A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an “extraordinary epic” of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle). NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * … NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE
Roxane Gay’s Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER
“There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
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This is one of those paradoxical books where I both wanted to hurry to the end to see how it all turned out and for it to last forever because I was lost in the beauty of the book. A gorgeous multigenerational story that I wish I were still reading. Absolutely amazing.
Pachinko weaves it’s way through multiple generations of a Korean family, largely based in Japan. It is not a quick or easy read, but it has depth, real characters, and a timelessness about the lessons learned. Beautiful writing. A true family saga.
When I was a child, my friend’s father had a pachinko machine at his house. We used to play with it, and I found it endlessly fascinating. When I saw this book, I picked it up based on the cover and title alone.
In some ways, Pachinko reminds me of a book I recently read, The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds. While that book was just ok for me, I thought Pachinko was much more enjoyable. I was interested in the life of Sunja and her family. I had no idea of the discrimination faced by Koreans living in Japan. Even those who are third or fourth generation born in Japan are still thought of as Koreans. It seems really shameful.
Pachinko follows the life of Sunja from her birth in Korea, until she is an old woman in Japan. She marries, has children, becomes a grandmother. I found it all fascinating. I enjoyed the writing style and felt invested in the characters. The pachinko in the title comes from the job Sunja’s son works at. He is an employee at a pachinko parlor, a type of gambling parlor. In Japan, many of the pachinko parlors are owned by Koreans, and it is considered a disreputable profession.
The life of Sunja and her family is filled with hardship. I found myself rooting for her family, hoping they could find happiness.
If you like multigenerational sagas, I think you will enjoy this book. I stayed up late to finish it, that is how good it is. I had to know how Sunja’s story would turn out.
I loved everything about this book. I wanted it to go on and on. Brilliant. Fascinating. Eye-opening. Educational. Beautiful.
This may be one of my favorite books ever. The complex relationships between those of Japanese and Korean descent after the occupation of Korea by Japan are explored by following one woman and her extended family.
The book is not something that I would normally read but I am part of a book club and so I read it. I ended up falling in love with the wonderfully rich characters that the author created and learned some historical facts that I didn’t know before. The story is long, granted, but the author weaves a wonderful tale with full-bodied characters. I would recommend this book for those who like to delve into a full story that draws you in.
Pachinko is quite a read–the language is beautiful, the story is moving. Moreover, I learned a lot about the tensions between Koreans living in Japan and the Japanese people. It certainly seems as though every culture finds a way to minimize the “other.” Well worth a read.
It is valuable any time one learns more about what makes the world tick. The dynamic between the two Koreas and Japan is well explained through the characters and their situations. The book also supports my general belief that mothers are alike (most mothers) worldwide and would do just about anything for their sons and daughters. This was a good read.
Honestly…I haven’t finished it yet. I have about 1/4 to go. I am LOVING it and wanted to post some buzz so you guys would pick it up. If you are a fan of “The Good Earth,” “Nectar in the Sieve” or other historical fiction that explores lives in non-western cultures (ugh I hate that term…but I hope you will excuse me), this is a story you will enjoy.
It is the story of Korean people during the time of Japanese occupation and rule. It is a tragic and fascinating look into a people oppressed and marginalized. The characters triumph is through surviving, living each day, and family and community.
I am anxious to see what will become of my new found Korean friends. I picked this up from the library. PLEASE do yourself a favor and go get it today.
This book is an epic tale of a Korean family that spans their history from 1910-modern times. The first half of the book really captured my attention. Life in Korea before and during World War II was a topic I knew very little about. The characters were vivid. Their experiences were intriguing and emotional. But for me the second half started to drag a bit. It seemed like the farther away the story shifted from the original characters the less connected I felt to the story. Of course, there could be an argument that the shift mimics the real life shifts that happen in a family where the focus is on the children and grandchildren rather than the parents. Death, judgmentalism, and unforgiveness were key elements in this book as were family, love, and striving for success. I also found the time jumps in the last part of the story to leave out a lot.
I did discover a couple of things through this story: 1. Life can be hard necessitating creativity and perseverance to survive. and 2. racism is a universal problem. This was an important story if for no other reason than to make the reader aware of these two truths.
I loved learning about Japanese and Korean cultures. Have you ever noticed that the easiest way to learn fact is through fiction. It’s not that all fiction is fact, but when an author makes the effort to produce a book as beautifully written as Pachinko, you can be pretty sure that the facts will stand up.
I loved that the issues we all have with family and secrets occur in all cultures. There’s an immediate connection: Yes! We know what it feels like to be young, grow old, keep secrets, and feel less than.
We are all the same; that is the beauty of this book.
**A note about this review: I read it in 2019 when I was really struggling with my eyes and not being able to physically read print books, not even on my kindle. So many of the books that I read, I had a bad experience with, simply because the narration was horrible. Such is the case here. Thankfully, a new eye doctor and new glasses have improved my eyesight enough that I can read kindle books again, but I still really require audiobooks for the majority of my reading. **
Close to a month after I finished this, I finally feel like I can write a review and rate this book.
This was not an easy book for me – I had looked forward to it for so long and had so many moments of disappointment and frustration while listening to this book.
Simply put, this narrator was horrible. Absolutely horrible. And I never felt any of the emotions that my friend [who read it before me] and others have felt. And there were things in the last 3rd of the book that might have come off as incidental when reading it, came off as vulgar and crass when having it read to me by this sub-standard narrator.
I had the distinct privileged of hearing Min Jin Lee speak at The Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, PA and this is how I found out that I had missed out on a lot in the book – she did a reading of a section that I had listened to just days before and had just not even cared about, and her reading of that section of book had me [and everyone else in the audience] weeping. It was so beautiful and haunting and moving. Coming from her [and oh how I wish she had narrated this book], it became an alive and emotional piece and made me realize the reason I disliked this book so much was simply the narration.
I had initially rated this 3 stars, but I think that is doing a disservice to both the author and the book itself. Clearly my experience at the author event proved that her writing is amazing and lyrical and my [crappy] experience with it was solely the narrations fault. Therefore, I am changing my rating to 4 stars [simply based on my experience at the author event]. It would have been five stars had the book been about 100 pages shorter and had the characters been fleshed out a bit more. But the end – that end. WOW.
When one has to rely on audiobooks only for their daily book infusion, you run across really bad narrators [and there are MANY MANY MANY out there – I am not sure how anyone thought they were good at this particular job] and that really tinges how you look and receive a book [a good example for me is The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane <--THAT narration completely ruined that book for me] and that is completely frustrating for me. I have walked away from books after listening to a sample of the audiobook and that just should not be the case. Very frustrating indeed.
This is a sweeping and poignant historical saga that covers four generations of a Korean family beginning with Yangjin in 1910 Korea to 1989 Tokoyo, Japan. It begins with Yangjin and her daughter, Sunja, who struggles to survive and provide for her family every single day as the whole family has to confront and question their faith, country, family and even their own identity. This story is fiction; but the events are historical and are very much relevant and, perhaps, too close for comfort in today’s environment.
The characters are gradually fleshed out and come to life on the pages. Even the secondary characters are meaningful and contribute to the story. The chapters are headed with dates much like a journal that is written in the third person. Some chunks are a year and others are much longer covering a period of almost eight decades. Min Jin Lee created a post war environment that is not only believable; but is politically and socially sickening. This is one book you will never forget. I really liked Pachinko; but I couldn’t love it. It was too much.
Pachinko is a masterwork. Once I adjusted to the now rarely used omniscient point of view, I fell into these characters lives and worlds as if I was right there with them. I found myself exclaiming out loud in reaction, and after one particular event (no spoilers here) I remained emotional about that event and the impact on the characters’ lives for literal days. That is how powerful this author’s writing is! In addition, I learned so much as if by immersion. I’ve been recommending this novel every where I go.
“Pachinko”, which I read about thirty books ago, continues to challenge my mind. It haunts me in a way that one is seeking answers to questions, known and unknown. Questions that are a mystery.
No plot explanations or spoilers here.
“Pachinko” is an intriguing story of a Korean family who live in Japan. A novel that is about a multi-generational family, I found it to be educational about cutural customs and beliefs.
There are several levels of the story that are universal mysteries of human nature. Still, my mind seeks answers for their decisions, behaviour and thought processes.
Human beings are a mystery all over the planet called Earth.
I Highly Recommend this Book!
Pachinko is a work of historical fiction which follows the lives of Sanja, her children and grandchild. We first meet Sanja as a young girl living in Korea during its occupation by Japan in WW II. Sanja meets and falls in love with an older man. When she becomes pregnant she learns he cannot offer marriage because he has a wife in Japan. He does offer to take care of Sanja and her child. Sanja rejects this offer and is lucky to meet Isak at her mothers boarding house. He is a sickly man who she and her mother nurse back to health. Isak, a minister is a good man who marries Sanja and takes her to Japan to live with his brother and sister-in-law. He raises her child as his own.
Pachinko is very well written. The characters are well drawn and react to situations in plausible ways. The world this novel takes place in was harsh and dangerous and the author conveys this well, throughout the story themes of racism and sexism are explored. The plot unfolds at a moderate even pace. Though not an action packed page turner the novel never gets bogged down. It held my interest throughout.
This is another must-buy-hard-copy book for me. The one and only reason for it is this book made me connect and so many characters within the first 20 pages. It has that kind of writing that will fool you into thinking that she is the protagonist … oh ok, she’s dead, so she is the protagonist … oh ok, so she is dead too, so then, is she the protagonist?… To be honest, you won’t have much time to think over it, because the writing keeps drawing in the reader in a way that the readers don’t have much time to think. They just end up in the next moment, and viola, they are passed over to the next character who they will root for. So, in a way, I think this is the only book I have read that made several strong characters rootable within the first 15-20 pages.
This book was an eye-opener for me. It didn’t just reveal an entirely different world and a conflict I was only partially aware of, but it revealed the cruelty and ignorance of racism in a completely different light. Racism takes on different forms in different countries, and I think it is helpful to see racism when it is performed between members of a race we are not part of. When we are part of something, it’s hard to see it for what it really is, but looking from the outside in, we can see it far more clearly. That’s the effect this book had on me. It portrayed good, noble, honest, and loving people–who were members of a race that was looked down upon by another. By seeing the conflict from their perspective–the perspective of the Koreans–you understood just how unjust was their treatment by the Japanese, but also how the dynamic between them was not simple. I came away with one idea above all others: that the relationship between the Japanese and the Koreans (or whites and blacks, or whites and Indigenous peoples), was one of an oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressor forces the oppressed into their lower, lesser position, the oppressed has to adapt and suffer, and then the oppressed is maligned and hated for how they adapt. The book shows that no matter how hard someone of this oppressed class works, if the oppressors want to see him in a certain way, he’ll always be seen in that way.
Pachinko is a sprawling multi-generational book spanning the 20th century, from when Japan colonized Korea before WWII, took people’s land and levied taxes, pretty much devastating Korea’s businesses, families and culture. The story speaks of misfortune, poverty and loss as it follows Sunja’s family. We meet her parents, then follow Sunja and her minister husband Isak and two sons as they move to Japan and start new lives. To complicate things, Sunja is also infatuated with a much older Korean man who also has moved to Japan. Isak gets a position in a church but Christianity is outlawed in Japan Christians are commanded to worship the emperor which leads to Isak’s arrest. Sunja and her sister-in-law start a business, and work hard to give Sunja’s sons a good start in life.
At first I was annoyed by all the information, all the characters and stories until I learned that the author had performed numerous interviews, then I felt like I was reading about actual lives. Many Koreans had emigrated to Japan after their country was devastated, and even after Japan becomes their homeland, generations live as “Korean-Japanese” who must periodically register as alien residents.
The characters who are flexible and meet the challenges presented by fate are able to adjust and find success on Japan’s terms. Sometimes this means they must align with gangsters, as when they work in the lucrative Pachinko business. Those who try to pass for Japanese may be the worst off. Women had limited social roles and were scrutinized and judged in all their actions. The game Pachinko is one of chance, though the business owners have some control and may even rig the outcomes. Like the game, a theme of fate and random chance runs throughout, and many of the characters do manage to change their destiny. But the book’s overriding theme is love.
Pachinko is a generational story, spanning decades, which is set during a time when the Japanese invaded and took over Korea. We follow the story of Sunja, her children and grandchildren and witness the pain and harships they suffer while living in Japan.
There were a few times I became confused between chapters. The author tends to jump from one chapter to the next, dropping you into the characters’ lives years later, while simultaneously introducing another character. It’s easy to catch back up after a few paragraphs but it can make the flow feel a little stinted.
That being said, this is easy to get lost in. The horror and fear Koreans had to constantly live in was absolutely heartbreaking. This isn’t a side of history that is often written about, but I think should be. I am half-Korean and often wonder what my mother and her family went through before coming to America. She doesn’t speak of her youth or of where she grew up.
If you enjoy historical fiction I say pick this one up and take your time with it. Go into this one knowing what you get is an ever-present sadness and lives that, while filled with short bursts of happiness, are ultimately clouded in oppression and gloom. It can be a hard read, but it’s worth it.