Image in the original: Pachinko Parlor
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award and ranked fifteenth on The New York Times‘ list of the hundred best books of the twenty-first century. The novel follows several generations of a Korean family in Japan, tracing their lives through colonial rule, war, discrimination and the struggle to belong.
Yet one of the most interesting things about Pachinko is the novel Lee had to abandon before she could write it.
Beginning in 1996, Lee spent seven years writing Motherland, a novel about ethnic Koreans in Japan. She researched their history extensively and completed a manuscript, but found the result unsatisfactory. She eventually set it aside.
In 2007, she moved to Tokyo with her family. There, and during visits to Osaka, she began interviewing members of the Korean community whose families had lived in Japan for generations. Their experiences challenged the understanding she had developed through historical research.
These people had experienced discrimination and exclusion, but their lives were not defined by suffering alone. They worked, raised families, pursued ambitions and made compromises. They wanted ordinary lives and the freedom to belong.
Lee later described her original manuscript as angry and dull. She had understood the historical injustices but had not sufficiently understood the people who lived through them. She eventually discarded almost the entire manuscript, moved the story’s beginning back to 1910 and introduced new characters, including Sunja, who would become the emotional centre of Pachinko.
The people she met had done more than supply new material. They had changed her understanding of what the story needed to be.
I find this particularly interesting because Tokyo changed me, too, although in a very different way.
For roughly my first ten years here, I disliked the city intensely. Having lived in several countries, I found Japan remarkably resistant to difference. Individuality seemed something to be managed rather than encouraged. The familiar saying about the nail that sticks out being hammered down felt uncomfortably close to everyday reality.
For years, I resented Tokyo for what I believed it lacked. Sometimes it felt as though the city had broken me.
And yet, gradually, I began to discover another Japan.
I became increasingly absorbed in its literature.
There was Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, written more than a thousand years ago and often described as the world’s first novel. Its psychological complexity and sensitivity to human relationships made me appreciate the depth of a literary tradition I had barely understood.
Then there was the extraordinary geographical and cultural range of the country.
From Hokkaido to Okinawa, Japan spans roughly the same range of latitude as Helsinki to Naples. That distance helps explain its remarkable regional food traditions, shaped by different climates, landscapes and histories.
I came to appreciate its hot springs, the attention paid to the changing seasons, and a history stretching from the Heian court to the age of the samurai. There was an entire cultural world I had overlooked while concentrating on what frustrated me about contemporary Tokyo.
These discoveries did not make my earlier criticisms false. The pressures to conform had not disappeared. But I began to understand that they were only part of a much larger picture.
A country could be socially conformist in ways I disliked and culturally rich and varied in ways I had scarcely noticed. I had allowed my experience of Tokyo to become my judgment of Japan.
Over time, I also came to appreciate the qualities that make everyday life here so rewarding. Today, I sometimes think there may be no better country in which to live.
Perhaps I had changed as much as my understanding of the place.
This is where Lee’s experience speaks to me.
Her original account of Korean life in Japan was not historically false. The discrimination she had studied was real. What she discovered was that even an accurate account of injustice could leave too little room for the complexity of human lives.
A novelist can be historically correct and still make people smaller than they are.
The same danger exists whenever we encounter another culture.
We arrive with assumptions formed by our upbringing, education and previous experiences. Those assumptions help us interpret unfamiliar things, but they can also determine what we notice and what we overlook.
Once an interpretation becomes part of our identity, questioning it can feel like surrender.
There is something here that reminds me of the Buddhist idea of attachment, particularly attachment to our own views. We become so invested in our understanding of the world that we resist experiences capable of changing it.
Letting go does not require abandoning judgment.
It means accepting that our judgments may be incomplete. We can continue to criticize what deserves criticism while learning to recognize what we once failed to appreciate.
That is what makes Lee’s abandoned manuscript so interesting to me.
She had invested years in an interpretation of a community, yet eventually recognized that the lives she encountered demanded a different story.
I think about that when I consider my own years in Tokyo.
For a long time, I believed I understood Japan because I could explain what I disliked about it. Only later did I recognize how much that explanation had excluded.
Tokyo did not simply teach me to love Japan.
It taught me how much I had failed to see while believing I understood it. ■
Sources
- Hachette Book Group — Pachinko Reading Group Guide / Conversation with Min Jin Lee
Hachette — Pachinko Reading Group Guide - PBS American Masters — “Min Jin Lee Revisits the Decades It Took To Write Pachinko”
PBP American Masters — Min Jin Lee interview - PBS Arts Talk — Ann Curry with Min Jin Lee
PBS Arts Talk — Ann Curry with Min Jin Lee
First published on Substack on Oct 15, 2026 (JST). Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive (published on this site: Oct 23, 2026). Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/let-the-place-ruin-your-draft
Cover image: Pachinko balls, photo by MichaelMaggs, 2008 (CC BY-SA 3.0 — source)
