The Pachinko Woman by Henry Mynton (Morrow)

Pachinko : a type of mechanical game similar to pinball but stands vertically and originated in Japan. It is widely used in Japan as a gambling device.

Harry Mynton is the pseudonym for a writer who has lived in Japan for over thirty-five years and was also a former business owner in Tokyo. His novel, The Pachinko Woman, uses his knowledge of Japan and Asia and has created a highly entertaining and provocative murder mystery involving the pachinko industry in Japan with its ties to North Korea. 

The story opens with an excerpt from a comfort woman’s diary. A Korean woman forced into sexual slavery during World War 2 to serve the soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army. This diary becomes a focal point of international intrigue as the woman writes about meeting an American woman who suffered the same fate as her.

Helim Kim is a naturalized American, born to North Korean parents and raised in Tokyo, Japan by her grandmother. The diary belonged to her grandmother who was from North Korea and is part owner of Allied International, one of the largest pachinko firms in Japan. Her mother disappeared when she was only seven. 

Kim worked for four years as a translator at the United Nations but has set up her own translating company in Los Angeles and still does client contracts for the UN. She had just returned from Pyongyang ten days ago and is now meeting with a Korean man who also has ties to the North.

She is meeting with Park Chung-Il, a North Korean officer who was a senior member of the intelligence department. However, in one of the hard-liners purges, he was stripped of all his powers and sent to Helsinki,Finland before being too liberal. They could not dispose of him because he was related to the current leader of North Korea, Park Tai Jin. 

Park Chung-Il has formed a group called Koreans for Democratic Action. The KDA’s main function is to sponsor indirect actions to destabilize Pyongyang and liberate North Korea. Park is using Helim Kim, the Pachinko Woman, to serve as a pawn for his own agenda. 

A few months ago, he contacted the FBI who were concerned about money laundering. Park told them he could give them information on Asia’s biggest money-laundering scam. “Blackmail from Japanese pachinko companies in the billions of dollars was being shuttled through offshore banks from Japan to North Korea. Someone inside the Japanese government was involved.”

Park has told the FBI how he could help stop the money-laundering operations. His group, the KDA, has managed to convince ten of the largest pachinko companies to file for Japanese stock listings. “Public listing in Japan demanded transparent accounting, stringent auditing, and recording of all funds transfers abroad. Japanese ownership and auditing would prevent extortion payments, dry up the money source, and decimate Pyongyang’s foreign exchange.”

There are multiple storylines happening concurrently and the number of characters are often hard to keep track of including an East German assassin hired by Russians to take out North Korean owners of pachinko parlors in Japan, a Japanese detective investigating the deaths, Kim’s former boyfriend who worked for the International Atomic Energy Agency, her current American lawyer boyfriend, FBI agents concerned with North Korea’s nuclear proliferation, and a former U.S. president who is to meet with the current leader of North Korea in Niigata, Japan. 

Many questions are left unanswered or are not satisfactorily explained. Who was the American comfort woman? Why is the Russian government involved in the killings? And how does Helim Kim’s grandmother’s diary tie into all this?

Mynton manages to use the current concerns surrounding the peninsula into his story such as North Korea’s attempt to continue making nuclear weapons. The comfort women issue is another delicate subject which is a thorn in the side of the Japanese government. Readers interested in the history of Asia and the politics surrounding both Koreas and Japan will be highly entertained, but should remember to keep notes about the characters. ~Ernie Hoyt