Pachinko

Mozasu enjoys working in the pachinko gambling parlors, where nearly everyone is Korean. He no longer gets into fights and works hard. Goro takes Mozasu to get some new clothes. The seamstress, Totoyama, is Haruki’s mother. Totoyama is interrupted from her work by her other son, who has cognitive disabilities. Goro seems worried and ends up ordering lots of clothes from her. When they leave and Totoyama shuts the door, Totoyama cries with relief, knowing she has money for rent and food.

Sunja, Kyunghee, Yangjin, and Yoseb try to figure out how to pay for Noa’s education. Yoseb tells the women that Mozasu should borrow money from Goro, but the women protest that Noa would never let his younger brother pay for his education. The women bring up the possibility of asking Hansu to pay, but Yoseb strongly disagrees, saying that such money would be “filthy. […] Take money from him for Noa, and there will be no end to him. He wants to control the boy” (264).

Hansu invites Noa and Sunja to his Osaka office to celebrate Noa’s acceptance into Waseda University. He then tells them that he has paid for Noa’s tuition, board, and fees, much to their surprise. When Noa leaves the room, Sunja insists that the money be a loan. Hansu insists that he is Noa’s father and that he must be allowed to support his son’s ambitions. 

Changho tells Yoseb that he will be moving to Pyongyang. Yoseb tells him that if Changho waits for him to die, then Changho can marry Kyunghee as long as he doesn’t take her to North Korea because he doesn’t trust the communists.

Changho tells Kyunghee what Yoseb told him. Kyunghee is stunned. She tells him that she loves him as a friend, but she says it’s not right to make such plans because her husband is alive: “To even talk about it while he is alive cannot be right. I pray that you’ll understand” (273). Changho says he does not share her faith and cannot understand how her faith could “allow such suffering” (273).

Changho leaves in the middle of the night for North Korea. Kyunghee cries and tells Sunja what he said. Kyunghee tells her that it wouldn’t be right to deny him the chance to have children. Sunja says, “Sister, he would not have cared about children. He would have been happy to have just been with you” (274). 

Noa is very happy studying at Waseda. He’s spent the past two years learning to write essays and take exams: “None of his requirements even seemed like work; Waseda was pure joy to him. He read as much as he could without straining his eyes, and there was time to read and write and think” (275). He meets another student, Akiko Fumeki, “the radical beauty on campus” (277). They talk about books, and she criticizes the books that they are reading in class. He’s impressed with her independent thinking.

During a class lecture, Akiko interrupts the professor to criticize her interpretation of the novel Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. The professor says that when the main character, Daniel, finds out that he is Jewish, he is free to love the other Jewish character in the novel, and they move to Israel. Akiko says, “So are you saying that it is better for people to only love within their race, that people like the Jews need to live apart in their own country” (279). The professor talks about the persecution that Jews have faced historically and how they want to have a Jewish state. Akiko then brings up that “Japan was an ally of Germany” (279), and the professor quickly cuts her off, saying they won’t be discussing that. Akiko continues to insist that Eliot was wrong:

Maybe the Jews have a right to their own state, but I see no need for Mirah and Daniel to have to leave England. I think this nobility argument or a greater nation for a persecuted people is a pretext to eject all the unwanted foreigners (279).

Noa is fascinated by Akiko’s interpretation.