"Pachinko" is a great historical novel following a Korean family from the 1930s to the late 1980s.
I normally ready historical novels set in Europe or the USA, so it was great to read a novel set in Korea and Japan because I know much less about their history.

I liked how the author showed how much society changed and stayed the same for Korean families living in Japan and how the family's fortune changed so much. I especially liked reading about the women's fates, but I still enjoyed reading about the male characters.

Overall, this is a great family drama with fascinating characters set in a period of history marked by societal change.

Family sagas are often formulaic, but what makes Pachinko stand head and shoulders above others I have read is its setting. It traces the fortunes (bad choice of words here!) of a Korean family from 1932 through to the 1980s. Before reading it, I knew nothing about Korean history; nothing about the Japanese occupation in the 1930s that I believe was one of the triggers that caused America to declare war on Japan; nothing about the nationwide poverty that ensued and that drove many Koreans to move, paradoxically, to eke out a perilous living in Japan in spite of being regarded by the Japanese as trash and the lowest of the low. I knew nothing about the Koreans in Japan being forced to live in, effectively, Korean ghettos, being denied all but the most menial and degrading of jobs and being subject to the harshest of rules and regulations.   
 
Sunja, daughter of widowed boarding-house owner Yanjin, falls pregnant but refuses to have anything further to do with the father, a wealthy Korean fish-broker, who is unable to marry her as he already has a wife and family. In those days, this could have brought deep shame to her family, but Isak, a preacher who is a guest in the boarding house, offers to marry her and take her to Osaka in Japan to live with his brother and his wife. In Osaka, their fortunes (that word again!) are mixed, but this very beautifully-written story relates the trials and tribulations of Sunja’s two sons Noa and Mosazu and their families through the turbulent times of the 20th Century.   

Noa and Mosazu, with different fathers, are completely unalike. Throughout Noa’s life he is determined to be accepted as Japanese in spite of the dice being weighed heavily against him, whereas Mosazu accepts his situation as it is and gets on with life as best as he can. Throughout the story the leitmotiv is the involvement of the family with Pachinko parlours. These pin-ball parlours were very popular in Japan but had the reputation – unfortunately justified in many instances - of being run by gangsters, or yakuza, and it is this taint of crime that is one of the pivotal points in the story.   
 
The story is written with tenderness and empathy. You are drawn into their lives, you share their joy and you grieve with them in their sad times. It opened my eyes to a completely different way of life, and I will now view Korea with new eyes and a glimmer of understanding of the Korean people and of the challenges they face in an uncertain future.   .    
 
I wasn’t ready for it to end!
 
Bennie Bookworm
 
Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

Pachinko was a wonderful written story. I’m usually not a historical fiction reader but this one had me hooked straight from the beginning. Wonderfully written. It warmed and saddened my heart. Personally Pachinko is so far my book of the year.

Pinball wizardry

Rupert Winchester

Min Jin Lee, Pachinko, Apollo: 2017


Pachinko opens in the early years of the twentieth century with a poor married couple who open a boarding house near Busan in Korea. They have a daughter, Sunja, who bears a child to a dandy fish-broker called Hansu, who, it turns out, is already married, so she ends up marrying a kindly pastor, Isak, and moving to Japan to live with him and his brother and wife.

Sunja gives birth to Noa, and later to Isak’s son Mozasu. The book follows her and her children’s lives through the Second World War and eventually up to 1989, through poverty and hardship, through struggle and hard work, to relative success and happiness, for some. Noa’s parentage becomes an increasingly important issue for him, and Hansu’s role as a catalyst in the story becomes more and more important, leading to a shocking denouement.

One of the main themes is the difficulties of living in Japan for Korean people. The racism of the Japanese is profound and deep-rooted and unsettling, and colours every element of Sunja’s life. At the start of Pachinko, the Japanese have annexed Korea, and treat the locals with contempt. For Koreans like Sunja who end up living in Japan, things are even worse. They have to live in a slum and are forced to degrade themselves to survive. Isak is arrested by the Japanese authorities in an anti-Christian crackdown and spends years in jail.

One of the few ways that Koreans managed to earn money in Japan was by setting up pachinko parlours, a mean and grubby trade, associated with gambling and gangsterism. Nonetheless, Sunja’s children become involved with it, with greater or lesser degrees of cheerfulness, and despite its dubious reputation in Japanese society, they make the best of it and pull themselves up in the world.

Written in a seemingly flat and unemotional prose, the almost deliberately unstylish writing builds to a charged luminosity. The affectless and aphoristic sentences are polished and understated and beautiful, and are often reminiscent of a fairy tale (“Other families in the land were not so fortunate to have two such sensible parents…”)

Min Jin Lee was born in South Korea but left when she was a small child. Pachinko was written in English, although she wrote it when she was living in Japan between 2007 and 2011. She currently lives in New York City.

With the sweep of Tolstoy, or Dickens, this haunting and epic novel is a monumental achievement. But it is not perfect. It is a shade too long, and perhaps somewhat overcomplicated towards the end. But in its big themes: the power of uncomplicated women, the value of stoicism, exile and identity and the importance of family, Pachinko deserves to be read by all.

As a literary genre, the multi-generational family saga is much more widely used in the West than in Asia. Apart from The Dream of the Red Chamber and possibly The Tale of Genji, the idea of following a large cast of related characters across time and space seems much more firmly established amongst Western authors. Indeed, James Clavell and his bland, crypto-fascist Asian Saga novels spring most quickly to mind when asked to come up with examples of the genre from the East.

Novels from elsewhere seem to have adopted the format with much more gusto. From One Hundred Years of Solitude and East of Eden, to the less rarified The Thorn Birds and Roots, the multi-generational family saga is widely used, and much more deeply culturally embedded in the Western canon. But, finally, Korean-born Min Jin Lee has written a marvellous, masterful and deeply involving family saga that deserves to take its place amongst Western examples of the genre.

A minutiously built book featuring a multi-generational story of a Korean family living in Japan. Beyond the novelty of the topic and the focus on ethnic identity challenges as such, the book has an extraordinary complex human structure dealing with life struggles and survival, motherhood and resilience against the unexpected turns of events in a world chaotically on the move.

A thoroughly enjoyable, informative and heartbreaking book. My review starts at 2 minutes into the youtube video linked below.

Pachinko is a wonderful, sweeping epic of a tale which is more than well worth a read. Across the generations, as more characters become drawn into the novel, more stories are added. It is, in effect, one story - the story of the consequences of an affair had by a young Korean girl Sunja with the mysterious businessman, Hansu. It is a story of choices, fate and destiny and it gradually becomes a multi layered novel, with everything interconnecting. Beautifully written, this book is both captivating and heartbreaking. I loved it.

Moving, emotional, real. The moment I finished reading this book I started telling my friends and family to keep a look out for it on shelves. Seamless writing and transitions between generations, Pachinko explores a piece of history that we don't often hear about.

Min Jin Lee's sweeping novel covers four generations of one family, beginning in Korea in the early twentieth century and ending in Japan in the 1980s. It begins by telling the story of Sunja, who is the matriarch at the centre of the novel.

As a young, naive girl, Sunja falls pregnant by a Japanese man, who is a yakuza (a gangster). She will be cast out in shame by her community, under the stigma of being an unwed mother, but she is rescued by a kind Christian minister, Isak, who marries her even though they hardly know each other.

The story then moves to Japan, where Sunja and Isak live and raise their family. But as Korean immigrants, they are treated as second-class citizens and are forced to live in segregated areas. "Pachinko" was a really eye-opening read for me, as I confess I didn't know anything about the Japanese occupation of Korea. I appreciated the insight into Korean and Japanese culture which this book gave me.

I enjoyed the first half of Pachinko, and the narrative and plot seemed strongest in the first half of the novel. Towards the end (Part Three), it felt less convincing to me. I couldn't emotionally connect to the characters as much as I could to Sunja and her husband, and without giving away spoilers, the actions taken by one of their sons (Noa) against his mother just seemed cruel and baseless.

Also, the constant misfortunes and tragedies experienced by the family in Part Three started to become rather wearing -- it seemed like events were thrown into the plot without much exploration of them. Despite the insights into how Koreans lived in Japan, I was surprised that major world events in the twentieth century (world wars, atomic bombs, the division of Korea into North and South Korea in 1945) were glossed over and barely mentioned. Granted, it is a character-driven story, but this just felt like a huge oversight.

Although I've criticized the novel, I enjoyed reading most of it and Sunja is a warm, sympathetic, memorable character. I just think it would have been a better read, with a tighter plot, if it had been brought to a conclusion earlier and if it included more background on the impact of historic events in Japan and Korea.

Enjoyed it more than I thought I would in first reading. It is a family saga of Koreans living in Japan. I have read books about Japan and China but had no idea of the grief and problems faced by Koreans up to the modern era. The characters are interesting and although at times specifically towards the end it jumps too many years at a time it is very enjoyable and well worth a read.

3.5*
“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage”

Predictable enough, what gets the story rolling is an out of wedlock pregnancy, marriage to a mister and a passage to Japan, in search of a better life. A family saga, spanning over three generations. A crude story of emigration, fighting, struggle, survival and resilience.
Pachinko: “ sordid business”, “not respectable”, connected to Yakuza etc, yet so popular. Pachinko is what inexorably connects this generations; is what allows them to make an honest living and especially what makes them successful and rich. I believe this duality between how loved Pachinko was yet so condemned in the Japanese society, illustrates perfectly well the situation of Korean immigrants in Japan of the 20th century.
In a way or another I've already read this story. It's almost the story of every emigrant out there, especially in times when emigrations was very though; yet not very much different in today's world. I cannot really say I didn't care about the characters, but I've been touched more by secondary characters like Hana(Solomon's first love and the daughter of his step mother) and Yumi ( Mozasu's wife and mother to Solomon) – her death really left me teary-eyed. I really appreciated how Lee takes on notions like identity, nationality, appurtenance. It is quite heartbreaking to be born in a country, to be raised exclusively in that country yet to not be either a full citizen of that country but neither a citizen of your parents' country. A real alien, I guess - “There was more to being something than just blood”.
Quite the coincidence while reading this book, I ended up chatting with an acquaintance about education and how baffled people are with our accents. It turns out she is a Canadian of Korean descent. She told me how her father was pushing her and her sister to work double what the school was giving them as homework. And that was pretty much his modus operandi about everything. It so reminded me of Sunja and especially of Noa. “Noa had been a sensitive child who had believed that if he followed all the rules and was the best, then somehow, the hostile world would change its mind. His death may have been her fault for having allowed him to believe such cruel ideals.”
Yet again I feel I need to assert that my rating is not directly connected with the quality of the book. It's definitely a good book, that I recommend: a touching story, full of details about the lives of Koreans in Japan, a lot of other historic details, plus all the important aspects that you expect to find in story about emigration. My rating is purely subjective, it reflects the fact I failed to really connect with the characters, to root for them, so to speak. Plus I didn't felt this book added to my knowledge or experience as an emigrant, it just confirmed what I already knew/felt and not more.

There are at least two generations too many in this multi-generational tale; it would benefit from losing the first chapter perhaps, and definitely the last 20% or so. But while that may sound a little damning, without that extra weight this would be a near perfect book. It’s elegant and skilful, thoughtful and refined, and for the insight into the Korean experience in Japan, and a depressing and hopeless examination of Motherhood, this epic is worth reading.

It starts in Korea in 1910 with an ageing fisherman and his wife who become boarding house keepers, but the main plot follows their granddaughter Sunja. Sunja falls pregnant out of wedlock and her honour is saved by a visiting church pastor who asks her to come to Japan with him as his wife. We then follow Sunja’s life, and the lives of her extended family, through World War Two and beyond - stretching as far as her Grandson returning to work in Japan in 1989 after attending university in New York.

Books set in other times, other places, other worlds are always fascinating, and there is a unique and horrifying aspect to the racism suffered by ethnic Korean immigrants in Japan that make this especially enlightening. It was something I knew nothing about. In Pachinko, the Korean characters are unwelcome “guests” in the place they were born, constantly under threat of deportation back to a country that - post Korean War and division - no longer really exists.

But parent/child relationships are the broken heart of this book. Some characters give every second of their lives struggling to pave the way for their children, others indulge their own desires at their children’s expense, but all end up either damaging their offspring irrevocably or at least blamed by them for everything that goes wrong. In a multi-generational novel there are plenty of parent/child pairs to bear this out - even in one of the least emotionally dramatic the daughter cries on her mother’s deathbed “I don’t, I don’t... I won’t blame you” - through force of will alone is the mother not held responsible for the daughter’s failures.

But despite the fascinating history and the subtle relationships the overarching problem remains. With a multi-generational book you have to love each generation as much as the last to keep pushing through the years to the end. To me there was only one character I truly cared about - my interest in Sunja extended to her relationship with her mother and children, but beyond that my stamina faded. The characters and stories in the last 5th of the book were interesting enough, but, without Sunja at their heart, the novel’s end felt a long time coming. It deserves all the good reviews it’s inevitably going to get, but with 13 chapters less is could have been something better still.

Very enjoyable. It's a big family saga, spanning decades, starting with a tiny fishing village in Korea and ending up in the financial markets of late 80s Tokyo. We follow several generations of a family as they suffer under the Japanese occupation of Korea, move to Japan in time for World War Two and then the turbulent post war years. There's a lot of sadness and grim outcomes over the course of the novel, but the thing I remember most is the acts of kindness throughout. The plot hinges on a remarkable act of sacrifice, and there is a sense of, I don't know...decency? throughout. It's a very pleasing book, and one I was sorry to finish.

An admirably ambitious book which seeks to tell the story of a multi-generational Korean family against the background of the C20th and Japanese-Korean relations. I can see the parallels others have pointed out with Victorian family sagas, but this doesn't quite manage to pull off its aims.

The first third grabbed me completely and the pages flew past effortlessly. As we move to Japan, though, and as the characters proliferate and the world in which they operate becomes more complex, something of the intimacy of the start is lost. I wonder if this is intentional as the beginning of the book is marked by a slow grace set against a rural background, something almost akin to a fairy-tale in the atmosphere - the later chapters get faster and more frenetic as C20th life speeds up and, in that movement, characters get lost, and there are big jumps between years.

Questions of family, of what it means to be 'foreigners' or gaijin in another land seep through the story, and there are interesting pen portraits of the differences between Korean and Japanese culture at various points. There's also an attention to the lives of women: pregnancies, marriage, sexual violence, illness all have their place in the narrative though, again, sometimes recounted in a distanced way.

So a big book, I just felt that it got more panoramic than I would have liked: more close-ups as the book developed were somewhat lacking for me. and would have drawn me closer to the heart of the story. Well worth reading, though, for its vision and flowing writing.

To be posted on Amazon and Goodreads

I received a free digital copy from the author/publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest feedback.

Pachinko starts in the early 1900s and subsequently follows the lives of one Korean family, as one daughter becomes pregnant outside of marriage, is married to a kindly Protestant preacher and moves to Japan. She then has to raise her children and they theirs while all feeling a connection to a Korea and trying to live as second-class citizens in Japan.

I enjoyed this slow-moving but graceful story starting with the disabled but kindly Hoomie and his shy but surprisingly strong daughter Sunja and eventually moving on to her children, the sensitive, smart Noa and tenacious and tough Mozaka and finally ending with Solomon. Each member of the family were different but intriguing to follow and for the most part, I really enjoyed following them along with their lives.

I feel like i learned a lot in this book. I haven’t read a lot of books set in Japan or Korea and I definitely got a look into Korean and Japanese culture from both Sunja’s childhood to her children’s and finally her grandchild’s in the 70s and 80s. I didn’t know how Koreans were treated by Japanese people and it seemed to last all the way up to the late 80s when Solomon was in his twenties and I found this really interesting. Another thing I noticed when Sunja was the main character of the story was how much she had to answer to the main man in the family. First it was Isak, who was quite gentle but then there was Yoseb who had a lot of ideas on how she should raise Noa and how Sunja and his wife should work and how they should earn money for the family. He wasn’t necessarily a bad man but he could have made life easier for the women, and made some decisions that made everyone’s lives harder.

I thought I would love Noa and I did when he was a child but I eventually grew to really dislike him and his decisions. I couldn’t understand why he turned from everyone including an aunt and uncle who loved him and a younger brother who idolised him when he found out the truth of his parentage. The fact that he was able to just shove Sunja aside, who had worked her skin to the bone for years to give him a good life, and have a family separate from her was really cruel to me and left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I also don’t quite understand his reasons behind his suicide - his obsession with bad blood, and maybe paying for the sins of the father (and I don’t think he necessarily seemed depressed?) but then leaving behind that grief and sorrow for a young family and Sunja. It seemed odd to me.

I got a bit tired near the end of the book and at that stage I wasn’t sure when it would end and how. The ending was a bit flat, but the story itself wasn’t wildly exciting so I understand why there wasn’t an epic conclusion.

Pachinko is a family saga and a novel about the experience of the outsider. Sunja is the daughter of a Hoonie, her much-loved father who died young. Hoonie was a disabled man, which in her coastal village in Korea, means she carries a stigma and may never marry. When she becomes pregnant by a Korean from Japan, a married man, it seems she will be outcast.

Then a Korean Christian pastor comes to the family’s boarding house. Their kindness to him during an extended illness and his faith lead him to make Sunja an offer – he will marry her and bring up the child as his own if she will come to Japan with him. He is moving there to escape the poverty brought by Japanese colonialism.

His hopes for an easier life in Japan prove naïve. Sunja and her husband live with her brother and sister-in-law, Kyunghee. The two women become close. Kyunghee accepts Sunja and her pregnancy, and her charm and delicacy and Sunja’s strength and perseverance complement each other in the trials that lie ahead. Life in the Korean ghetto of Osaka is difficult but together the women survive poverty, war, repression and loss.

Sunja’s sons face different challenges. Noa and Mozasu, are both born in Japan, but they are not citizens. They are subjected to prejudice and their ambiguous status means they are never secure. But while Mozasu reacts with defiance, Noa tries ever harder to assimilate, to become more Japanese. He values Japanese ideas, culture, even the language, over Korean. His struggle is depicted with compassion and we see the compromises made by the Korean characters – and the Japanese who are close to them.

It has resonance today, when we see people from minorities taking leading roles in anti-immigrant parties or governments. This subtle depiction of Noa provides some insight into why they make what seems like an incomprehensible choice.

Another way the characters insulate themselves from prejudice is through wealth. Money doesn’t buy acceptance, but it does buy power, within certain constraints. For Sunja and her family, the support of a wealthy patron also has its price.

The writing in Pachinko is beautiful. The author creates vivid characters and evokes place from a few brushstrokes – whether it’s the remote beauty of the beach near Sunja’s village in Korea, or the frenetic desperation of the pachinko parlours (gambling arcades) of Osaka. The narration is understated, even at times of great drama, and this quiet voice somehow heightens the emotion.

Pachinko is the story of a family and survival in tough circumstances. At its heart is the strength and resourcefulness of women.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via Netgalley, in return for an independent honest review. This is a huge chunky family saga which gives the reader an insight into Korean cultures spanning four generations. Sunja, a young Korean woman becomes pregnant by a much older suitor which is seen as a disgrace to the family.To help ease the family Burdon, a visiting Japanese Pastor offers to marry her and take Sunja to live in Japan.
The Japanese have very little respect for Koreans and serious predjudices soon become apparent to the family. This is well written and easy to read despite its size. I soon became engaged with the plot and felt all the wide range of emotions it evokes.The characters were well developed, even if they were not all likeable. My only criticism which prevented it being a 5* read for me, is that about the last third felt somewhat over packed so that the book could finish. I would have preferred it to be a duology.
A fantastic choice for lovers of family sagas and those wanting a well researched historical perspective on both Korea and Japan. 4*

A long but very thought provoking story which I enjoyed immensely.

In Yeong-do in Busan, South Korea, a humble couple run a boardinghouse for fishermen and manual workers at the port. Hoonie is gentle and loving, but marked by his hare lip and twisted leg, while his wife Yanjin is a thrifty, practical hostess. Their daughter Sunja, their only surviving child, is the love of both their lives and, after Hoonie’s death, it falls to Yanjin to raise her daughter alone while also running a business. Sunja is not beautiful but her sturdiness and hard work hide a dreamer’s soul. Beguiled by the prosperous Koh Hanso, she becomes pregnant by him, only to learn that he has a wife and children in his adopted hometown of Osaka. Having fallen at the first hurdle, having shamed herself and her ancestors, and ruined every hope for her future, Sunja retreats into abject misery; but help comes from the most unexpected quarter. Their sickly guest, the Christian pastor Isak Baek, is on his way to minister in a church in Osaka and he offers to marry Sunja, shielding her shame with his name and raising her child as his own. Overwhelmed by such kindness, Sunja goes with him, exchanging her humble but clean village life for the more competitive, harsh and challenging existence in a foreign city, where Koreans are regarded as second-class citizens and life will be a constant battle for vindication.

Don’t be put off, as I nearly was, by the description of this book as a ‘family saga’, which conjures up images of Dynasty. It packs a powerful punch while still being very engaging and well-written. This is a powerful tale of resilience, oppression – whether of Koreans by Japanese, women by men, or Christians by other faiths – and the sacrifices we make to ensure our children have better lives. Yet it’s also instructive as a fictional introduction to the invasion of Korean by Japan, the resulting Korean diaspora, the social tensions that arose from this, and the vacuum of authority in Korea after the Japanese withdrawal that led to the war and the miserable division we see in the Korean peninsula today. Its primary legacy, for me, has been to highlight how shamefully little I know of the lives of people from this region of the world in the 20th century, and it has done much to give me a clearer idea of the relationship between Korea, Japan, China and the wider world.

For the full review, please visit my blog at the link given below:
https://theidlewoman.net/2017/01/19/pachinko-min-jin-lee/