* The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf book club * ‘This is a captivating book … Min Jin Lee’s novel takes us through four generations and each character’s search for identity and success. It’s a powerful story about resilience and compassion’ BARACK OBAMA. Yeongdo, Korea … BARACK OBAMA.
Yeongdo, Korea 1911. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.
Following a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja’s salvation is just the beginning of her story.
Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinkois an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.
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A wonderful broad epic of a Korean family living in Japan over a fifty-year span of time.
Loved this story and loved the characters!
3.5 Stars. “A woman’s lot is to suffer,” is a refrain spoken often throughout the novel. This is a story of women suffering. Every woman in this book constantly suffers for choices they made, choices society made for her, or choices the men in their lives made. At times, the pain of the characters was so unrelenting that it was difficult to want to read the book. Still, the progress of the story was engrossing. This is a generational story of a Korean family in Japan spanning from about 1920 to 1990. The novel is written like a history of the family with no reservations about jumping time periods; in one paragraph a child may be born and in the next he has already finished schooling. She sometimes ended chapters with statements like “he died 5 years later.” The time jumps are huge and sweeping giving the story an epic feel. While there is so much pain in the story, it is not tear-inducing as much as exhausting. Lee doesn’t linger on scenes enough to give the reader too much emotional impact. Instead, we are reminded that women are made to suffer and we move on to the next scene, possibly years later. Still, we come to know four generations of this family and root for them against the odds. The prose is easy-flowing and not embelished. Lee wants to cover the history of 4 generations of this family in 500 pages; she does not flourish her writing or linger in descriptions.
The title Pachinko, refers to a Japanese casino game like a cross between a slot machine and pinball. Users feel they have a bit of control of the outcome, but in the end, the house always wins. This is how it is with the women of the story: every time there is a chance for a leg up, the system, society, or the men knock them back.
I learned a lot about Japan and Korea while they were at war and the two Koreas were forming. Also, the severe racism from Japanese to Koreans was detailed well and eye-opening for me. Even as of 1989, Koreans born in Japan were not considered Japanese citizens. The many names the Japanese government made Koreans use was also something new to me. For these historical aspects, I appreciated the novel a great deal and I enjoyed following this family throughout 70+ years despite not Lee not lingering long enough to feel fully connected to a specific character. To Lee though, these aspects of the novel are supplemental to displaying the constant grief and suffering of Korean women and how they learned/were taught to accept it, not necessarily to overcome it.
“Pachinko” by: MinJimLee
Recommended by our local book store. It is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It goes fast and you wish there was more
Those who know me know that I’m a sucker for a family saga that spans generations and countries, so I unsurprisingly utterly adored Pachinko. The novel begins in Korea in the early 1900s with Sunja, the beloved only daughter of a disabled fisherman and his much younger wife. As a teenager, she falls in love with a wealthy gangster and becomes pregnant with his child. But when he reveals that he is already married and offers to set her up in Japan as his mistress, Sunja refuses him and instead accepts an offer of marriage from a sickly minister who is passing through her village on the way to take a position at a Christian church in Osaka. Sunja’s decision will echo through her extended family for generations as they struggle to succeed in a country that wants Koreans immigrants like them to fail. The reader is taken through decades of Japanese and Korean shared history through the lens of one family and the result is a beautiful story perseverance, hope and survival, even when all of the odds are stacked against you.
This was so engrossing I had to force myself to put it down. This book is such a well developed multi-generational saga I cannot draw any comparisons. My most recommended book by far this past year.
My book club read this informative novel in October 2018. Since CHIMCHI figured so prominently in the book, our hostess for the evening went to the supreme effort of watching many videos in order to make CHIMCHI, and she served other appropriate Korean cuisine,
We learned much about Korean and Japanese interaction from the 1920s until current times. Our discussion included the development Pachinko in Chicago, its transference to Asia in the 1940s where it changed into the currently known game there. and the impact that culture… and the exclusion from a major culture … has on the Korean immigrant population. In Japan, the Koreans are vilified while in the US, they are looked upon as being a thrifty, hard working community that values educating their kids and getting ahead. I learned that SEVEN ELEVEN is a Korean concern – how odd that now there is a great economic controversy with Seven Eleven in Japan.
There are powerful women in the book – especially Sunjya and her sister in law, and the men who were intrinsically positive figures even though some of them were outwardly “ gangsters”. They took care of their community, protected those less fortunate than they were, such as Hansu harboring Sunjya’s family during WWII in a farm isolated from the bombing targets. It doesn’t matter that he did it for Noah’s sake … he protected the whole family, except for Yosef who unfortunately got caught in Nagasaki, and subsequently suffered health problems. Suniya’s son ultimately could not escape the discrimination, and committed suicide, despite being very bright and successful.
4.11.2019
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.
I thoroughly enjoyed the story although I felt it got a bit long in places. Her detailed description is excellent and her characters believable. It was hard to read at times because of the situations the young woman finds herself in. I liked it much better than the author’s most recent book which I couldn’t get into at all.
This is a FANTASTIC book that taught me a lot about Korean / Japanese social history and was a complete page-turner. Highly recommend it.
Great saga!
One of the best books I have read. Thoroughly enjoyed
This was an amazing history of 20th century Korea and Japan pre-and post-war World War II. Beautiful writing and captivating story.
The author wrote clearly and engages the reader. I could have done without the sec scenes which didn’t enhance the story in any way. Almost like editor or author feels one must follow Hollywood’s misguided sense that the story must contain sex
I can’t say enough about this amazing book! Read it!
I wanted to read this book because I like to read about other cultures. I had just read The Island of the Sea Women, also based on Korean characters. Sea Women was very good. Horrific in some parts, but really well written. Pachinko was just ok. It was good enough to finish, but not good enough that I’d recommend it to anyone.
Interesting. A book club choice. Not one I’d have picked up on my own, but I did enjoy it.
Learned so mich history that I had no idea about, in a very nice storyline. Super interesting!!
too long
Meh….