Min Lee - Pachinko

“Each morning, Pastor Yoo has been asking for any word from you. We didn’t know when you’d come. If we’d known that you were arriving yesterday, I would’ve come to pick you up at the station.” Hu was no older than twenty; he spoke Japanese and Korean very well and had the mannerisms of a much older man. Hu wore a shabby white dress shirt with a blown-out collar, tucked into a pair of brown woolen trousers. His dark blue sweater was knit from heavy wool and patched in places. He was wearing the winter remnants of Canadian missionaries who hadn’t had much themselves.

Isak turned away to cough.

“My child, who is that with you?” Yoo turned his head to the voices by the door and pushed up his heavy horn-rimmed eyeglasses closer to his face, though doing so hardly helped to sharpen his vision. Behind the milky gray cast clouding his eyes, his expression remained calm and certain. His hearing was acute. He could not make out the shapes by the door, but he knew that one of them was Hu, the Manchurian orphan who’d been left at the church by a Japanese officer, and that the man he was speaking with had an unfamiliar voice.

“It’s Pastor Baek,” Hu said.

The siblings seated on the floor by the pastor turned around and bowed.

Yoo felt impatient to end the meeting with the brother and sister, who were no closer to a resolution.

“Come to me, Isak. It’s not so easy for me to reach you.”

Isak obeyed.

“You have come at last. Hallelujah.” Yoo put his right hand lightly over Isak’s head.

“The Lord bless you, my dear child.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting. I arrived in Osaka last night,” Isak said. The elder pastor’s unfocused pupils were ringed with silver. He wasn’t blind, but the condition was severe. Despite his nearly lost vision, the minister appeared vigorous; his seated posture was straight and firm.

“My son, come closer.”

Isak drew near, and the older man clasped Isak’s hands at first, then cradled his face between his thick palms.

The brother and sister looked on without saying anything. By the transom of the door, Hu sat on bended knees, waiting for Yoo’s next instruction.

“You were sent to me, you know,” Yoo said.

“Thank you for allowing me to come.”

“I’m pleased that you’re here at last. Did you bring your wife? Hu read me your letter.”

“She’s at home today. She will be here on Sunday.”

“Yes, yes.” The older man nodded. “The congregation will be so pleased to have you here. Ah, you should meet this family!”

The siblings bowed again to Isak. They’d noticed that the pastor looked happier than they’d ever seen him.

“They’ve come to see us about a family matter,” Yoo said to Isak, then turned to the siblings.

The sister did little to hide her irritation. The brother and sister were from a rural village in Jeju, and they were far less formal than young people from cities. The dark-skinned girl with the thick black hair was wholesome looking; she was remarkably pretty while appearing very innocent. She wore a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the collar and a pair of indigo-colored mompei .

“This is the new associate pastor, Baek Isak. Should we ask for his counsel, too?” From the tone of Yoo’s voice, there was no possibility of the siblings’ dissent.

Isak smiled at them. The sister was twenty or so; the brother was younger.

The matter was complicated but not out of the ordinary. The brother and sister had been arguing about money. The sister had been accepting gifts of money from a Japanese manager at the textile factory where she worked. Older than their father, the manager was married with five children. He took the sister to restaurants and gave her trinkets and cash. The girl sent the entire sum to their parents living with an indigent uncle back home. The brother felt it was wrong to take anything beyond her salary; the sister disagreed.

“What does he want from her?” the brother asked Isak bluntly. “She should be made to stop. This is a sin.”

Yoo craned his head lower, feeling exhausted by their intransigence.

The sister was furious that she had to be here at all, having to listen to her younger brother’s accusations. “The Japanese took our uncle’s farm. We can’t work at home because there are no jobs; if a Japanese man wants to give me some pocket money to have dinner with him, I don’t see the harm,” the sister said. “I’d take double what he gives me if I could. He doesn’t give that much.”

“He expects something, and he’s cheap,” said the brother, looking disgusted.

“I’d never let Yoshikawa-san touch me. I sit, smile, and listen to him talk about his family and his work.” She didn’t mention that she poured his drinks and wore the rouge that he bought for her, which she scrubbed off before coming home.

“He pays you to flirt with him. This is how a whore behaves.” The brother was shouting now. “Good women don’t go to restaurants with married men! While we work in Japan, Father said I’m in charge and must watch out for my sister. What does it matter that she’s older? She’s a girl and I’m a man; I can’t let this continue. I won’t allow it!”

The brother was four years younger than his nineteen-year-old sister. They were living with a distant cousin in an overcrowded house in Ikaino. The cousin, an elderly woman, never bothered them as long as they paid their share of the rent; she didn’t come to church, so Pastor Yoo didn’t know her.

“Father and Mother are starving back home. Uncle can’t feed his own wife and children. At this point, I’d sell my hands if I could. God wants me to honor my parents. It’s a sin not to care for them. If I have to be disgraced—” The girl started to cry. “Isn’t it possible that the Lord is providing Yoshikawa-san as our answer?” She looked at Pastor Yoo, who took the girl’s hands into his and bent his head as if in prayer.

It wasn’t uncommon to hear rationalizations of this sort — the longing to transform bad deeds into good ones. No one ever wanted to hear that God didn’t work that way; the Lord would never want a young woman to trade her body to follow a commandment. Sins couldn’t be laundered by good results.

“ Aigoo ,” Yoo sighed. “How difficult it must be to bear the weight of this world on your small shoulders. Do your parents know where you’re getting this money?”

“They think it’s from my wages, but that barely covers our rent and expenses. My brother has to go to school; Mother told me that it’s my responsibility for him to finish. He’s threatening to quit his studies so he can work, but that’s a foolish decision in the long run. Then we’ll always be working these terrible jobs. Without knowing how to read and write Japanese.”

Isak was astonished by her clarity; she had thought this through. He was half a dozen years older than she was, and he had not thought of such things. He’d never given his parents one sen of his wages, since he’d never earned money before. When he served briefly as a lay pastor at his church back home, he had gone without a salary because the church had so little for the senior clergy and the congregation had such great needs. He wasn’t certain what he would earn here. When he received the call to work at this church, the terms hadn’t been discussed; he’d assumed that his compensation would be enough to support him — and now, his family. With money always in his pocket and more readily available when he asked his parents or brother, Isak hadn’t bothered to figure out his earnings or his expenses. In the presence of these young people, Isak felt like a selfish fool.

“Pastor Yoo, we want you to decide. She won’t listen to me. I cannot control where she goes after work. If she keeps meeting with that goat, he’ll do something terrible, and no one will care what happens to her. She’ll listen to you,” the brother said quietly. “She has to.”