Go: A Coming of Age Novel

This has been sitting on my Kindle for quite a while because...well, I'm not a huge fan of ebooks. In fact, my Kindle has been dead for the past two months. But, I finally charged it up and opened this.

Coming of age stories don't usually appeal to me because they all seem the same: angsty teen with

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raging hormones who is only interested in hating their parents, having sex, or both. This was no exception. Add in the obscene amount of physical violence and bullying coming from peers and adults alike, and this story was definitely not my cup of tea.

The part I did like, was the glimpse into a culture I knew nothing about. Sure I knew that the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans tend to not get along, but the Zainichi was a whole new side I had never heard before. Go featured an interesting insight into the discrimination that most Koreans who live in Japan face.

While Sugihara suffered from many of the issues all teenagers whine about, his were coupled with the oppression of his heritage and made life that much more difficult. Even being hassled by police became more dangerous with laws regarding Zainichi as foreigners with alien registrations.

Even though most of the story made me never want to visit Japan, I learned more about the culture which made it worth the read.

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Sugihara is a student in a Japanese high school, but he's not Japanese. Born, raised, and educated in Japan, he is still Korean, a citizen of South Korea, and legally a resident alien. This places some legal restrictions on him; it also makes him a target of bullying and prejudice.

He has had to

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become a fighter, while keeping his eyes on the prize of passing the entrance exams for a Japanese university. When he meets and falls in love with a Japanese girl named Sakurai, they bond over classical music and foreign films.

But she doesn't know he's Korean, until, after a personal tragedy in his own life, he finally tells her.

Anti-Korean prejudice runs deep in Japan, and it's not clear that Sakurai will be able to overcome it in herself, or even want to.

This is a short novel, and a novel of first love, but it is so much more than that. It captures, effectively and without a heavy hand, the complexities of being a foreigner in the only country Sugihara knows, the ways it has affected his parents, especially his father, and both the bonds and the conflicts in his relationship with his father.

I found it both enjoyable and enlightening. Recommended.

I bought this audiobook.

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I enjoyed this for most of the novel until a disturbing end. This story was first published in Japan in 2000 and seems to be set in the early 1990's. Like one of Haruki Murakami's novels, there are lots of Americanisms in the story, primarily music and film references (although the film references

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include a broad range of foreign films) and the music refs aren't just classical and jazz, but people like Bruce Springsteen or Lou Reed, or Jimi Hendrix and Gene Kelly singing and dancing in the rain, which is actually very Murakami-like. The story is about a Korean boy, Sugihara, and his family living in Japan, and as the title says, it is a coming of age novel. But it is also the story of 2nd generation Koreans living in Japan and how they were considered a much lower class. I didn't know this but in the 1950's Koreans in Japan, even if born there, had to choose to become citizens of either North or South Korea. This boy's father chose North Korea.

I generally like Japanese novels, and this one has that snarky sense to it that some of Murakami's novels, and other Japanese authors have, and I sort of think of it as a Japanese style of storytelling.

Despite my Murakami comparison, this is told more simply and lacks the nuances that Murakami's writing has. The story is set during jr high school and primarily high school years. And of course a girl comes along. Maybe not of course, but it seemed of course, because love changes the way we see the world and our boy Sugihara is no exception. But Sugihara is Korean and the girl is Japanese. I really liked the first half of the novel but the way the story developed had me liking the latter half less and less.

The story is bothersome because Sugihara makes his way through school by becoming a bad-ass who takes on all comers. The Japanese students hate him because he is Korean and they come to fight him and he repeatedly beats them down (sometimes quite graphically). He keeps score. As we near the end of the novel he is 25-0 he says in his fights. He also strives to have a better life for himself then he has and studies hard for his exams and universty enrollment exams. He also reads voraciously. He has some interesting friends and his relationships with them contribute to the story and our understanding of the world Sugihara lives in.

Now here is my problem, and if spoilers bother you read no more. Sugihara's father was a boxer in his younger days and he has taught his son how to fight. This is basically why Sugihara can beat all comers in middle and high school. There are a couple of mentions in the story about Sugihara having been punished by his father. They appear in such a way that one understands it as part of the environment Sugihara has grown up in and one understands that the father is basically a good man who cares for his family but to be Korean in Japan puts one up against extreme racial prejudice and toughness is one way to survive.

As the story nears the last few pages and Sugihara studies for his exams he gets a call from his father, drunken somewhere and out of money to get home and apparently unable to pay his bar bill. This is not the usual father - he has been losing his business due to corrupt police and prejudice against his ethnicity. Sugihara goes out to find his father and bring him home. He hires a taxi to take him home since he is unsure if he could manage his severely drunken father on the trains and buses. In the taxi Sugihara berates his father and the taxi driver pulls over to the side of the road, angry at the son who is being disrespectful to his father. The father and son get out and the father invites the son to come at him. There ensues a violent fight which ends with the father smashing Sugihara in the mouth breaking a tooth and beating him to the ground. A crowd wildly applauds the father and the taxi driver gives him a free ride home telling the father how inspiring he was. When they arrive home the mother then beats the son 38 times with a broomstick. Sugihara stays home from school 3 days to recover and then is told more than once how adorable he is with his broken mouth. He is maybe 16 years old. Later Sugihara tells a friend he must dedicate himself to toughen up even more so that he can win his next and final fight.

What a great message.

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If you have read PACHINKO, you know of the second-class treatment of Koreans living in Japan. This book approaches the story from a young boy who wishes to leave the second-class schools of the Koreans and learn in a Japanese school. He changes his name to a Japanese name but even so his classmates

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discover he’s Korean. Luckily, his Korean schooling has made him tough and he physically battles kids in his school. It’s a great story, not only of his life as a student, but also that of a boy who has grown-up with a father who was a champion boxer. What surprised me most about this story is the bullying and lack of tolerance among Japanese as well as the violent gangs. Sugihara is familiar with the police station as he has been called in for his violence. The translation is good as this was originally published in Japanese.

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Well, the subtitle should have warned me off as I really hate coming of age stories and angst-filled teenagers. Sugihara, a Japanese-born Korean, is bullied at school (apparently ethnic prejudice is rampant) until his father, a former boxer, teaches him how to fight. But he's not a fair fighter:

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he's been known to whomp his opponents with a heavy ashtray, punch them in the windpipe, and kick them in the balls. He's a bad student, until he befriend Jeong Il, a studious boy who introduces him to wonderful books. Then he decides to work hard so that he can get into university and eventually move to Norway. He falls in love with a girl who is supposed to be smart, quirky, charming, impulsive and mysterious. I just wanted to smack her. She spins on stools. She has very short hair. She hops fences, trespassing on elementary school grounds after dark. She reads interesting books. She arranges to meet Sakurai and then just walks off, expecting him to follow (off curse he does). I can't tell you her name because she refuses to reveal it and just goes by her last name, Sakurai. Yes, she is Japanese. So you know this is not going to end well when, just as they are about to consummate their relationship, Sugahari tells her that he is Korean. Except that this is a YA book, so of course it does.

It guess it wasn't as bad as it could have been, for those who enjoy this genre. I never read YA, but this book was free, and it was short, and I was trying to get in one more book before the end of the month. If it sounds like something you'd enjoy, I advise you to read reviews either here on LT or on Amazon.

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Contemporary YA romance is pretty far outside my usual wheelhouse, but I had a few days left on my Kindle Unlimited trial and this book caught my eye and I went, "Well, why not?" Very glad I took the punt, because I really enjoyed this book.

The main character, Sugihara, is a 16yo Zainichi Korean,

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which is to say he's an ethnic Korean whose family has been living in Japan for two generations. They still don't have Japanese citizenship – they have to choose between North Korean or South Korean nationality. And the book is quite an insightful glimpse into what it's like (or was like, in 2000 when the book was first written) to grow up as part of such a marginalised community – having to report regularly to the police station to be fingerprinted, not having access to "good" jobs, having the authorities capriciously make decisions against you, etc.

But the book is also a romance: at a party at a nightclub, Sugihara meets Sakurai, a remarkably confident girl who moves quickly to woo him, and so starts a surprisingly fun-to-read teenage romance. They talk about music and book and films and Sakurai fills Sugihara in on all the dating advice being given to teenage girls, which he kinds of responds to with a cute, "oh, OK..." attitude. It's nice. The only real obstacle to their love is that Sugihara is scared that Sakurai won't want to be with him any more if she finds out he's Korean.

I will say that the book is somewhat violent. Sugihara is a bit of a delinquent who gets into fights all the time at school, and his father is an ex-boxer with the same tendency. Even his mum can be prone to flying into violent rages in this book. But the way it's written is sort of cartoony, almost for laughs, which I think a lot of readers will find inappropriate. At any rate, that's the one real reservation I had about this book. Overall it was a pretty fun, quick, easy read.

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On the surface, this is a wonderful "boy meets girl" story. They have so much in common, except the one difference they can't overcome.

But not too far under the surface, this is a story about racism and acceptance. What really makes us one race vs another, one nationality vs another.

The boy in the

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story was born and raised in Japan, speaks Japanese as his primary language - but he's considered Korean because his parents are Korean. He learns to speak Korean at school - some of his Korean friends don't even learn to speak Korean.

I don't tend to think of Japan as having problems with racism, so this book was very eye-opening.

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