Thirty Years of Pachinko: Min Jin Lee on Failing Well

Nora Ellis

Welcome to Behind the Book. I'm Nora Ellis. My guest today is Min Jin Lee: National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim fellow, author of Free Food for Millionaires and the novel we are here to talk about, Pachinko. Min Jin, welcome.

Min Jin Lee

Thank you, Nora. I am glad to be here, and I am glad you want the boring parts, because the boring parts are the job.

Nora Ellis

What is Pachinko, for a listener who has only seen the series?

Min Jin Lee

Four generations of one Korean family living in Japan across most of the twentieth century. It begins with a girl in a boarding house in Busan and ends in a country that still will not quite call her grandchildren citizens. The pachinko parlours are the only business open to them, which tells you everything about the title.

Nora Ellis

It took nearly thirty years.

Min Jin Lee

Failing well, mostly. I wrote an entire version in the nineteen nineties from the point of view of one Korean Japanese man and it was flat, because I was writing an argument, not a family. Then my husband's work took us to Tokyo, I interviewed dozens of people, and I understood the story belonged to the women. I threw out the manuscript in my forties and started again.

Nora Ellis

How did you know that was the right call?

Min Jin Lee

Because the new pages were harder to write and easier to read. That is my only reliable test. When I am defending a draft in my head, it is dead. When I am nervous and curious, it is alive.

Nora Ellis

What did you want the book to achieve?

Min Jin Lee

Ordinary people are historically invisible and I find that unbearable. A woman selling kimchi in a market in Osaka is carrying an entire century. If I do the work properly, a reader in Ohio who has never thought about Korea for one minute of her life will grieve for her. That transaction is the point of the form.

Nora Ellis

And the ambition for its reach?

Min Jin Lee

Unapologetically large. I want this history known, and a novel is the most efficient smuggling device we have. The television adaptation brought millions of people to a subject they would never have searched for. I will keep talking, keep touring, keep answering the letters, because the book only works if it is in somebody's hands.

Nora Ellis

Advice for a writer holding a manuscript nobody wants yet?

Min Jin Lee

Keep it, keep going, and get older. Patience is an underrated craft skill. Some books need the writer to become a different person first.

Nora Ellis

Min Jin Lee, thank you. Listeners, we promote every guest after the recording, so Pachinko is on our promoted books page this month, in the newsletter, and out across our channels. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave us a review, and pass this episode to a writer who is on draft nine. I'm Nora Ellis. Thank you for listening to Behind the Book.