Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

I originally watched some episodes of the Pachinko dramatization on Apple TV. Because of the excellent acting and engaging script, I became quickly engrossed in the production. After learning the story would be released in 4 seasons, I was dismayed knowing I would be at the edge of my seat for the next four years yearning to know what happens to these characters. Wishing to spare myself this misery, I looked up the book, Pachinko, upon which the drama was based, bought my copy from Amazon Kindle and read it cover to cover in two days. Being a slow reader and being that Pachinko is not a light read, I got through that book very fast simply because almost from the first page, I could not put it down. Generally, I’m not a fan of family sagas, but I have recently begun watching Korean dramas with subtitles. While enjoying the dramas, I have become interested in Korean history and culture, so reading this book, written by Korean American author, Min Jin Lee, was an opportunity to acquaint myself with Korean culture from the lens of someone raised in a Korean household, but who also has lived and been educated in the United States. I was grateful that, unlike the movie, the story in this book runs along in a sequential timeline with very little time-shifting. Lee presents this story in a universal, omnipresent point of view, so one gets the story from multiple viewpoints, not only from major characters, but from some minor ones as well. The writing is so skillfully executed, the narrative runs seamlessly along. The writing is also immersive with just enough description to set the scenes. Through this evocative writing, I could feel the closeness of life in Sunja’s childhood boarding house while appreciating the freedom and beauty of the black rocks by the seashore where Sunja and her companions washed clothes and where she spent time with her lover, Koh Hansu. A week after finishing this book I can still close my eyes and feel the poverty of Osaka where Sunju and her family eked out a living, all crowded in a small, rickety dwelling, held down and oppressed for being Koreans by their Japanese overlords. The strongest part of the story were the characters, all thoughtfully written and fleshed out. Sunja was a plain, uneducated peasant girl whose great intelligence, wisdom, loyalty, faith and well-honed instincts helped lay the foundations for her family’s survival during rough times and later for their great prosperity despite the prejudice they were forced to endure. Her two loves, Koh Hansu and Isak, different as two men could be, protected her and her family in their own way. Her son, Noa, witnessed the hardships of the World War II in his younger years, but because of his great intelligence and because of the secret presence of his wealthy, natural father, he was spared many of the dangers and deprivations other Korean children faced. Growing up and being educated alongside Japanese children, he came to be greatly conflicted between his Japanese education and his Korean heritage. His younger brother, Mozasu, lacked the patience for education, yet he was diligent and street-smart and made a success of his life running and eventually owning pachinko parlors. Koh Hansu was probably the most tragic of the characters Lee highlights. He is a gifted Korean, born into poverty who found success by selling his soul to his Japanese overlords. He has married into a wealthy Japanese family, even been adopted by his father-in-law, yet he has little respect for his Japanese family. He loved the Korean peasant girl, Sunja, but she refused to become his mistress and went on to pursue her own life. Though Sunja is only one among many lovers, he remains haunted by her throughout his life. She gave birth to his only son, but she also touched his heart in a way no other human being could. Though Koh is a much feared and corrupt Yakuza in later years, he still goes out of his way to show kindness to Sunja and her family. Also of interest are the couple Yeseb and his beautiful wife, Kyunghee. Yeseb struggles with a feeling of inferiority towards his younger brother, Isak, who he believes is too idealistic and fragile for this word. He is a protective older brother hemmed in by traditional, paternalistic ideals that prove costly in the foreign world of Imperial Japan where his family is forced to exist under difficult and almost impossible conditions. He works multiple jobs and still isn’t able to make enough to support his family, yet he refuses to let his wife work outside the home. Later he becomes disabled and is forced to become dependent upon others, including his wife, for care. The most beautiful thing about this extended family is these individuals have their share of conflict, resentments, and misunderstandings, but throughout their lives, they are completely devoted to each other. When trouble threatens from the outside or when one family member is in need, each one of them comes through for the other. The book starts in Korea during the early part of the twentieth century during the Japanese occupation. In Korea, Sunja and her family, as well as other Koreans, are regarded with suspicion by their Japanese overlords. Not only do the Japanese exploit them and take the best land and sea can produce, but they regard and treat the native Koreans as innately inferior. The attitudes don’t change after World War II during occupied Japan or even as late as the 1980’s when the book ends. Koreans living in Japan or even born there are still regarded legally and socially as foreigners. Returning to Korea, as many of these individuals desired to do after the war, was problematic as well, and even downright deadly. Families and individuals from the north of Korea, had to return to a part of Korea run by the Communists. There were individuals in the book who returned and were never heard from again. The south of Korea was run by a dictator most of the time and beset by chaos and corruption, as well as the Korean war. Sunja and her family were trapped in Japan by these circumstances, but Japan, first Osaka and then Yokohama, became their home. Here they were able to start and run businesses and earn a living. Being Koreans, they might never be fully accepted in their community, but here they found a life. They weren’t shunned by all Japanese. Lee introduces her readers to Japanese individuals touched by this family, but all of them have one thing in common: because of circumstances or past actions or mistakes, they have been marginalized by their Japanese countrymen. There is Mozasu’s girlfriend, Etsuko, who was divorced by her husband because of infidelity. In her disgrace she had to leave her community in Hokkaido and move to another town. Mozasu’s first employer had an autistic son and was also marginalized. Noa’s first serious girlfriend, Akiko, who doesn't fit in with her Japanese peers, is a precocious Japanese girl from a wealthy family, who is fascinated by Noa’s Korean heritage. When Akiko, through her ignorance and thoughtlessness, interferes and unwittingly forces an explosive family issue, Noa freezes her totally out of his life. I never heard the name Pachinko until I watched some of the drama on my streaming service. As the book explains, it is a popular game in Japan that is a cross between pinball and slot machines. Winners appear to win by chance and thereby have hope for a good outcome, but the owners set the machines and allow some wins so that other less fortunate people will be drawn in. Winners are those who happen to play during the time of day the pins are loose and ready to yield the winnings. I suppose life can be looked upon as a game of Pachinko. Pachinko was one of the few avenues where Korean individuals could make their fortunes in post-war Japan. It was not considered respectable enough for good Japanese people to be a part of, even though the Japanese loved to play it. Both of Sunja’s sons end up making a living running Pachinko. This book presented a window into, what are to me, two foreign cultures, Korean and Japanese. Sunja’s extended family is made up of aristocrats from the north of Korea as well as peasants from the south. Sunja’s youth was grounded in Confucian, old world Korean ideals, but as time passed, she and her family were introduced to Christianity, the values of Imperial Japan, post-war commercialism, and globalization. The values of her Korean childhood such as loyalty, morality, revereance for family and work ethic remained in Sunja and were passed on to subsequent generations of her family. What stood out to me was the great influence of Christianity and how its message of forgiveness and loving grace impacted this family and tempered the harsher aspects of their traditional Korean ideals. Unlike many modern authors dealing with Christian characters, Lee presented the clergy in a balanced and realistic way, neither lionizing them nor demeaning them. All of Lee’s characters were carefully nuanced and believable. Individuals like Sunja, Isak, Noa, Solomon, and Hansu came alive to me and continue to haunt me nearly a week since I finished the book. I was truly sad to come to the end of book. It was a beautiful read, one of the best books I’ve read in the past three or four years. I highly recommend it!

This was a excellent book. A real page turner. The origin of the story centered around the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. This book tells the story of how ordinary Korean people survived during this period and longer. The book follows a poor family during the occupation, WWII, the Cold War, and the Korean War. It touches on some of the religions followed by the Korean people in Korea and in Japan. It is easy to get caught up in the characters. There was a lot of fluff in the book. The author expanded on characters that would have not been of interest to any reader and certainly not to me. Pachinko is about a family saga set in Korea and Japan from 1910 to 1980. Sunja, daughter of Hoonie and Yangjin, is a teenaged girl living with her mother, who runs a boarding house in a fishing village in Gohyang, Korea. Hoonie is the crippled son of a poor fisherman, and Yangjin is the daughter of a poor farmer, so they are used to struggling to survive. When Sonja’s loving father, Hoonie, dies of tuberculosis when she was 13 years old, she and her mother continue to work hard to keep the boarding house above water. Sunja has worked hard all of her life. She is now in charge of shopping for the boardinghouse after her father dies. It’s what her mother does, too. Koh Hansu, a wealthy man who has a wife and 3 children in Osaka, notices 16 year-old Sunja on her shopping errands. He is attracted to her and follows her to see where she goes. One day, he sees that three Japanese boys are mocking her for being Korean. The boys surround Sunja and then start to assault her. Koh Hansu saves her from the boys and gains Sunja’s trust. Koh Hansu continues to pursue her. She does not know that he is already married and falls hard for him. He professes to love her and gives her a gold pocket watch. She wants to be his wife, and expects him to propose marriage. When she gets pregnant and he then tells her that he is already married, he offers to provide for her, but she rejects his offer as dishonorable. Koh Hansu, I believe, really loved Sunja. He says he’ll support her, but she wants nothing more to do with him. For weeks, Sonja and her mother have taken care of a kind Japanese boarder and pastor, Baek Isak, who has been ill with tuberculosis. To save Sunja’s reputation and give her child a good name, he offers to marry Sunja and take her to Osaka where his family lives. Sunja and Baek Isak move in with his brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee. Yoseb has contempt for the pregnant Sunja, but having no children of her own, Kyunghee welcomes Sunja and is excited about the baby. Kyunghee was so lovely and she loved Sunja. Her husband Yoseb was difficult. Baek Isak and Sonja also have a son together by the name of Noa. After Baek Isak dies, Sunja gets a job in a restaurant, since she now has no other income. Kim, the man whom she considered her boss, is really employed by Koh Hansu (Noa’s father), who owns the restaurant and got her the job. In 1940, Japan invades China and then soon joins the Axis powers with Germany and Italy. Food becomes scarce in Osaka. The restaurant closes because there is very little food to buy at the market. I believe that Koh Hansu was a decent person who learned how to survive and became rich with the help of his Japanese father-in-law. He did what he had to do to survive in my opinion. He could have been a bit nicer and moral, but that was not who he was. On the last night at the restaurant, Koh Hansu appears and urges Sonja and her friend Kyunghee to leave Osaka and go to a safe place he knows, the Tamaguci farm in the country. He tells them that the Americans are going to bomb Osaka. Kyunghee cannot convince her husband Yoseb to go since he has been offered a job as a foreman in a steel factory in Nagasaki. The women take Sonja’s two boys with them and reach safety. The Americans bomb Nagasaki. Yoseb survives the bombing but never recovers his health. Surprisingly, I think the household wanted him to die sooner. Sunja and Hansu’s son, Noa was a studious child who was so much like his stepfather, Isak, who Noa believed to be his real father. Mozasu, Isak’s biological son, struggles with the stigma of, being half Korean and is not very studious, had a harder time in school. Noa did so well in school, his father Koh Hansu wanted to pay for his education at an elite school in Tokyo. Noa, thought Hansu was just his benefactor at the time. In Japan, Pachinko parlors were often associated with Koreans. In the book, Sonja and Baek Isak’s son, Mozasu, worked in a pachinko parlor for Goro-san as a guard and then became the general manager of Paradaisu Seven. He ended up a multi-millionaire and owner of multiple pachinko parlors. I had never heard of pachinko, and after reading the book, still could not figure out what the fascination was. In the 1950s, Mosazu, Sonja and Baek Isak’s son, is hired as a guard at a pachinko parlor. Mosazu works hard in order to pay Yoseb’s medical bills, food, and rent. He also wants to help his half-brother, Noa, go to Waseda University to major in English literature. Without asking permission, Koh Hansu steps in and pays Noa’s tuition, room and board. Noa is doing well, but when his girlfriend, Aikido comes uninvited to lunch with his father and tells Noa that his father is a mobster, he confronts his mother, drops out of school and disappears. After World War II, Korea is split up by the Americans, Russians and Chinese. Even the Japanese take over some areas. The Koreans still suffer from the foreign powers’ takeover of their country. As Koreans in Japan, they are considered visitors even when they were born there. There were jobs they could never have; it was illegal to rent to them. The Koreans lived in ghettos that did not have the same services as Japanese neighborhoods. The Koreans were looked down upon in the Japanese public schools and most jobs were not available to them regardless of their training or education. Koreans were considered dirty and undesirable to Japanese citizens. When a Korean boy turned fourteen, he had to register, be fingerprinted and interviewed, and he had to ask for permission to remain in Japan, even though he was born there and has never been to Korea. This process will be repeated every three years. And this was in the 1970s, not the 1870s. Getting Japanese citizenship was extremely difficult. But Sunja’s family does get ahead, attaining a comfortable living. There were a quite a few sexual interactions in the book by unmarried couples that were surprising. The book even explored a homosexual who was friends with Mosazu. I could not figure out whether or not Mosazu knew that he was a homosexual. I know that Koh Hansu knew. Hansu could deploy private detectives everywhere with his money.

The vignettes of the people connected to Sunja, the main character, move the story through the many years and times that the narrative spans. I had read three-quarters of the book and couldn't put it down so I bought the Audible version too so that I could listen to it on my commutes. That was a mistake though, since the number of characters that had built up over the duration of the narrative made it a blur of recalled names that I could only later place and had to backtrack. I went back to reading the text rather than listening. The narrative though is quite fluid and the author has a very readable style despite the huge time span and the many characters. Amazingly, they all have their personalities that shine through the narrative, and the reading of it isn't confusing at all because the many characters are so distinctive, despite sometimes the few pages they occupy. The distinction isn't through some narrative trick, with some difference in speech color for example, but the tone and the emotional identity come through very powerfully. Amazingly, I felt as strong connection to some of the minor characters who come up later just as strongly as for the major characters we visit with throughout. I am a Korean-American fluent in English and Korean and having lived half my life in the US and in Korea, so the narrative had a special poignancy for me. Brought tears to my eyes. I however knew nothing of the suffering and the circumstances of the Korean expats in Japan, displaced there through the Japanese occupation of Korea and through WWII. The historical accuracy and the research, at least from my knowledge, are right on. The details are authentic and deftly textured without being overwhelming or heavy-handed. Min Jin Lee has an excellent economy of words and a tight control of the purpose of the scenes and circumstances introduced. Amazing to learn this is only her second full novel. Appealing to men readers, I think, too for the historical, business, and most importantly the humanity therein. One of my favorite reads in many many years!

This book is set from 1910 to 1989, and follows one family. If there is a main character, Sunja can be called such, for the book begins by summarizing the circumstances of her family before her birth, and ends with her as an old woman. The story is close to 500 pages long, and at times skips decades, and yet neither factor is a negative. Min Jin Lee writes about situations: when she skips time, she tells how a situation developed many years later, keeping only the needed moments, and thus it is easy for the reader to follow. The family line she writes about allows plenty of moments to show how different lives develop, and encounter different scenarios. She writes from a shifting, third-person perspective: every family member gets a section which follows them through a portion of their life and shares their thoughts, often at the same time as it shares the thoughts of those reacting around them. Every character she changes to has reactions relevant to moving the story forward, and so what could have been confusing instead provides greater depth to the narrative. Each perspective is full and complete, each character (even those with entirely incompatible views on life) believable. Even minor characters get their moment of internality where the reader can understand them, if not sympathize with them. (I think of Hansu.) In this epic story, there is room to explore many characters, and she does not skimp. Throughout the entire book, I noticed only one awkward sentence, a considerable feat. The writing is somewhat old-fashioned in its formality, but this helps the reader to expect the deep resonance the story will hold without going so far as to take away accessibility. It is interesting to note that Min Jin Lee has shared that part of her writing process for this book was to read a portion of the Bible (as literature) before sitting down to write each day. The story is about Koreans in Japan, especially during World War II, and follows the many discriminations enacted against them. As the decades wear on, the situation improves (partly because Japan in general is doing better), but the discrimination does not go away. In the end this is the central and heartbreaking thread of the story. This is a very full, very affecting, very well constructed story. I rate this book 10/10.

Pachinko is historical fiction, one of my favorite genres. This book was a National Book Award finalist. I can see why. It is certainly a powerful epic tale, spanning many decades. For me, Pachinko was unique in that although I had read quite a few works of historical fiction about Japan and China, I had never read a book about Koreans and their interactions with the Japanese. Sonja is the daughter of Hoonie and Yangjin who run a boarding house in Gohyang, Korea in the early 1900s. Hoonie is the crippled son of a poor fisherman, and Yangjin is the daughter of a poor farmer, so they are used to struggling to survive. When Sonja’s loving father, Hoonie, dies of tuberculosis when she is 13 years old, she and her mother continue to work hard to keep the boarding house above water. Sunja is now in charge of shopping for the boardinghouse. In the early 1900s, the Japanese imperialists have taken over Korea. The Japanese look down upon the Koreans who are considered lazy and dirty, “a cunning and wily tribe”. Many Koreans starve and others die. Fortunately, Yangjin has a garden and chickens, and Yangjin is good at making economical meals for her family and boarders. It is hard to make the food stretch, but Yangjin and Sunja manage to do so. Koh Hansu, a wealthy man who has a wife and 3 children in Osaka, notices 16 year-old Sunja on her shopping errands. He is attracted to her and follows her to see where she goes. One day, he sees that three Japanese boys are mocking her for being Korean. The boys surround Sunja and then start to assault her. Koh Hansu saves her from the boys and gains Sunja’s trust. Koh Hansu continues to pursue her. She does not know that he is already married and falls hard for him. He professes to love her and gives her a gold pocket watch. She wants to be his wife, and expects him to propose marriage. When she gets pregnant and he then tells her that he is already married, he offers to provide for her, but she rejects his offer as dishonorable. For weeks, Sonja and her mother have taken care of a kind Japanese boarder and pastor, Baek Isak, who has been ill with tuberculosis. To save Sunja’s reputation and give her child a good name, he offers to marry Sunja and take her to Osaka where his family lives. Sunja and Baek Isak move in with his brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee. Yoseb has contempt for the pregnant Sunja, but having no children of her own, Kyunghee welcomes Sunja and is excited about the baby. Baek Isak and Sonja also have a son together, Mozasu, who struggles with the stigma of being half Korean. After Baek Isak dies, Sunja gets a job in a restaurant, since she now has no other income. Kim, the man whom she considered her boss, is really employed by Koh Hansu, who owns the restaurant and got her the job. In 1940, Japan invades China and then soon joins the Axis powers with Germany and Italy. Food becomes scarce in Osaka. The restaurant closes because there is very little food to buy at the market. On the last night at the restaurant, Koh Hansu appears and urges Sonja and her friend Kyunghee to leave Osaka and go to a safe place he knows, the Tamaguci farm in the country. He tells them that the Americans are going to bomb Osaka. Kyunghee cannot convince her husband Yoseb to go since he has been offered a job as a foreman in a steel factory in Nagasaki. The women take Sonja’s two boys with them and reach safety. The Americans bomb Nagasaki. Yoseb survives the bombing but never recovers his health. After World War II, Korea is split up by the Americans, Russians and Chinese. Even the Japanese take over some areas. The Koreans still suffer from the foreign powers’ takeover of their country. In the 1950s, Mosazu, Sonja and Baek Isak’s son, is hired as a guard at a pachinko parlor. Mosazu works hard in order to pay Yoseb’s medical bills, food, and rent. He also wants to help his half brother Noa go to Waseda University to major in English literature. Without asking permission, Koh Hansu steps in and pays Noa’s tuition, room and board. Noa is doing well, but when his girlfriend, Aikido comes uninvited to lunch with his father and tells Noa that his father is a mobster, he confronts his mother, drops out of school and disappears. Koh Hansu tracks his son down. He finds that Noa works in a pachinko parlor and is doing well. Noa even has a Japanese wife and 4 children. Noa’s employer and his wife and children think Noa is 100 percent Japanese. Noa does not want anyone to find out that he has Korean blood. Sadly, after Hansu takes Sunja to see her son, Noa commits suicide after she leaves. The book goes on at length into the 1970s. Racism and stereotypes of Koreans are clearly and painfully presented. Male dominance over women is blatantly apparent, as well. It is a long book but worth reading. For the most part, aside from rather boring segment about Etsuko and Hana at the end of the book, I enjoyed the book and gained some understanding of Korean history. In the future, I would hope to read some nonfiction works to understand Korean history and culture more thoroughly. Note: Why the name “Pachinko”? In Japan, Pachinko parlors were often associated with Koreans.. In the book, Sonja and Baek Isak’s son, Mozasu, worked in a pachinko parlor for Goro-san as a guard and then became the general manager of Paradaisu Seven. He ended up a multi-millionaire and owner of multiple pachinko parlors. Noa, Sonja and Koh Hansu’s son, also worked at a pachinko parlor. There were other references to pachinko parlors, as well.

One of my favorite read last year. Lengthy but well written. Very honest writing. I love the whole back story of how the family had started but it fell short at the last quarter of the book. Like most reviewers, I wasn’t happy with certain characters death and how it was dismissed. Overall, a solid good read. Love the historical aspect and Korean culture.

I'm joining the smallish percent who found this novel far less engaging than the reviews and accolades would suggest. I didn't dislike it and I read the entire book but I found it slow-going and very uneven, both in the writing, characterization and plotting. I remain surprised this was a National Book Award nominee. As is the case with many generational sagas, it often had the feel of an outline that was filled in episodically. In some chapters, we got tremendous detail; in others, months and years of action were compressed into a few paragraphs. The themes of change, of discrimination and hatred, of the slow destruction of key aspects of Japanese/Asian society, of women's and men's roles, of sex, of work and the identify work confers, were all interesting, but as with so much of this novel, they were addressed unevenly. Some characters were fleshed out in great detail; others with broad brush strokes. In general, Lee does way better with women than men, but I never really felt I "knew" any of the characters beyond Sunja and to some extent Kyunghee. As we moved into the later years and second and third generations, the characters felt more like caricatures -- representing "types" rather than three-dimensional people. The style, as others have noted, is simple and spare. Sometimes that works well, and there are sections that truly resonated, where I stopped in admiration of a well-crafted sentence or metaphor. But just as frequently, I found sections that were awkward and definitely seemed to be written by someone for whom English was a second language. The sweep of the novel, while impressive, had similar inconsistencies. In some parts, we moved from month to month or year to year and then suddenly jumped several years. This added to the sense we were following an outline rather than a fleshed-out novel. Given Japan's role in the war, for example, it was strange how little of that came through. Even the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki seemed like a footnote; there was virtually nothing about the level of devastation, despite Yoseb's being caught in the Nagasaki bombing and badly burnt and wounded. And by the time we got to the 1990s, it felt as though Lee were racing to finish, sending characters off to die or disappear, with one of the most abrupt endings I've ever read.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a family saga about a four generations of a Korean family that is set in Korea and Japan. It’s a National Book Award finalist, and, in what may be an even greater honor than that, it made my Favorite Books list. I have found that it is easier to explain why I don’t like a particular book or to point out a book’s flaws than it is to explain why I absolutely loved one. It’s like explaining why a rainbow is beautiful. I can talk about how the colors are pretty or how it made me feel, but there is something about rainbows, sunsets, and the best works of art that transcends easy explanation. You just have to experience them. Read Pachinko. The format of the book is straightforward. It proceeds chronologically from about 1900-ish to 1989 and follows various characters that belong to one family. It never sprawls out of control – there aren’t 37 second-cousins that you will have to keep track of – and there aren’t flash-backs and flash-forwards that could potentially cause confusion. There are occasional Japanese or Korean words sprinkled around, but their meaning is apparent from the context. I don’t speak a lick of those languages, and I followed everything without ever having to consult a dictionary. The prose is simple and straightforward, generally consisting of short, direct sentences. There’s not a lot of fluff. Therefore, the book reads quickly, despite being an almost 500 page family saga about sexism, fate, hard work, destiny, chance, war, poverty, racism, familial obligations, identity, immigration, citizenship, language, education, opportunity, community, and faith. The main characters are diverse, interesting, flawed, and generally fundamentally good people. The characters are not very Dynamic (at least in an obvious way), but they weren’t really intended to be. This isn’t a story populated with characters that have grand, clear character arcs. This made them feel more realistic to me. How many people do you know that are on a Hero’s Journey? Most people I know just try to keep their heads down, work to put food on the table, and hope for good opportunities for their children. I’ve said before that I am a fan of history, and I was generally ignorant of Korean culture in Japan. Pachinko is not some dry history lesson, though. It’s as entertaining as a soap opera. You should read it.

I rate it as a 9/10 In the early 1900s, Sunja, a young Korean lady, works with her mother at a boarding house in Yeongdo after the passing of her loving father Hoonie. When she was around 16, she falls in love with a mysterious man who saved her from being assaulted, and when she tells him she is pregnant, he confesses to be married and to having a family in Japan, but still would like her to be his mistress in Korea. Feeling betrayed and ashamed, Sunja does not accept it and ends the relationship with him, keeping the child but never revealing its father’s identity to anyone. At the boarding house, a Christian minister learns what happened, and since he believes to be dying from tuberculosis, he decides to marry Sunja, give the child his name, and also in search of giving meaning to his own life. All is then set, and they move to Osaka, where the story unfolds. Pachinko is a patchwork of stories, having as the background the Japanese occupation in Korea and the hardships Sunja and her family (representing most Koreans from that time) endured while trying to simply survive. It is a combination of suffering, pain, shame, violence in all its forms, but also unconditional love, sacrifice, bonds, and determination. It is raw and blunt, touching nerves you didn’t know that were there, and it makes us realize how fortunate some people are for not ever having to go through any kind of prejudice nor hardship because of your nationality, or how you look. Sunja’s story is no different from many other families’ stories around the world, and the way Min Jin Lee describes it makes us feel like we are there, living it all first-hand, and therefore impossible to finish it with dry eyes.

Pachinko is the epic story of people like you and me. Through 4 generations, we learn of the struggle of ordinary koreans that had to immigrate to Japan. It's a tale of hardship, love and family. From the very beginning, it's easy to feel connected to the characters. But most of all, it's a story about emotional connections. No matter how capable or intelligent you are, without love and support, it's hard to make it in the world. Pachinko shows that with incredible clarity. The value of human understanding is shown many times throughout the story. I reccomend this book to everyone who enjoys learning new cultures and sensitive, rich storytelling.

I was raised up in Osaka. When I was an elementary school student, I used to commute to coaching school in Tsuruhashi. Although I noticed that there were a lot of yakiniku restaurants, I wasn't interested in Korean stuff so I was completely ignorant of the history until I read this book. The discrimination of being Zainichi tyousenjin in Japan is depicted in this book, I think it still persists more or less even in this era. I remembered that my dad said that he hates tyousenjin. They were cunning and dirty. I suppose we unconsciously need someone whose position is extremely low and mocked badly by others like the hierarchical system in India. It shows us that things go well thanks to it. I was impressed by the author's deep insight of human psychology and well research and understanding. I think Noa's weakness represents Japanese character. Japanese are very sensitive and serious(not all though). I couldn't dislike Hansu throughout the stories. He was Yakuza. But his devotion to Sunja seemed true. If I were Sunja, I might be a Hansu's second wife haha.

Buen libro

Pachinko was a very lucky read. I randomly bought it and didn't think much of it. As soon as I read the first line I couldn't put it down anymore. It's been many years that I read a 500 page book so quickly (full time job, children, household...). I took every single second possible to keep reading. This is so carefully thought out. A beautifully written saga that follows a family over 5 generations in the war times of Korea and Japan. I never really thought about the war over there (being Austrian we are very caught up in our own dark history) - this book opened my eyes so much - the characters are so deep and the author is most obviously very smart and careful in writing this incredible book! This is an absolute 10/10 and more!