Min Jin Lee’s multigenerational novel covers seven decades (from 1910–1989). The story introduces a huge cast of characters and encompasses history, race, politics and gender. Like Noa in Pachinko, Lee is an admirer of the nineteenth-century English novel. This love of the classics is reflected in her writing style. Although she uses language in a typically modern, pared back way, the sprawling scope of Pachinko is reminiscent of the novels of Charles Dickens. Lee’s interest in the struggles of ordinary men and women in a largely unjust society is also a recurring theme in Dickens’s fiction.
Lee takes on a further common feature of nineteenth-century fiction by choosing to use an omniscient narrator in her novel. By employing a God-like narrator who has an overview of all the characters’ actions and thoughts, Lee is able to tell the story of a whole community. Democratically conveying the perspectives of all characters—even the minor ones—she gives a multitude of voices to people who have largely been forgotten by history.
Min Jin Lee has stated that one of her main aims as a writer is to create “radical empathy through art.” By conveying the humanity of each and every one of her Korean characters, Lee hopes to redress mankind’s tendency to “dehumanize entire populations.” This seems a particularly important goal at a time when Western perceptions of Koreans may be based solely on negative news coverage of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. As Lee points out, “it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they’re all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.”
