Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
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 pregnantâand that her lover is marriedâshe 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 charactersâstrong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisisâsurvive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
loved the first 2/3 of the book. such great insight into the experiences of koreans in japan during ww2 and beyond. the last third feels so distant from what I had been reading before. I want to hug sunja so bad what a heartbreaking life
0A remarkable and sweeping story of four generations of A Korean family living in Japan. An unflinching look at racism that will feel unsettlingly familiar for an American reader, a meditation on what it means to be home, and a heartbreaking depiction of the sacrifices family makes for one another. While the ending felt rushes as time moves more quickly between chapters towards the conclusion, I still felt that the novel resolved itself in such a satisfying and beautiful way. Thank you, Min Jin Lee, for an unforgettable story about love, belonging, family, and pachinko.
0This book seamlessly took us from generation to generation. I felt a little sad when the focus would start to transition from mother to son or something, but quickly fell in love with the inner thoughts and outward actions of the "new" focus.
My only critique (and thus the reason for the 4 stars) was that though the characters endured interesting situations, they themselves weren't fully formed or dimensional. Each mother had some level of sacrifice, desire, sadness, etc. and it was sort of left at that.
One thing my sister pointed my attention to: WHO KNEW THAT STEAM AND HOT WATER AGES THE SKIN SO MUCH? This was mentioned twice or three times throughout the book, and since then I've started taking cooler shower :D
0
