Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist)

This book was hard to put down. One more reason to quit my day job! There are a lot of interesting multi-generational family sagas out there. However, Pachinko is at the top of the pile due to excellent writing and a unique story line. Pachinko spans the time period from 1910-1989 and follows a Korean family as they move from Korea to Japan. The story begins with Hoonie, a man born with physical deformities who is loved and nurtured by his parents. The family owns a boardinghouse. Japan has annexed Korea and times are tough. Because of difficult financial times, Hoonie is able to find a bride. Yangjin and Hoonie have a happy but hard life and are blessed with a daughter named Sunja. As a young girl, Sunja meets Koh Hansu. He is wealthy and handsome, but he is also not as he seems. They have an affair and she becomes pregnant. She makes the difficult choice to leave Korea for Japan, as the wife of one of her mother's boarders, Isak. He is a minister from Osaka who has been ill all of his life with tuberculosis. Isak and Sunja go to Japan and he raises her son, Noa, as his own. They later have a son together named Mozasu. In Japan they live with Isak's older brother and his wife. The brothers are very different. Noa is intellectual while Mozasu struggles in school. The family scrimps and saves to make sure that Noa can attend school. Mozasu is clever and ends up working in a pachinko parlor. Throughout Sunja's life, Koh Hansu is never far away and gives unwelcome interference in an effort to give his son a good life. Noa eventually discovers the truth of his birth with devastating results. Mozasu prospers, as does his family. Much much more happens in the book, but I do not want to ruin the twists and turns. Pachinko is set against the backdrop of WWI, WWII, and the Korean War. Koreans were treated as second class citizens in Japan. They had to change their names. Some Koreans were able to pass as Japanese. Those that could got better jobs and better treatment, so they guarded that secret from bosses, friends, and even spouses. After the wars, going back to Korea was often not an option. Pachinko parlors also play a major role in the book. A parlor may be shady and mob connected. Pachinko is a type of gambling game, like vertical pinball. Parlors still exist today. I Googled it! In addition to highlighting Korean history (about which I knew next to nothing), the story is very compelling. I cared about the characters, even the unlikeable ones. The book is full of tragedy, loyalty and betrayal, suffering, and triumph. But this is no fluffy beach read. The writing is lovely without being too flowery. I am still thinking about this book, though I finished it two weeks ago. I highly recommend this book and I plan to read Ms. Lee's other book, Free Food for Millionaires.

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.

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!