Haunting Families: Postmemory and Transgenerational Trauma in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko

The re-writing of the past has been consistently used in contemporary fiction as a way to illustrate the relevance of certain historical events, while also emphasising the bond between present and past. For this reason, many present-day authors have chosen the genre of historical fiction to expose what Linda Hutcheon calls the “many truths” that could have existed in the past, and such an approach has become a powerful tool used to discover the voices of those who were silenced. In this chapter, I analyse the impact of memory in the transmission of the past through Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory by assessing Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko (2017) under these terms, as well as interrogating the power of collective memory and the psychological haunting of the mind. This analysis also considers the mother’s role within the family, and the spaces designated to women according to society. With the novel’s first words—“history has failed us, but no matter”—, the author claims to explore the life of a survivor, of a woman whose testimony has been denied and, building on this idea, this chapter aims to prove the power of historical fiction to re-construct the past.