, to return home. Their fortunes, if not their status, finally begin to change when one of them becomes a pachinko man — a business open to ethnic Koreans because of its unsavory associations.

Lee employed what could be seen as either verities or convenient clichés about Koreans — stubbornness, passion, capacity for hard work, shrewd business instincts — in the service of a substantial melodrama. “Pachinko,” the book, is a page-turner, but its attention to the details of character and period (it takes place over eight decades, beginning in 1910) and its steady, unforced narrative drive give it considerable power. It has the feel of something from the 19th century, like the Victorian novels devoured by one of its characters, the scholarly Noa.

By contrast, “Pachinko” the TV series has a thoroughly contemporary sensibility, and it works overtime to ingratiate itself with all possible viewers. That desire is evident in the opening credits sequence, set to a pop tune, the Grass Roots anthem “Let’s Live for Today” : The central cast members, in their period costumes but out of character, dance among the pachinko machines, sliding and spinning and mugging for the camera. It’s hard to imagine anything more out of tune with Lee’s book.

Of course, the show’s makers — the network- and cable-TV veteran Soo Hugh ( “The Whispers,” “The Terror”), who created it and was the lead writer, and the directors Kogonada and Justin Chon — had no obligation to the book, and their “Pachinko” has its own significant charms. The credits sequence, with its bright but washed-out palette, is pure eye candy, and the show looks great overall, especially in the early episodes directed by Kogonada and shot by Florian Hoffmeister.

The elaborate reproductions of Korean markets and fishing villages from the early 20th century and of the Korean ghetto in prewar Osaka, constructed in South Korea and British Columbia, are both luxuriously picturesque and credibly lived-in. As visually satisfying costume drama, the period sections of “Pachinko” are unimpeachable.

Also impossible to argue with is the excellence of the show’s large, mostly South Korean and Japanese cast. (The dialogue is predominantly Korean and Japanese, subtitled in separate colors.) The main character, the indomitable Sunja, is played with equal grace by the newcomer Minha Kim as a young wife and mother and by the Oscar-winning Yuh-Jung Youn (“Minari”) as a long-suffering matriarch. Another major South Korean star, Lee Minho of the beloved K-drama “Boys Over Flowers,” deploys his charisma in the role of Hansu, Sunja’s lover and, later, her Magwitch-like benefactor.

Here and there — generally in the moments taken most directly from the book — those actors achieve something powerful, like the wrenching scene between Sunja and her mother, Yangjin (Inji Jeong), when Sunja leaves Korea. Too often, though, their work is wrapped in several layers of Hollywood gauze; the subtlety of their performances gets obscured by the general tendency of the production toward tasteful schmaltz.

In some moments this is explicit — note the cooing vocalise and ad-agency camerawork when Yangjin prepares a special goodbye meal of hard-to-find white rice. But it is discernible primarily as an overarching sensibility, and in adjustments that make the characters more conventionally relatable and events more conventionally dramatic than they were on the page.

Hence, the child Sunja (Yu-na Jeon) is now a lovable, precocious moppet, an Annie of the fish market, and her father, Hoonie (Dae Ho Lee), has morphed from stoic and noble to eloquently philosophical. A series of plot changes — including how Sunja and Hansu begin spending time together and how the gentle pastor Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh) broaches the idea of marriage with Sunja — seem designed to comfort a current viewer who wants a female protagonist to have more agency. But they don’t add anything to the story, whose original point was how little ability Sunja had to direct the course of her life.

(In perhaps another nod to changing sensitivities in the five years since the book came out, one of the central bad guys, who was Japanese in the original, is now white.)

Viewers who have read the book may also be distracted by several structural changes. The story now moves on multiple time tracks, seguing constantly between past and present, and large chunks of story — like an entire episode largely set during the Kanto earthquake of 1923, which led to a massacre of Koreans — have been added. Other significant plot strands from the book don’t appear at all.

These changes mostly reinforce Hollywood-style uplift — the introduction of a glamorous, ill-fated entertainer on the ocean voyage to Japan has strong echoes of “Titanic.” They work toward making the show a traditional, sentimental, inspirational saga. They also have a practical value, because while “Pachinko” is based on a self-contained novel, it is not a mini-series. New material is needed, and material from the book needs to be hoarded for potential future seasons.

The premiere of “Pachinko” follows on the unprecedented success in America of South Korean films and TV dramas like “Parasite” and “Squid Game,” and it has the soap-operatic appeal of a well-made K-drama. But as an adaptation of a popular novel by an Asian-American author, brought to the screen by an Asian-American artist with an ethnically Asian cast, the more apt comparison is to a work from three decades ago: Wayne Wang’s “Joy Luck Club.”

Hollywoodization, voluntary or not, is the operative word when it comes to both “Joy Luck Club” and “Pachinko.” And to the extent that glossy melodrama pulls audiences into a story that puts people we haven’t seen before onscreen, and treats the hatred and injustice they face with some degree of honesty, it’s not a dirty word.

But beneath its shine and its likability, “Pachinko” is pretty ordinary — a lot of hard work has gone into making something easily digestible.

As it happens, the story of Sunja and Isak echoes that of my own maternal grandparents, who left northern Korea in the late 1920s, met and married in Osaka and never went home again. Lee’s “Pachinko,” with its attention to mundane detail and its harsh but not hopeless fatalism, resonated strongly with what I know of their lives. The TV “Pachinko” melted away while I watched it.

Mike Hale is a television critic. He also writes about online video, film and media. He came to The Times in 1995 and worked as an editor in Sports, Arts & Leisure and Weekend Arts before becoming a critic in 2009. More about Mike Hale

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Pachinko review – a sumptuous South Korean epic like nothing else on TV

Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel gets a tantalising adaptation that sweeps back and forth from Korea in 1915 to Japan’s Wall Street era. It’s a rollercoaster ride through time and space

‘T hey grabbed our land, snatched our rice, our potatoes, our fish,” snarls a fisherman to his mates over a drink. “To take a rock in my hand and crush a soldier’s head with it, to warm my cold hands with his blood! Just to know there’s one less cockroach wandering our land. That would give me pure joy!”

His friends look worried. Such careless talk costs lives. It’s Korea in 1915, but it could be anywhere oppressed peoples have chafed against imperial rule – Dublin 1916, Amritsar 1919, Nanking 1937, Mariupol 2022.

When Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel, Pachinko, was published in 2017, it was hailed as a sweeping historical epic spanning a rich era of modern east Asian history. It journeys through colonial Korea, the second world war, the allied occupation of Japan, the Korean war, to Japan’s high-growth period – all refracted through the prism of one family. Tash Aw in the Guardian praised the novel as “a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing”. He meant the so-called Zainichi – Koreans, often compelled to leave their homeland after losing their livelihoods under colonial rule and winding up uprooted, anxious second-class citizens in Japan.

This adaptation (Apple TV+) brings to life a Korea you would never have gleaned from Squid Game or K-pop . It’s a vast, sumptuous, dynastic political TV series of the kind scarcely made any more, complete with swooning strings from Nico Muhly’s score. It reminds me of the historical television dramas I grew up with – Roots, Tenko, The Forsyte Saga. But there is a difference. Pachinko sophisticatedly cuts across continents and eras, from a rustic fishing village under the Japanese yoke in 1915, to braces-wearing financial workers greed-brokering deals on green computer screens in 1989 New York and Tokyo.

Pachinko opens on an idyllic Korean island , blighted byJapanese officers straight out of the sadistic rotters’ playbook. “We bestow on these idiots all our progress, our schools, our education only to have a cripple spew lies in our face,” says one, on the morning after the drunken fisherman’s seditious rant.

The “cripple” he is talking about is Hoonie – the kindly, cleft-lipped, hobbling father of our adorable heroine Sunja – and he won’t betray his fisherman chum to these thuggish overlords. It’s Sunja who sensibly tells our doomed rebel fisherman to clear off out of town. “I’m a man,” he tells the little girl in the opening episode’s most poignant line, “who no longer knows how to live in the world.” We cut to 1989 Osaka, where Sunja, now a beloved granny resting on the veranda, wistfully recalls this moment.

The virtue of this cutting back and forth is to reinforce the sense that the drama’s Korean characters have of living under a curse. “There is a curse in my blood,” Sunja’s mother says at the outset: all three of her sons have died in their first year and, now pregnant with Sunja, she fears the girl will die too. Later our drunken fisherman worries: “It’s too much, living with this hate. Our children will be cursed. How can all this ever end?”

Each such scene then flashes forward to 1989, where Sunja’s grandson, a Korean-Japanese Wall Street whizz kid called Solomon, is trying to broker a Trump-like hotel deal in Tokyo to make his fortune. He visits his family in the Korean township in Osaka. Is he, too, under the family curse? No doubt, that is why Solomon’s beloved granny tells him he is better off in the US.

The problem with this narrative ride through time, though, is that it overloads us with tantalising storylines. I want to care about Solomon’s sister who has disappeared and might be dead, but here she is a mere detail flagged up for future reference.

Near the end of the first episode, there is another shift in the timeline. We flash forward eight years from 1915. Sunja is now a beautiful, if impoverished, young woman, shadowed, as she strolls through her native town’s fish-gutting zone, by a strikingly handsome mysterious stranger in impeccably pressed western clothes (what kind of twerp wears a white linen suit where fish heads are flung about?) She notices she is being stared at, but he can’t keep from staring. It’s an eloquent depiction of his desire – and her intrigued disbelief that this soigné stranger desires her.

Sunja doesn’t know what horrible secrets are going to be revealed about this stranger. Those of us who have read the novel, though, do: Pachinko’s curse, if that’s what it is, is poised to strike again.

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• <em>Pachinko</em> Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

Pachinko Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

W hen Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the occupation was more than just a political reality. As Korean resistance met with ever harsher responses from the colonial government, Japanese leaders took aim at the culture itself. A strategy of forced assimilation meant the destruction of cherished art, historical documents, and buildings dating back centuries. Koreans saw their language, religion, commerce, agricultural industry, and news media supplanted by the invaders’ institutions; they even had to adopt Japanese names. Meanwhile, with scarce employment prospects in their homeland, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had little choice but to relocate to Japan, where they were mostly relegated to menial jobs and faced brutal discrimination.

This atrocity, whose impact on the Korean people still reverberates in the present, forms the backdrop of Min Jin Lee ’s magnificent 2017 novel Pachinko . The rare National Book Award finalist that is also a bestseller, populated by rich characters and suffused with emotion, Lee’s story comes to television with a lavish adaptation premiering March 25 on Apple TV+. By all accounts, it was not easy bringing this epic, multigenerational, multilingual saga of immigration and family to the small screen. Creator Soo Hugh ( The Whispers ), working with filmmakers Kogonada ( After Yang , Columbus ) and actor turned director Justin Chon, as well as a uniformly excellent ensemble cast, beautifully conveys the sweep and spirit of the novel. The only major misstep is a structural choice that undermines Lee’s carefully paced storytelling.

Spanning most of the 20th century, Pachinko opens in the woods of rural, Japanese-occupied Korea in 1915. Yangjin—a young woman born into poverty, married to the cleft-lipped son of a family that owns a boarding house and reeling from the deaths of three consecutive infant sons—has come to secure a blessing for her fourth pregnancy. “There is a curse in my blood,” Yangjin (Inji Jeong) tells the female shaman. Then the action jumps three-quarters of a century and halfway around the world, to New York in 1989. An ambitious young finance guy, Solomon (Jin Ha), strides confidently into a meeting with a pair of white, male superiors, who unceremoniously inform him that he’s not getting a promotion they all know he’s earned.

When we meet Yangjin, she’s just months away from giving birth to the show’s heroine, Sunja, whose life will be shaped by what she endures during the occupation. Solomon is Sunja’s grandson. And this eight-episode first season (of four that Hugh hopes to make) patiently fills in the intervening decades, though not with the simplistic tale of immigrant bootstrapping that newcomers to Lee’s story might expect. In one of the two parallel narratives, set in the ’30s, a teenage Sunja (played with grace, vulnerability, and grit by Minha Kim) becomes entangled with a Korean businessman, Koh Hansu (South Korean megastar Lee Min-Ho), whose flexible morals have helped him prosper in Japan. Their romance catalyzes her departure for Osaka—although, again, not for the reason you might assume. The other core story line follows Solomon’s return to Osaka, where his family still lives, with a plan to prove he’s worthy of a VP title by facilitating a crucial deal that only an employee of Korean heritage could possibly close.

There is a symmetry to this structure, one that magnifies some of Pachinko ’s most salient themes. Even though they’re poor in the ’30s and relatively rich in the ’80s, the family is constantly forced, in both eras, to choose between impossible binaries: money and integrity, safety and authenticity, assimilation and persecution. But it’s not exactly difficult to glean these ideas from Lee’s chronological structure, which I greatly prefer. There’s a trend toward multiple timelines in TV these days; complicated storytelling has become the marker of prestige drama—of television as art. Yet Pachinko was art long before it was TV. The bifurcated narrative only adds too many transitions that disrupt the series’ emotional throughline and sows confusion around characters that turn up episodes before they’re properly introduced. Readers eager to see the book’s absorbing middle chapters onscreen will have to cross their fingers for a renewal.

Such a big miscalculation might sink a weaker show, but in every other sense, Pachinko —like its heroine—is too singular and alive to fail. As portrayed by Kim in her youth and Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung in older age, Sunja epitomizes immigrant persistence without devolving into a stock character. Hugh avoids reducing her to either a martyr or a plucky success story. It was a wise choice, and one that has only become possible in the streaming era, to mix Korean, Japanese, and English dialogue; color-coded subtitles efficiently convey how characters combine tongues and code-switch. The art direction surpasses that of TV’s most immersive historical dramas, including The Crown . Complementing this intricate mise-en-scène and the cast’s fiercely physical performances is cinematography that lingers on textural details: the hem of a wedding dress, the pudgy foot of a newborn, the snowy brilliance of Korean white rice.

Yes, this adaptation is less than perfect; the disservice it does to the structural integrity of a novel that gains momentum and poignancy as the decades progress shouldn’t be understated. The overall impression is of an epochal masterpiece cut into snippets and reassembled out of order. That’s frustrating. Even when you account for its shortcomings, though, TV’s Pachinko remains the rare show of both artistic and historic import. Everyone should see it. But maybe read the book first.

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Review: “Pachinko” brilliantly blurs the lines between past and present

The show memorializes the lasting effect of japanese colonialism on koreans by depicting stories of trauma and healing..

On April 29, Apple TV+ aired the final episode of “Pachinko,” an eight-episode television drama based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Min-Jin Lee. The series was such a success that, on the same day the final episode aired, Apple announced the renewal of “Pachinko” for a second season — a well-deserved achievement. 

“Pachinko” tells the story of four generations of a Korean family from 1915 to 1989. The television series takes a different approach to Min Jin Lee’s novel, switching back and forth between past and present rather than following the chronological timeline of the novel. While some fans of the book were off-put by this directorial choice, I believe it is the greatest strength of the television adaptation. 

At the center of the story is Sunja, depicted from childhood to elderhood by Yu-na Jeon, Minha Kim and “Minari” actress Youn Yuh-jung. The series artfully intertwines Sunja’s past life as a daughter and wife in a Japanese-occupied Korean Peninsula with her life as a mother and, presently, a grandmother in Osaka, Japan. In Japanese-occupied Korea, Sunja struggles with an unexpected pregnancy and the difficult choice of leaving her mother behind to seek a better life in Osaka. In 1989, Sunja wrestles with the historic ghosts of the past while her grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha), ignores them in an attempt to fit into Japanese society.

The constant segue between Japan and Korea in the 1930s and 40s and 1989 Osaka lends to one of the central themes of the series — the immutability of the past and its pervasiveness within the present. “Pachinko” generates a dark irony through characters who insist that there’s no point living in the past, yet find themselves unable to resist its pull. The story is at once poignant and powerful in its blurring of the lines between past and present, and the ability of the cast to convey the emotions of the characters with subtlety and authenticity makes the execution particularly effective.

“Chapter Four” of “Pachinko” is one of the most brilliant examples of the show’s genius in blurring past and present. In the latter part of the episode, two Korean women — an old landowner in 1989 and a young Korean singer in 1939 — mirror each other throughout a series of alternating scenes, their actions and choices eerily similar despite occurring decades apart. In 1989, Sunja’s grandson Solomon sits in the boardroom of his company in Osaka, waiting for the Korean landowner to sign the contract in front of her, relinquishing her home of many years. In 1939, a dinner party for Japanese elites takes place aboard a ship en route to Osaka. The only Korean present is an accomplished female singer; the other Koreans are below the deck of the ship, struggling to endure the heat and the lack of ventilation.

As the episode alternates between past and present, we see that both the singer and the landowner feel a sense of alienation among the Japanese. Both women were offered a substantial amount of wealth in exchange for their most valuable assets — the singer for her talent and the landowner for her home. As past and present blend together, both the singer on the ship and the Korean landowner are confronted with the choice of denying their Korean identity or embracing it. By signing her land over to the Japanese investors, the landowner betrays the memories of the injustices committed against her and her ancestors by the Japanese throughout the decades. Similarly, by continuing to sing only opera for the Japanese elite, the singer sacrifices the music of her people and her pride as a Korean.

The use of the Korean language elicits anger from the Japanese in both the past and present scenes, showing the continuing legacy of Japanese colonialism. Instead of signing the paper right away, the landowner turns to Solomon and begins speaking to him in Korean. This action is mirrored by the woman on the ship, who suddenly bursts into a soulful Korean ballad. Up until this point in the series, Solomon has told Sunja and the Korean landowner that the past is in the past. These two scenes, juxtaposed against each other, fully reject that notion. They show that the past is still very much present, justifying the Korean landowner’s adamance against signing the contract.

Near the conclusion of “Chapter Four,” both the landowner and the singer have chosen to hold the Japanese accountable for their reprehensible actions. The landowner gazes intensely into Solomon’s eyes and tells him about the injustices her predecessors faced upon moving to Japan. She tells him that they were called cockroaches, nothing but pests to be crushed underfoot. Her words cause Solomon to finally acknowledge the still-present trauma of his grandmother and the landowner. “Don’t sign,” he tells her; the Korean landowner smiles at Solomon, then leaves the room without signing the contract. Her exit becomes an act of martyrdom that is mirrored by the singer on the ship, who stabs herself in the neck before she can be caught and arrested for her act of disloyalty. They have chosen to reclaim their dignity and embrace their Korean identity, even though it means the loss of a fortune and the loss of a life.

The power of these scenes would be lost on the audience if not for the stellar ability of the actors to transcend dialogue in their depiction of the characters’ emotions. The eyes are the windows to the soul in “Pachinko.” The series features numerous silent scenes in which the actors use only their eyes to communicate joy, grief and longing when they are lacking words. Lee Min Ho demonstrates this prowess in “Chapter Four,” in which Sunja makes her decision to move to Osaka with her new husband, Isak. Ho’s character, Koh Hansu, has a Japanese officer bring Sunja to his office at the fishing market. When she doesn’t respond to Hansu’s advances, he tells her that she will regret her decision to move to Osaka, and that when she is begging for him to come save her, he won’t even remember her name. Sunja leaves, but the camera stays behind to show us the tears glistening in Hansu’s eyes. They reflect a vulnerability that would have otherwise been hidden from the audience’s knowledge. They tell us that Hansu, no matter how hard he tries, will never be able to forget Sunja’s name.

“Pachinko” is a modern masterpiece that unflinchingly approaches the painful history of Korea’s colonization by Japan. With artful symbolism and stellar acting, it brings to life those stories of pain and suffering that exist as part of the Korean consciousness today.

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Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

National Book Award Finalist

by Min Jin Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2017

An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth.

An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience, seen through the fate of four generations.

Lee ( Free Food for Millionaires , 2007) built her debut novel around families of Korean-Americans living in New York. In her second novel, she traces the Korean diaspora back to the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910. “History has failed us,” she writes in the opening line of the current epic, “but no matter.” She begins her tale in a village in Busan with an aging fisherman and his wife whose son is born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot. Nonetheless, he is matched with a fine wife, and the two of them run the boardinghouse he inherits from his parents. After many losses, the couple cherishes their smart, hardworking daughter, Sunja. When Sunja gets pregnant after a dalliance with a persistent, wealthy married man, one of their boarders—a sickly but handsome and deeply kind pastor—offers to marry her and take her away with him to Japan. There, she meets his brother and sister-in-law, a woman lovely in face and spirit, full of entrepreneurial ambition that she and Sunja will realize together as they support the family with kimchi and candy operations through war and hard times. Sunja’s first son becomes a brilliant scholar; her second ends up making a fortune running parlors for pachinko, a pinball-like game played for money. Meanwhile, her first son’s real father, the married rich guy, is never far from the scene, a source of both invaluable help and heartbreaking woe. As the destinies of Sunja’s children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the troubles of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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Connecting Cultures, Linking Lives

Book Review: Pachinko

“History has failed us, but no matter.”

These are the words that open the novel Pachinko by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee, and they perfectly encapsulate the spirit of the epic multi-generational immigrant stories told within its pages. In Lee’s own explanation, these words are her ‘thesis statement;’ the ideas behind it are the main reasons why the book exists. For the author, history has indeed failed us — the ordinary poor people, the immigrants, those who have been left undocumented — and left us to fend for ourselves. Through fictional tales based on historical accounts, Pachinko chronicles the stories of the immigrants who, despite being largely ignored, have succeeded in staking their claims on the world through sheer intelligence and adaptability.

VIDEO: “Panchinko” author Min Jin Lee answers your questions

A Multi-Generational Immigrant Epic

Specifically, the stories span from Korea in the 1880s to Japan and America in the late 1900s, a century-long series of interconnected tales involving four different generations of immigrants.

Adam Morgan of the Chicago Review of Books was right on the money when he wrote that Pachinko “could not have been published at a more relevant time in America.” Although written back in 2017, Morgan’s description remains true today. As modern-day America struggles with bigoted demons of its own, Pachinko is a thesis that is both harshly truthful and impossible to put down.

Why Pachinko?

As a student of history, Lee sees the game of pachinko as the perfect metaphor for the pursuit of fortune, the failings, and the struggles of the people in the book. Stories of marriage, death, birth, and betrayal, provide an entertaining peek into the class-based, racial, sexual, religious, and political divisions that have defined immigrant life in the previous and current centuries. As NPR notes in its review of the novel , the game of pachinko is one of Japan’s national obsessions, which is something that is as true in the last century as it is today. In fact, Asian online gaming magazine Expat Bets’ guide to Japan reports that pachinko is regarded more as a recreational activity instead of a casino game in the country, which accounts for its continued mainstream popularity. Old and young locals as well as tourists continue to flock to the many pachinko parlors that are spread throughout Tokyo’s Shibuya District. Pachinko is so prevalent in the country’s zeitgeist that modern gaming company Sega just recently merged its pachinko and game development branches for the purposes of improving their domestic research and development. Likewise, Konami recently resurrected the renowned horror game Silent Hill as a pachinko machine to appeal to a greater number of audiences.

Apart from being the perfect metaphor for the stories in the book, pachinko is instantly recognizable both to the old and the young, an unbroken connection spanning three different countries and four different generations.

If you liked this review, or if you’re looking for more books about Asia and the Asian-American experience, you might also enjoy our list of books on Fall Reading About Japan .

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Pachinko review: a masterpiece of empathy, integrity and family loyalty

Min jin lee tells an endearing tale of hardship and inhumanity suffered by koreans.

Min Jin Lee: a writer in complete control of her characters and her story and with an intense awareness of the importance of her heritage.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Yaa Gyasi's debut novel Homegoing in these pages and praised the author's use of time and generational discord to tell a story that combined politics, history and gender with page-turning appeal. The same compliment could be offered to Min Jin Lee, whose novel Pachinko was one of the most popular choices among writers offering their summer reading selections to The Irish Times .

Pachinko tells the story of Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and today, a family saga that explores the effects of poverty, abuse, war, suicide, and the accumulation of wealth on multiple generations. When the novel opens, we are introduced to Hoonie, “born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot”, who enters into an arranged marriage with Yangjin and despite their age difference – he is 28, she is 15 – a mutual respect and affection builds between them, not least because of their shared love for daughter Sunja.

It is Sunja who will prove the most important character in the novel. As a teenager, she is seduced by a yakuza, Koh Hansu, leaving her pregnant and unmarried, but when a sympathetic young missionary asks for her hand, it seems her disgrace will be avoided.

One of the most endearing elements of Pachinko is how honourable most of the characters are. Husbands love their wives, children respect their parents. Even Koh Hansu, who has played fast and loose with the affections of a young girl, spends decades trying to help Sunja, and although she is dismissive of him in later life, their relationship remains one of the most intriguing in the book.

Impoverished circumstances

But for all the love scattered across the pages, there is hatred too. The monstrous degrees of hardship, disrespect and inhumanity suffered by the Koreans makes for painful reading. They live in impoverished circumstances, are paid less than their Japanese counterparts, are spoken to as if they were dogs and, in one powerful scene, are forced to register time and again as strangers in a land in which many of them have in fact been born. Lee writes of this maltreatment with a stoicism that reflects the fortitude of her characters. Surviving is what matters to them, not human rights.

As the generations continue, we are introduced to Sunja’s sons, Noa, studious and intellectual, and Mozasu, passionate but disinterested in education. The choices both boys make in their lives stand in stark contrast to each other but they pursue their goals with equal conviction, albeit with markedly different results. No spoilers, but suffice to say that as the boys’ lives diverge they arrive at opposing fates. Ultimately, the importance of family honour proves so strong that revelations from the past lead to the most heart-breaking tragedy.

Pachinko itself is a Japanese version of pinball and while pachinko parlours become the family business later in the novel, it also stands as a metaphor for the lives they lead. In a game of pinball, the initial strike of the ball against the flipper determines how the game will play out. For Sunja and her descendants, it is what happens at birth that determines their fate. Over the years they may bounce off the sides of the machine, ricocheting against the bumpers, kickers and slingshots, but there is a sense that fate has decided how their lives will develop from the moment the plunger hits the ball.

Generational sweep

While Pachinko is only Min Jin Lee's second novel – her first, Free Food for Millionaires , will be reissued later this summer – it is the work of a writer in complete control of her characters and her story and with an intense awareness of the importance of her heritage. In its generational sweep, it recalls John Galsworthy's The Forsyth Saga , replicating some of that classic novel's focus on status, money, infidelity and cruelty as it explores the effect of parental decisions on children, and the children of children. As Faulkner put it, "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

This is a long book but is told with such flair and linguistic dexterity that I found myself unable to put it down. Every year, there are a few standout novels that survive long past the hype has died down and the hyperbolic compliments from friends scattered across the dust jacket have been forgotten. Pachinko , a masterpiece of empathy, integrity and familial loyalty, will be one of those novels.

John Boyne's latest novel is The Heart's Invisible Furies (Doubleday)

John Boyne, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a novelist and critic

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Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

Contributors

By Min Jin Lee

Formats and Prices

• Hardcover (Large Print)
• Audiobook Download (Unabridged)
• Trade Paperback
• Audiobook CD (Unabridged)
• Hardcover $29.00 $37.00 CAD
• ebook $11.99 $15.99 CAD
• Hardcover (Large Print) $54.00 $69.00 CAD
• Trade Paperback $19.99 $25.99 CAD
• Audiobook CD (Unabridged) $35.00 $45.50 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around February 7, 2017. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

Also available from:

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• Books-A-Million

Description

• One of Buzzfeed's "32 Most Exciting Books Coming In 2017" Included in The Millions' "Most Anticipated: The Great 2017 Book Preview" One of Elle 's "25 Most Anticipated Books by Women for 2017" BBC: "Ten Books to Read in 2017" One of BookRiot's "Most Anticipated Books of 2017" One of Nylon's "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017" One of Entertainment Weekly's Best New Books One of BookBub's 22 Most Anticipated Book Club Reads of 2017
• "Stunning... Despite the compelling sweep of time and history, it is the characters and their tumultuous lives that propel the narrative... A compassionate, clear gaze at the chaotic landscape of life itself. In this haunting epic tale, no one story seems too minor to be briefly illuminated. Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen." The New York Times Book Review
• "In 1930s Korea, an earnest young woman, abandoned by the lover who has gotten her pregnant, enters into a marriage of convenience that will take her to a new life in Japan. Thus begins Lee's luminous new novel PACHINKO--a powerful meditation on what immigrants sacrifice to achieve a home in the world. PACHINKO confirms Lee's place among our finest novelists." Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This Is How You Lose Her
• "A deep, broad, addictive history of a Korean family in Japan enduring and prospering through the 20th century." David Mitchell, Guardian, New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks
• "Astounding. The sweep of Dickens and Tolstoy applied to a 20th century Korean family in Japan. Min Jin Lee's PACHINKO tackles all the stuff most good novels do - family, love, cabbage - but it also asks questions that have never been more timely. What does it mean to be part of a nation? And what can one do to escape its tight, painful, familiar bonds?" Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Little Failure and Super Sad True Love Story
• "Both for those who love Korea, as well as for those who know no more than Hyundai, Samsung and kimchi , this extraordinary book will prove a revelation of joy and heartbreak. I could not stop turning the pages, and wished this most poignant of sagas would never end. Min Jin Lee displays a tenderness and wisdom ideally matched to an unforgettable tale that she relates just perfectly." Simon Winchester, New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman and Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles
• "PACHINKO is elegant and soulful, both intimate and sweeping. This story of several generations of one Korean family in Japan is the story of every family whose parents sacrificed for their children, every family whose children were unable to recognize the cost, but it's also the story of a specific cultural struggle in a riveting time and place. Min Jin Lee has written a big, beautiful book filled with characters I rooted for and cared about and remembered after I'd read the final page." Kate Christensen, Pen/Faulkner-winning author of The Great Man and Blue Plate Special
• "An exquisite, haunting epic...'moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too,' illuminate the narrative...Lee's profound novel...is shaped by impeccable research, meticulous plotting, and empathic perception." Booklist (starred review)
• "PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee is a great book, a passionate story, a novel of magisterial sweep. It's also fiendishly readable-the real-deal. An instant classic, a quick page-turner, and probably the best book of the year." Darin Strauss, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Half a Life: A Memoir
• "The breadth and depth of challenges come through clearly, without sensationalization. The sporadic victories are oases of sweetness, without being saccharine. Lee makes it impossible not to develop tender feelings towards her characters--all of them, even the most morally compromised. Their multifaceted engagements with identity, family, vocation, racism, and class are guaranteed to provide your most affecting sobfest of the year." BookRiot, "Most Anticipated Books of 2017"
• "An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience... the destinies of Sunja's children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the trouble of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view. An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth." Kirkus (Starred Review)
• "A sprawling and immersive historical work... Reckoning with one determined, wounded family's place in history, Lee's novel is an exquisite meditation on the generational nature of truly forging a home." Publishers Weekly
• "If proof were needed that one family's story can be the story of the whole world, then PACHINKO offers that proof. Min Jin Lee's novel is gripping from start to finish, crossing cultures and generations with breathtaking power. PACHINKO is a stunning achievement, full of heart, full of grace, full of truth." Erica Wagner, author of Ariel's Gift and Seizure
• "A beautifully crafted story of love, loss, determination, luck, and perseverance...Lee's skillful development of her characters and story lines will draw readers into the work. Those who enjoy historical fiction with strong characterizations will not be disappointed as they ride along on the emotional journeys offered in the author's latest page-turner." Library Journal (starred review)
• "Brilliant, subtle...gripping...What drives this novel is the magisterial force of Lee's characterization...As heartbreaking as it is compelling, PACHINKO is a timely meditation on all that matters to humanity in an age of mass migration and uncertainty." South China Morning Post Magazine
• "Everything I want in a family saga novel, a deep dive immersion into a complete world full of rich and complex lives to follow as they tumble towards fate and fortune...PACHINKO will break your heart in all the right ways." Vela Magazine
• "Gorgeous." Nylon.com, "50 Books We Can't Wait To Read In 2017"
• "Expansive, elegant and utterly absorbing...Combining the detail of a documentary with the empathy of the best fiction, it's a sheer delight." The Daily Mail
• "Deftly brings its large ensemble of characters alive." The Financial Times
• "A social novel in the Dickensian vein...frequently heartbreaking." USA Today
• "Spanning nearly 100 years and moving from Korea at the start of the 20th century to pre- and postwar Osaka and, finally, Tokyo and Yokohama, the novel reads like a long, intimate hymn to the struggles of people in a foreign land...Much of the novel's authority is derived from its weight of research, which brings to life everything from the fishing village on the coast of the East Sea in early 20th-century Korea to the sights and smells of the shabby Korean township of Ikaino in Osaka - the intimate, humanising details of a people striving to carve out a place for themselves in the world. Vivid and immersive, Pachinko is a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing." The Guardian (UK)
• "Min Jin Lee has produced a beautifully realized saga of an immigrant family in a largely hostile land, trying to establish its own way of belonging." The Times Literary Supplement
• "Lee's sweeping four-generation saga of a Korean family is an extraordinary epic, both sturdily constructed and beautiful." The San Francisco Chronicle
• " Pachinko is a rich, well-crafted book as well as a page turner. Its greatest strength in this regard lies in Lee's ability to shift suddenly between perspectives. We never linger too long with a single character, constantly refreshing our point of view, giving the narrative dimension and depth. Add to that her eye and the prose that captures setting so well, and it would not be surprising to see Pachinko on a great many summer reading lists." Asian Review of Books
• "A sweeping, multigenerational saga about one Korean family making its way in Japan. The immigrant issues resonate; the story captivates." People
• "A culturally rich, psychologically astute family saga." The Washington Post
• "[An] addictive family saga packed with forbidden love, the search for belonging, and triumph against the odds." Esquire, "Top 10 Best Books of 2017 (So Far)"
• "An intimate yet expansive immigrant story." The Michigan Daily
• "The seminal English literary work of the Korean immigrant story in Japan...Lee's sentences and the novel's plotting feel seamless, so much so, that one wonders why we make such a fuss about writing at all. Her style is literary without calling attention to its lyricism." Ploughshares
• "Effortlessly carries the reader through generations, outlining its changing historical context without sacrificing the juicy details...Life is dynamic: in Pachinko , it carries on, rich and wondrous." The Winnipeg Free Press
• "The beautiful, overwhelming tone of the novel - and the one that will stay with you at the end - is one of hope, courage, and survival against all the odds." The Iklkely Gazette UK
• "An exquisite, haunting epic." The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center & Bloom Magazine
• "As an examination of immigration over generations, in its depth and empathy, Pachinko is peerless." The Japan Times
• "Lee shines in highlighting the complexities of being an immigrant and striving for a better life when resigned to a second-class status. In particular, she explores the mechanisms of internalized oppression and the fraught position of being a "well-behaved" member of a maligned group. When history has failed, and the game is rigged, what's left? Throughout Pachinko , it's acts of kindness and love. The slow accumulation of those moments create a home to return to again and again, even in the worst of times." Paste Magazine
• "This is honest writing, fiction that looks squarely at what is, both terrible and wonderful and occasionally as bracing as a jar of Sunja's best kimchi." NPR Book Review
• "Lee is a master plotter, but the larger issues of class, religion, outsider history and culture she addresses in Pachinko make this a tour de force you'll think about long after you finish reading." National Book Review
• " Pachinko gives us a moving and detailed portrait about what it's like to sit at the nexus of two cultures, and what it means to forge a home in a place that doesn't always welcome you." Fusion
• "If you want a book that challenges and expands your perspective, turn to Pachinko ...in Lee's deft hands, the pages pass as effortlessly as time." BookPage
• "A big novel to lose yourself in or to find yourself anew-a saga of Koreans living in Japan, rejected by the country they call home, unable to return to Korea as wars and strife tear the region apart. The result is like a secret history of both countries burst open in one novel. I hope you love it like I did." Alexander Chee, author of Queen of the Night and Edinburgh writing for the Book of the Month Club
• "Sweeping and powerful" The Toronto Star
• "[An] immersive novel." BBC.com's "10 Books to Read in 2017
• "This family saga about a Korean family living in Japan sticks with you long after you've finished the 496th. I didn't want it to end." Reading Women
• "A sprawling, beautiful novel." PBS

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“Imagining singing can also help Parkinson's patients who are having difficulty walking. If they just imagine a rhythmic song in their head, like ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,” they'll be able to cross the street without stopping. It's a simple benefit, but it's very powerful.”

Music psychotherapist Stacie Yeldell writes about a boy who found relief from the pain of sickle cell anemia in the viral song “ The Fox .” What’s the relationship between pain and music?

“Pain is what is very much impacted by music. And in fact, there's a huge focus on research in terms of pain and Joke Bradt's chapter, which is all about that. They don't really know exactly what mechanism is occurring now with that, but they do know music reduces pain.

“I have a friend who actually had a brain bleed and the only thing that alleviated her excruciating pain at first was the loudest possible music she could play.  So, it's possible that that's what was interrupting his pain as well.”

How can music serve as a “bridge” to people with dementia, as music therapy pioneer Concetta Tomaino writes in the book?

“Music and memory are so completely linked. We remember events in our lives: If we hear just a snippet of a song, we're back at our wedding. We're back at any number of events.

“With people with Alzheimer's disease, it is the last memory to stay because this memory area, as it pertains to music, is the last area of the brain that's impacted by the disease. So [Tomaino has] been trying to kind of prolong the sustainability of memory attached to music memories.

“Somebody came up to me after the Kennedy Center Honors and said, ‘I just want to say I heard one of your presentations and my dad was really becoming difficult and becoming a little bit violent. And we remembered suddenly because of what you said, that he was an opera lover and we put on opera. And he calmed down and he smiled, and we've been playing it ever since. It's made a huge difference in his mood and state.’ And so it can alleviate life for caregivers as well.”

Have these insights changed the way you sing?

“It doesn't change the way I sing, but for instance, I now tell the audience that our brain waves are aligning as we are in this space together, having a shared musical experience. That's why they've now shown that singing in a choir is more impactful than singing alone.

“How this work has changed me is that I am living my life now, being mindful of the fact that I need these artistic experiences, things that I thought were extra. ‘If I have time, I'll go to a concert.’ I now prioritize them in my life and I see a huge difference in my state of mind, less anxiety. I’m much happier, so I'm like a living example of how this works.”

Emiko Tamagawa  produced and edited this interview for broadcast with  Todd Mundt .  Allison Hagan  adapted it for the web.

Book excerpt: 'The Parting Glass' from 'Music and Mind'

By Richard Powers, edited by Renée Fleming

It’s morning, and dozens of thrushes, wrens, and warblers are singing their hearts out in the trees beneath the window of my house in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Spring in Appalachia, and you know how that piece goes. Some of the singers live here year‑round. Others are passing through on long journeys. I listen as the dawn chorus reaches its wild peak. No one is conducting. The music exhilarates me, and clearly the singers are thrilling one another. If you ask a scientist why birds sing, the answer will deal in courtship and territory. But if you asked the bird, and if you could understand its reply, it would probably be something like, “Because I have to, and it feels so good.”

I put on some music of my own, adding a descant to the morning mayhem. Here’s a miracle that I hope I’ll never get used to: I can stream just about any song ever recorded, any time I want, in every season, from any room in my house in the woods. I call up a fine old Scottish‑Irish song that always goes right through me: “The Parting Glass.” The song is at least four hundred years old, and no one is sure who wrote the music or the words. Traditional, as they say. And I have dozens of covers to choose from. I play one by three Canadian women singing a cappella, in crystalline harmony, as if they’re already a step or two beyond the grave.

The song partakes of an old Celtic tradition. When a guest rose to leave the party and climbed up in the stirrups of his horse, he’d be given a stirrup cup or parting glass, one more drink to fortify him for the night’s trip back home. The song is in the voice of a guest taking such a leave:

So fill to me the parting glass And drink a health whate’er befall, And gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be to you all.

Words fill my house and spill out into the woods. It’s just a folk song— plaintive, playful, a little melancholy. The tune traces out the basic moves of tonal expectation, traveling from home and back again with open grace. The harmonies are steadfast and simple, with no great surprises. The lyrics, however, are a little cheeky, a nice mix of sass, stoicism, and self‑effacement, even though it’s easy to hear that this singer is setting out on a journey somewhat longer than a night’s ride:

Of all the money that e’er I spent, I spent it in good company. And all the harm that e’er I’ve done, Alas it was to none but me. And all I’ve done for want of wit To mem’ry now I can’t recall. So fill to me the parting glass: Good night and joy be with you all!

A summing up, then, with the singers taking stock before a last depar‑ ture. The words could be about nothing at all—they might be in a foreign language, and I would still hear the farewell. It’s there in the suspended harmonies, in the way the chords waver between major and minor. I’m off now, out of here: drink to me, drink to my disappearance. The Celts have always been good at emigration and goodbyes.

For reasons that science may never quite put its finger on, I get chills and my eyes start to water. It happens to me with music, far more than with any other art. Music has a startling ability to make a listener sad over noth‑ ing, simply by unfolding chords in a certain order and weaving them through with a tuneful filigree. It’s not clear what the adaptive advantage of this might be, but the right pitches in the right rhythm can overwhelm us with sorrow. And we love every minute of that harmonious grief.

I’m reassured by a quick online search that reveals at least twenty health benefits of crying. The sheer abundance of weeping’s benefits makes me laugh and laughing brings at least ten benefits more. I don’t know why I chose this song—an evening’s last farewell—to add to the birds’ exuberant morning chorus. I don’t understand why I would willingly choose sadness. But it feels so good. It’s a bracing dive into a cold spring, a glimpse of mid‑ night just before breakfast.

Countless clinical studies have now tied the secret of health to moving. There is also great health in being moved, something that produces similar physiology. Think about the old meanings buried in the etymology of “emotion.” To move and to feel are complements, and the emotion that a tune triggers is a tune‑up in how to move more deeply through the wider world. Music makes us go somewhere. It propels us into new states, new vantages, new emotional affordances. If you ask a scientist why music is healthy, the answer will come in units of cortisol and heart rate and blood‑ oxygen levels. But if you ask this listener, I’d say that music is an off‑line cognitive therapy. By making us sad in the absence of real tragedy, it leaves us more adept in sadness when life calls for the real thing.

Being moved by a song holds the key to mental health. Music says: “Here’s what happens to us. We and those around us move like chords unfolding in time, throwing off fantastic sparks and harmonies. And then the chords end. Here’s how to feel sad about that. And how to hear how that sadness, too, will pass.”

I suspect that none of the dozen species of birds singing outside my window know that one day their song will stop. But every human does. We carry the knowledge of our own death with us all life long. Awareness of mortality is the first and hardest challenge to our sanity. In my life, the best consolation for my approaching death has always been to sing it and to hear it being sung. I think that’s why the world’s great sacred ways of coping with death are so often built around music. So many times in this life I’ve heard friends say, “I love this piece. Play this at my funeral.” Music can train us in goodbyes. In giving us a little taste of our own finitude, it lets us, for a moment, feel the infinite.

“The Parting Glass” lasts only two and a half minutes. Soon enough, it reaches its final stanza. But in those one hundred and fifty seconds, the song lights up my brain in several ways. First, there is the sheer glory of the sound: three clear voices tuned tightly to each other. Then there is the stepwise tune and its dramatic pauses, its phrases always taking their leave, always coming home. Those simple syncopations lay out the plainest two‑step dance, reminding me of all the dancing I won’t be doing when I no longer have a body. A good song—a great movement—is a way of saying, Dance now, if only in your mind, for there is no dancing where you’re going. Finally, there is music’s uniquely vertical trick, stacking up companion lines in step with the one that my ear keys to. The tune contains its own accompani‑ ment, and all the regions of my brain fire in harmony. It reminds me of what good company I’ve spent my life in.

Of all the comrades that e’er I’ve had Are sorry for my going away. And all the sweethearts that e’er I’ve had They’ d wish me one more day to stay. But since it falls unto my lot That I should rise and you should not, I’ ll gently rise and softly call Good night and joy be with you all!

Of all music’s health benefits, teaching us how to be okay with our own disappearance may be the deepest. A good song lets me hear how the chords go on, far beyond the double bar. As another good song puts it:

Music, music for a while Will all our cares beguile.

That it can do so with sadness is a pure delight.

“The Parting Glass” does what all good songs do: it ends. It gets up in the stirrups, takes a last deep drink, and is off. My Canadian singers spring a surprise minor final cadence, and the tune is done. The morning chorus starts to disperse. I land back on Earth, turn from the window, and get on with my full day’s work. For what it’s worth, I get a ton done.

As I fall asleep, the night is all melancholy owls and mournful whip‑ poor‑wills. Birdsong, too, knows the uses of sadness. At two a.m., when I briefly wake, there is nothing but dead silence. I’m fine with that. The song is ended, but the melody lingers on. Even in the long rests, I can hear how the morning chorus will begin again in the dark, just before sunrise, for whoever may or may not be there to listen.

From 'Music and Mind' edited by Renée Fleming, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Richard Powers.

This segment aired on April 9, 2024.

Robin Young Co-Host, Here & Now Robin Young brings more than 25 years of broadcast experience to her role as host of Here & Now.

Emiko Tamagawa Senior Producer, Here & Now Emiko Tamagawa produces arts and culture segments for Here & Now.

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Book Reviews

'lilith' cuts to the heart of the gun debate and school shootings.

Gabino Iglesias

Eric Rickstad's Lilith is one of the most uncomfortable novels you'll read this year. Full of sadness and rage, this timely narrative cuts to the heart of the gun debate and school shootings with a scalpel of words.

Lilith forces readers to look at one of the ugliest parts of U.S. culture, a too-common occurrence that is extremely rare in other countries. This is novel that acts like mirror; it shows you society with love and great insight into what makes us tick, but also with brutal honesty and under a stark, unwavering light.

Elisabeth Ross is a single mother and teacher raising her son Lydan by herself. One morning. Lydan wakes up with an "icky" feeling about the day and begs Elisabeth to stay home. But working mothers rarely take a day off, so even though she wants to stay at home and spend the day with her beloved boy, she takes him to school and gets to work. That day, a man breaks into the school with a powerful rifle and kills a lot of people, mostly kids. Elisabeth breaks the rules and manages to get some of her kids out and then goes back in to rescue Lydan, who suffers devastating injuries that leave him almost dead.

In the aftermath of the traumatic event, Lydan is a shadow of his former self. He becomes strangely haunted in many ways, often talking about dark things and saying he's already dead. After leaving the hospital, the boy spends his days limping around the house with injuries that will change his life forever, taking pain meds to get through the day, and dealing with PTSD. Meanwhile, Elisabeth must deal with bosses that want to fire her for breaking the rules — and with the simmering rage that's threatening to boil her alive. The system is broken. Evil men make money from every tragedy. Elisabeth needs her insurance more than ever and her bosses want to give her a six-month suspension without pay.

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Then something clicks. Someone must do something, and she's the perfect person to do it. Elisabeth morphs into a persona she names Lilith, the first wife of the biblical Adam, a woman who refused to serve a man. Elisabeth, well, plans revenge and then must face the consequences of her actions. Is she a hurt, loving mother doing the right thing or no better than the man who shot up the school? The answers to the questions her actions raise aren't easy, and they make the core of Lilith a truly emotional conundrum.

Reading Lilith is an endurance exercise. Lydan's destroyed body and psyche, the unreasonableness of Elisabeth's bosses, and the growing pain and anxiety add up to a powerful novel you can't look away from, but that hurts you with every page. Rickstad, with impeccable pacing and economy of language, delves deep into the gun culture that uses every school shooting as an excuse to celebrate guns and sell more guns. Also, he gets to the core of how misogyny is part of not only that culture but also of everything Elisabeth has ever experienced. As Elisabeth develops her plan and becomes Lilith, the unkindness and abuse history has shown women become something that's always present, and the men who insist on perpetuating that become something she wants to fight against: "They shape the world through violence and conquest, pillaging and rape and genocide, oppression and control; they use their own language to mold a world that's male dominant, male centric, male first."

Perhaps the most powerful thing Rickstad accomplishes here is that he never spells out any answers while constantly presenting the right questions. Yes, we know school shootings are awful and this country's obsession with guns — and the push by some to completely deregulate them — is unhealthy and dangerous, but the anger we feel and the violence we wish upon those who don't seem to care about dead children is no better. The person who shot up the school doesn't matter here; he is a symptom of a much larger disease. Elisabeth and Lydan matter. They are the heart of this narrative, and that serves as a reminder that the discourse exists, but that the people behind it, those who suffer and die as well as those whose lives change as they become caretakers, are more important than any political discussion. This is a brave, timely novel that goes straight to the damaged soul of this country.

Gabino Iglesias is an author, book reviewer and professor living in Austin, Texas. Find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @Gabino_Iglesias .