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Motif
Explanation and Analysis—Food:
Food holds special status in Pachinko’s fictional fabric. Over the course of the novel, Sunja meets Hansu at the fish market, Kyunghee peddles kimchi at the train station, and Noa struggles to erase the garlicky smell of his clothes. Speaking through a language of banchan and kimchi, the novel develops a deeper narrative about class, identity, and survival. Perched over a pot of melted sugar one night, Sunja suddenly thinks back to her Yeongdo home’s “bountiful garden” of “watermelons, lettuces, and squash.” Food is a source of tradition, memory, and heritage for a people otherwise unmoored from their homeland.
At the same time, Pachinko holds up food as something of a double-edged sword. Dishes like kimchi or bone broth are staples of Korean identity and, in the context of imperial Japan, symbols that brand its members with ethnic otherness. Japanese high schoolers assault Sunja on her way to the market. Korean food cripples Noa with shame decades later as kids call him “garlic turd,” while the telltale “smells of garlic, shoyu, and the stronger miso” in the apartment building give away Tetsuo’s Korean identity. In the oppressive Japanese society, characters are what they eat.
But amid the novel’s famines and wars, food most powerfully expresses humanity’s practical, material needs. “In the end, your belly was your emperor,” Yoseb thinks to himself while mulling the household’s financial straits. As wartime shortages spread and budgets thin, food offers the only promise of survival. Yoseb’s job relocation barely spares him from the atomic bomb, but Tamaguchi’s sweet potato farm does. Yangjin and the boardinghouse scrape past the famine with donations from lodgers. Most notably, Sunja and Kyunghee provide for their hard-pressed family by selling kimchi at the market. Koh Hansu aside, their kimchi business opens the door to positions at Kim Changho’s restaurant and allows them to sustain the household. Pachinko makes food a marker of time, place, and life itself.
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