The Asian Anglophone Family Novel: Intergenerational Life Writing in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko

This chapter focuses on Pachinko, an intergenerational family novel by Korean American author Min Jin Lee. The novel centres on a Korean family in the twentieth century as they relocate to Japan, a country in which they are perceived as ethnic outsiders. Lee details the Baek/Boku family’s intergenerational history by drawing from oral histories transmitted through personal interviews with the so-called Zainichi people, an example of the intergenerational experiences which have become prevalent in Asian Anglophone works. This trend reclaims but also reworks the family novel, which had largely declined in Anglophone literary fiction, by reviving its connection to the nation and nation-building in a contemporary context. This development in life writing centres the group rather than the individual—and focuses on broader transcultural and hybrid experiences rather than homogeneous national imaginaries. Lee renders Pachinko closer to factual life writing while portraying the family as a stand-in for the Zainichi experience, an approach which complicates the homogeneous family-as-nation by depicting characters with complex identities, troubled by local particularities and historical developments. The chapter traces Lee’s approach to life writing and oral history, and the family novel’s history, before turning to Pachinko’s culturally entangled family. Intergenerationality emerges as a hybridising process that complicates the monolithic family and nation, but also the family as nation.