Throughout Pachinko, characters are haunted by questions concerning their identity—questions made more difficult by a conformist Japanese society that often sees difference, especially Korean difference, as a matter of contamination or “dirty” blood. In some ways, this problem only becomes more acute in the generations after Sunja settles in Japan; her children and grandchildren must work harder to understand their difference as their lives become more tangibly rooted in Japan than in Korea. For both Sunja’s son, Noa, and her grandson, Solomon, Korean blood appears to be something that inevitably limits their horizons and curtails their happiness. Lee shows that, while Sunja maintains that “blood doesn’t matter,” racist ideas about blood do affect people’s opportunities in life and can have a devastating impact on their sense of self.
When, as a college student, Noa finds out that the yakuza Hansu is really his biological father—not Isak, as he has believed all his life—he is devastated, believing this parentage makes him “dirty,” reflecting the idea that blood can impact one’s sense of self. Sunja tries to explain to Noa that “blood doesn’t matter” and that Isak had chosen to be his father in Hansu’s stead. Noa protests, “Yakuza are the filthiest people in Japan […] I will never be able to wash this dirt from my name […] How can you make something clean from something dirty? And now, you have made me dirty.” He explains that all his life, he’s tried to escape the relentless Japanese taunt that Korean blood is dirty and criminal; now that he knows the truth about Hansu, Noa believes he is tainted after all. Sunja wants Noa to accept that Isak’s fatherly devotion is stronger than Hansu’s questionable ties, but Noa can only see that his blood—and his hard-won identity—have been sullied.
Noa ends up dropping out of Waseda University and moving to Nagano, where he starts a new life passing as Japanese. He lies about his ethnicity in order to get a job as a bookkeeper at a pachinko parlor. He later marries a Japanese woman named Risa who is similarly “tainted” by family scandal, “effectively unmarriageable” because her father, a doctor, had committed suicide after inadvertently causing the deaths of some patients. In other words, once he resigns himself to a tainted self-image, Noa gravitates toward circumstances—the shady pachinko industry and a “compromised” woman—that confirm what he believes about himself based on his blood.
Confirming this sense of a self-fulfilling prophecy, after Sunja, with Hansu’s help, finally tracks Noa down years later, he still remains bitter about the “problem” of his blood, saying, “I suppose having yakuza in your blood is something that controls you. I can never be clean of [Hansu].” Moments after Sunja leaves, Noa commits suicide, apparently unable to bear the tension between his feigned and actual identities any longer.
When Yangjin is dying, she tells her daughter Sunja, “you brought shame on your child by having [Hansu] as his father. You caused your own suffering. Noa, that poor boy, came from a bad seed […] Mozasu came from better blood. That’s why he’s so blessed in his work.” Sunja, on the other hand, doesn’t believe this: “Seeds, blood. How could you fight such hopeless ideas? Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe in such cruel ideals.” Perhaps because of her own experience of getting a second chance through her marriage to Isak, Sunja doesn’t believe that one’s roots should determine their entire life and identity. Even still, she realizes that society brutally suppresses such freedom and that blood does matter to her society.
As late as the 1970s, ideas about “contaminated” Korean blood persist in Japanese society, shaping the life of Sunja’s grandson, Solomon. Mozasu explains to the teenaged Solomon that ethnic Koreans living in Japan have no real homeland; at government discretion, they can even be deported to a land (Korea) they’ve never seen, because they can’t be Japanese citizens. In light of this homeless state, Mozasu cherishes certain ambitions for Solomon—that his son will speak perfect Japanese and perfect English and end up working for an American company. Notably, Korea or Korean identity doesn’t figure into these plans in any way; Solomon, he hopes, will bypass the obstacle of his blood by becoming a “citizen of the world” instead.
When Solomon’s first love, Hana, who is Japanese, is dying of AIDS she contracted while working as a prostitute, she tells Solomon, “It’s a filthy world, Solomon. No one is clean. Living makes you dirty […] you should stay here and not go back to the States, and you should take over your papa’s business. Become so rich that you can do whatever you want. But, my beautiful Solomon, they’re never going to think we’re okay.” Like his uncle Noa, Solomon seems to feel a kinship with women who are contaminated in the eyes of society. Based on her own outcast status, Hana tells him that, no matter how hard he works, Solomon will never overcome society’s rejection of him; so, unlike his uncle and other well-meaning Koreans, he should accept his lot and not try. In accordance with this advice, Solomon ultimately does join his father’s pachinko business; hence, in a way, he makes peace with the colonialist Japanese logic that his blood is contaminated, even though two generations of his family have spent their entire lives in Japan.
All his life, no matter how hard he tries to deny it, Noa “[carries] the story of his life as a Korean like a dark, heavy rock within him.” And Solomon ends up losing his job when his father’s yakuza connections taint a critical real estate transaction, joining his father’s pachinko business despite Mozasu’s higher ambitions for him. These sad endings appear to confirm the fatalistic idea that blood determines who people are and what they do. However, Min Jin Lee offers a glimmer of hope at the end of the book when it’s revealed that, until he died, Noa faithfully visited Isak’s grave to honor his adoptive father. This suggests that, on some level, even Noa hearkened to Sunja’s plea that “blood doesn’t matter.”
Related Themes from Other Texts
Identity, Blood, and Contamination ThemeTracker
Identity, Blood, and Contamination Quotes in Pachinko
“The widow told me about her daughter only yesterday. And last night before my evening prayers, it occurred to me that this is what I can do for them: Give the woman and child my name. What is my name to me? It’s only a matter of grace that I was born a male who could enter my descendants in a family registry. If the young woman was abandoned by a scoundrel, it’s hardly her fault, and certainly, even if the man is not a bad person, the unborn child is innocent. Why should he suffer so? He would be ostracized. […] Maybe my life can be significant—not on a grand scale like my brother, but to a few people. Maybe I can help this young woman and her child. And they will be helping me, because I will have a family of my own—a great blessing no matter how you look at it.”
“What else can we do but persevere, my child? We’re meant to increase our talents. The thing that would make your appa happy is if you do as well as you’ve been doing. Wherever you go, you represent our family, and you must be an excellent person—at school, in town, and in the world. No matter what anyone says. Or does,” Isak said, then paused to cough. He knew it must be taxing for the child to go to a Japanese school. “You must be a diligent person with a humble heart. Have compassion for everyone. Even your enemies. Do you understand that, Noa? Men may be unfair, but the Lord is fair. You’ll see. You will,” Isak said, his exhausted voice tapering off.
“Yes, appa.” Hoshii-sensei had told him that he had a duty to Koreans, too; one day, he would serve his community and make Koreans good children of the benevolent Emperor.
Mozasu knew he was becoming one of the bad Koreans. Police officers often arrested Koreans for stealing or home brewing. Every week, someone on his street got in trouble with the police. Noa would say that because some Koreans broke the law, everyone got blamed. On every block in Ikaino, there was a man who beat his wife, and there were girls who worked in bars who were said to take money for favors. Noa said that Koreans had to raise themselves up by working harder and being better. Mozasu just wanted to hit everyone who said mean things.
Hansu did not believe in nationalism, religion, or even love, but he trusted in education. Above all, he believed that a man must learn constantly. […] It thrilled him that Noa could read and write English so beautifully—a language he knew was essential in the world. Noa had recommended books to him, and Hansu had read them, because he wanted to know the things his son knew.
The young man’s extraordinary scholarship was something Hansu knew he had to nurture. Hansu was not sure what he wanted Noa to do when he graduated; he was careful not to say too much, because it was clear that Noa had some of his own ideas. Hansu wanted to back him, the way he wanted to back good business plans.
Noa stared at her. She would always believe that he was someone else, that he wasn’t himself but some fanciful idea of a foreign person; she would always feel like she was someone special because she had condescended to be with someone everyone else hated. His presence would prove to the world that she was a good person, an educated person, a liberal person. Noa didn’t care about being Korean when he was with her; in fact, he didn’t care about being Korean or Japanese with anyone. He wanted to be, to be just himself, whatever that meant; he wanted to forget himself sometimes. But that wasn’t possible. It would never be possible with her.
“Yakuza are the filthiest people in Japan. They are thugs; they are common criminals. They frighten shopkeepers; they sell drugs; they control prostitution; and they hurt innocent people. All the worst Koreans are members of these gangs. I took money for my education from a yakuza, and you thought this was acceptable? I will never be able to wash this dirt from my name. You can’t be very bright,” he said. “How can you make something clean from something dirty? And now, you have made me dirty,” Noa said quietly, as if he was learning this as he was saying it to her. “All my life, I have had Japanese telling me that my blood is Korean— that Koreans are angry, violent, cunning, and deceitful criminals. All my life, I had to endure this. I tried to be as honest and humble as Baek Isak was; I never raised my voice. But this blood, my blood is Korean, and now I learn that my blood is yakuza blood. I can never change this, no matter what I do. It would have been better if I were never born. How could you have ruined my life? How could you be so imprudent? A foolish mother and a criminal father. I am cursed.”
The marriage was a stable one, and eight years passed quickly. The couple did not quarrel. Noa did not love Risa in the way he had his college girlfriend, but that was a good thing, he thought. Never again, he swore, would he be that vulnerable to another person. Noa remained careful around his new family. Though he valued his wife and children as a kind of second chance, in no way did he see his current life as a rebirth. Noa carried the story of his life as a Korean like a dark, heavy rock within him. Not a day passed when he didn’t fear being discovered.
“It is hopeless. I cannot change his fate. He is Korean. He has to get those papers, and he has to follow all the steps of the law perfectly. Once, at a ward office, a clerk told me that I was a guest in his country.”
“You and Solomon were born here.”
“Yes, my brother, Noa, was born here, too. And now he is dead.” Mozasu covered his face with his hands.
Etsuko sighed.
“Anyway, the clerk was not wrong. And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.”
Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
“Japan will never change. […] The zainichi can’t leave, nee? But it’s not just you. Japan will never take people like my mother back into society again; it will never take back people like me. And we’re Japanese! I’m diseased. I got this from some Japanese guy who owned an old trading company. He’s dead now. But nobody cares. The doctors here, even, they just want me to go away. So listen, Solomon, you should stay here and not go back to the States, and you should take over your papa’s business. Become so rich that you can do whatever you want. But, my beautiful Solomon, they’re never going to think we’re okay. Do you know what I mean?” Hana stared at him. “Do what I tell you to do.”
