Pachinko is a multigenerational historical fiction
set in Korea and Japan spanning the years of 1910-1989, written by award-winning Korean author Min Jin Lee. The story begins in Yeongdo, Busan, in what is now South Korea in 1910, with Sunja Kim the daughter of crippled Hoonie and his wife Yangjin who work hard to run a guest house. When Sunja falls pregnant to a powerful businessman and discovers he is already married, her life seems doomed. One of the guests, Christian minister Pastor Isak, steps in and offers to marry Sunja and take her to Osaka where he is to be posted. The story follows the lives of Isak and Sunja, and his brother Joseph and wife Kyunghee in Japan where they experience the prejudice and hardships faced by the Koreans under Japanese rule (1910-1945). Isak and Sunja go on to have two sons, the studious Noa and easy-going Mosazu who works his way up to wealth by establishing a series of Pachinko parlours. Pachinko is an arcade type game with pins and steel balls, a popular form of legal gambling in Japan.

Pachinko is an epic saga following four generations of the family's fortunes and misfortunes. It is an engrossing tale, simply written but revealing and descriptive. My only complaint is it could have been significantly shorter as my attention drifted terribly in the final quarter. ( )

Read on my Kindle for our local reading group. On the whole I thought it interesting, highlighting a period in Asian history that many of us in the western world know little about. The author clearly did a great deal of research, and it feels authentic.

However it's a lengthy saga book, spanning most of the 20th century, and the viewpoint is omniscient so it's hard to get a real 'feel' for any of the characters. I felt as if the jumps from section to section left some threads standing, while killing off some people whom I had started to be interested in.

I also felt that there was an excessive amount of 'strong' language, mostly unnecessary, and far too much intimate detail about different sexual encounters.

I'm glad I read it from the historical perspective, but it wasn't a book that inspired me, and I don't suppose I'll read it again.

Longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2024/04/Pachinko-Min-Jin-Lee.html ( )

This is a family saga which takes us from early 20th century southern Korea, in a fishing village not far from Busan, to Japan in the late 1980s.

Let's begin with Sunja, who comes near to bringing shame on her family by becoming pregnant to a rich wheeler-dealer before marriage: he himself is married, of course. She's redeemed by Protestant pastor Isak, who marries her despite knowing her history, and takes her to begin a new life with him in Osaka, Japan. Following Korea's annexation to Japan in 1911, life had become increasingly hard- food shortages, punitive taxation, land annexation. But for those Koreans who sought a different life in Japan, things weren't a lot better. This was a life of sacrifice, hardship, and being a less-than-second class citizen. Sunja, her husband, her in-laws worked hard - very hard - though soon Isak was imprisoned for his beliefs, and died on his release.

Sunja's early shame and guilt underlie much of this book. As do guilt and shame generally. Noa, Sunja's first son does all he can to pass for Japanese all his life, and his beginnings come back to haunt him in a terrible fashion.

This is a book about resilience and emotional conflict passing down through the generations. It's about well-drawn characters making their way in the world, sometimes with great success, but rarely able to escape from the shadow of their past. It's a real page turner, from which I learnt much about this period of Korea's history. Highly recommended ( )

"in the end, the belly is your emperor" ( )

Hoonie is born in the late 1800s with a cleft palate and twisted foot but he’s very strong, a hard worker, and loyal to his wife Yangjin. Their only surviving child is Sunja, and this book mainly tells her life story, her mother Yangjin’s story, and Sunja’s children and grandchildren through the late 1980s. Pachinko, a game of chance, makes this poor family eventually very wealthy. I like family histories but this one didn’t work well me. What I liked was the book rarely delved into gory facts, such as dying. We knew a main character was going to die…& then in the next chapter, time has gone by, the death is in the past, as a matter of fact. I appreciated avoiding some cringey scenes. It was a good book. It just didn’t flow well for me. I even waited to review it in hopes I’d think better of it over time. Nope. So it’s a low pick for me.