Zainichi Protagonists and the Making of Historical Fiction: Cold War Security and Economic Insecurity in Min Jin Lee's <i>Pachinko</i> and Yang Sŏk-il's <i>Chi to hone</i> (<i>Blood and Bones</i>)

Abstract This article discusses how the historical experience of Zainichi (the postcolonial Korean diaspora in Japan) is represented through the fictionalized family history, set from the colonial period to the dusk of the Cold War. Looking at two post–Cold War novels across English and Japanese languages, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and Yang Sŏk-il’s Chi to hone 血と骨 (Blood and Bones), this article contextualizes the Zainichi intergenerational historical novel within a transpacific memory culture on Japanese-US imperiality and Korean diaspora. Built from firsthand or secondhand Zainichi memories, these novels experiment with different kinds of agency allotted to Korean characters amid the difficulties of effecting social change. Under dual conditions of Cold War security and economic insecurity, the agentive possibilities for a Zainichi character may be channeled in ways that reinforce the violent sociopolitical order as much as they might take the forms of revolutionary activity, resistance, or survival. These novels retrospectively narrate the experience of economic and geopolitical uncertainty within the frames of accepted historical knowledge. While Yang’s novel includes flashbacks to socialist and lumpen struggles as hallmarks of Zainichi memory, Lee purges her novel of the leftist Zainichi legacy, manipulating smaller levers of individual possibility within the unquestioned parameters of racialized labor and Korean division.