The taint of racism survives across generations and through history’s seismic shifts, in Min Jin Lee’s compelling saga of Korean immigrants in twentieth-century Japan. This epic tale of colonial domination and discrimination opens a window on suffering, both past and ongoing, that will perhaps come as a revelation to Western readers.

Lee has done an impressive job of exposing the terrible consequences of Japan’s invasion of Korea in 1910 and the ensuing fall out. Her long, careful and tender narrative, simple in form, rests on a persuasive foundation of research while funneling information through four generations of a single family, starting with the fortunes of Hoonie, a Korean child born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot.

Hoonie is 27 when Japan annexes Korea, beginning the systematic, implacable oppression of its people, forcing many into penury and others to move to Japan for survival, unaware of the ghettoization they will experience there. Such is the fate of Hoonie’s beloved daughter Sunja whose youthful mistake – to fall under the spell of a charismatic older man, Hansu – will mould the future of his descendants down through the decades.

Sunja becomes pregnant but Hansu cannot marry her – he already has a wife and three daughters. Disgraced herself and about to bring shame and ruin to her hardworking, widowed mother, an indefatigable innkeeper, Sunja is in despair until thrown a lifeline by a Korean pastor, Isak, whose frail health encourages him to save her through marriage, thereby giving his own, perhaps brief existence meaning. And so Sunja weds Isak and the couple moves to Japan, to start a new life in the home of Isak’s brother.

Such fairytale events occur on and off through this long story, but are easily overshadowed by the darker developments in the lives of Sunja, Isak, their family, children and acquaintances. In a culture that sees them as dirty, untrustworthy second-class citizens, and confines their opportunities accordingly, the family works for its survival, both religious and economic. War and tragedies closer to home overtake them. Yet Sunja’s first child, Noa, and a second – fathered by Isak – named Mozasu grow up into thoughtful men with strong work ethics and moral dispositions. For complicated reason, both end up working in the less than honourable pachinko (gambling) business.

Most memorable in its remoter and innocent first chapters, the novel can seem soapy at times, with drama and rescue – and loss – arriving at surprising speed. But Lee writes with a transparency that lends honesty to her characters, notably the women at the novel’s heart. ‘A woman’s life is suffering’ is the oft-quoted refrain of Sunja, her mother and her sister-in-law whose powers of endurance and generosity are tested to their limits. The female characters’ sexuality are also explored with some frankness.

This is a saga with an ambitious reach, and an element of literary depth that pushes the boundaries of its category. Lee’s rural panoramas and teaming townscapes, her plotting, characters, energy and empathy all lift the book beyond the conventional. Its life lessons may be painful, but the reading experience is far from it.

During the cold long winter months I love to escape into an epic novel - one in which I am immersed in lives in another culture and time. “Pachinko” was exactly the novel I was hoping to find to provide my escape. Min Jin Lee tells the story of four generations of Koreans over a period of 70 years. The story begins with a young Korean girl, Sunja, who is impregnated by a married man. A kind young minister offers to marry her and takes her to Japan to build a new life. Sunja experiences many difficulties in her life, but she is committed to forging a better life for her children. The scope of the book allows the reader to follow Sunja’s descendants, their own successes and struggles, and the complicated relationships family life generates. Lee creates marvelous characters and I became fully invested in their stories. At the same time, she provides a revelatory look at Japanese discrimination against Koreans during this time period, the effects of World War ll, and a vivid and enlightening portrait of a culture and time I wasn’t familiar with. Set aside some time to lose yourself in “Pachinko,” it’s well worth it.

My review was posted on Goodreads on 2/5/17

Pachinko is a game of chance. While the odds are stacked against you, there's always the hope that things will fall into place for a big payout. It's not so far off from ones hopes for a better life when circumstances seem to have dictated your fate. Lee's masterpiece chronicles the lives of a Korean family left to chance as they emigrate to Japan where they can never truly belong. Multi-generational in scope, it is a family saga, a history lesson and a damn fine novel.

Sometimes as readers we luck out in ways we can't possibly imagine when we pick up a book casually but with interest, as I did with Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I knew it described a Korean family and, honestly not much more. That was enough to pique my interest. This is a beautiful story that envelopes you with its writing, characters and the historical details which are not well known. Korean families in the generations 1910-1980 experienced unique dislocations and outsider status that was not apparent here or shared through our history books or media. When experienced through these characters, history comes alive in countless ways; the book is memorable and moving. I will not easily forget it. Thanks to the publisher for an advance copy through NetGalley. I loved the book.

Pachinko is a novel that exemplifies the word “epic.” Following the members of a close-knit family from a rural fishing village on a Korean island to various locales in Japan and elsewhere, it spans nearly 90 years and almost 500 pages. I would have been happy if it were longer.

It’s a big story, rich in character and activity. These aspects, plus the clean, straightforward writing style, make for a brisk, absorbing read. It opens in 1910 with the circumstances that lead to the birth of the principal heroine, Sunja, who grows into a sturdily built, handsome young woman.


When a liaison with a wealthy fish broker leaves her pregnant, and Sunja learns he can’t marry her, one of the guests recuperating at her mother’s boardinghouse makes a surprising offer. Due to his frailty, Baek Isak never expected to wed anyone, but his Christian beliefs (he’s a Presbyterian minister from Pyongyang) and generosity of spirit leads him to ask for Sunja’s hand. When the couple relocates to Osaka and moves into Isak’s brother’s home in the Korean ghetto, Sunja views firsthand the plight of immigrants living in a country that doesn’t welcome them.

The novel was revelatory for me, as it introduced me to an aspect of history about which I’d known little. Between 1910 and 1945, Korea was a colony of Japan. Through the experiences of Sunja, her husband, in-laws, and descendants, we get to see the ramifications of this part of history. As one Korean man remarks in the novel, “For people like us, home doesn’t exist.” In Japan, Koreans are negatively stereotyped as belonging to a “cunning and wily tribe” and “natural troublemakers.” They can’t rent decent housing or obtain the best jobs. On the other hand, any Koreans who adapt to Japanese ways would be looked upon suspiciously back home. The members of the Baek family must always be on their best behavior, since they represent their country of origin.

Over the years, through constant toil, their fortunes rise. The meaning of the title (which refers to Japanese pinball gambling, a hugely popular activity there) isn’t obvious in the beginning but becomes clear in the novel’s later sections.

Pachinko tells a universal immigrant story, but it also offers enough specificity to provide a full picture of the geography and customs of 20th-century Korea and Japan. The novel’s scope lets readers see how the family acclimatizes themselves to an increasingly modernized Japan while keeping their own identity as Koreans. Because of the discrimination they face, it’s impossible for them to fully assimilate.

Two more elements of note. Writing instructors and readers often decry the use of “head hopping,” that is, the switching of viewpoints within a scene. Lee shows why this so-called rule was made to be broken. She uses this technique on occasion, but it’s performed subtly and has the effect of enhancing the scene’s emotional impact. Also, while Sunja often hears the adage that suffering is a woman’s plight, she and her equally industrious sister-in-law, Kyunghee, are the engines that ensure their family thrives and survives. The family’s men, while (mostly) decent and hardworking, aren’t always as fortunate. This emphasis felt curious to me; I couldn’t tell if it was meant to be symbolic of a larger theme or not.

If you don’t know anything about this historical era or part of the world, no need to worry. Lee will bring you into her characters’ world so completely so that they’ll feel like family. An engrossing historical saga, Pachinko’s themes are also significantly relevant to the world we live in today.

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC:

Good generational tale set in Korea and Japan. A family has a patriarch with some deformities, but who is intelligent and kind. This is mostly the story of his daughter and his wife who run a boarding house to make ends meet after the death of the father. Mom is an excellent cook, so the house stays full of lodgers. The girl becomes pregnant by a lover she thought would marry her and accepts one of the lodger's as her husband to protect the family from shame. He takes her to Osaka. Life in Japan is difficult for Koreans, they are poverty ridden and mistreated.
The background historically goes from Japan's annexation of Korea, through the depression and onto WWII in Japan and modern days.

Pachinko is a family saga that takes place in Japan and Korea during the 1910s through the 1980s. It follows generations of a family through their triumphs, disappointments, loves and struggles. It's about family, society and faith. All in all, I found it to be a very touching story but it may have been a little too long for my liking. I am a huge fan of eastern literature about this one just didn't quite cut it for me.

Enter this sweeping multi-generational saga. For the first half of the book, I really did feel swept off my feet. For the second half however, I felt like the pacing was a little bit off. Whenever I thought of this book, I pictured a quilt, because of the way the author was able to do this with her writing style.

This story follows a Korean family who immigrate to Japan, and start out living in poverty. There are traditional arranged marriages, shameful pregnancy, and stories of forbidden and lost love embedded in this tale. We start this story out with Hoonie, an old child who was born with deformities. His parents being thankful that any marriage offer would come to them, so they accept. All during this time in 1910 Japan annexes itself from Korea, so times get even more financially tough.'

After having three newborn's that died, Hoonie becomes the proud father of our main character, Sunja. She is adored and praised on by her father, unusual in this specific culture. When she reaches the age of ten, her father suddenly and she is left to help around the inn with her single mother. When she's still under the age of eighteen, a foreign man notices her in the food market. From there she has a forbidden love affair that ends up in an unwanted pregnancy. And for reasons that are spoilery, she obviously can't be with the father. Isak Baek, a sickly minister that has been living in their inn offers to marry Sunja. Her mother must let her daughter go to Japan, knowing that this is the best thing for her reputation.

Filled with tragic dissolvement of family, motherly love and sacrifice, where education can get you. This story is told through the historical period of the discrimination, annexation from Japan, and the Great Depression that was going on worldwide through the lens of this family's story.

The first half kept me engaged and interested, but I felt like something was off about the pacing in the second half. Future generations are rushed and they story isn't given the full consideration that I feel like the author focused on in the first half. I would have liked for this book to dive into a little bit of the modern members of the families lives, as I feel that I could relate to that the most within the time period.

Also, my mistake in the timing that I personally read this book was that I started it on a readathon. Which was obviously the wrong choice, since this book is around 500 pages, a real doorstopper. So I found myself skimming, speed-reading, and not really soaking in the content the way that I wanted to because of my hastiness. That's why I feel like couldn't enjoy the reading experience to the fullest.

One word that I could use to describe this book would probably be eye-opening. I wasn't aware of the history that was going on in this time period in that part of the world, and I was definitely glad that I got to experience this insightful story.

**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me a book in exchange for my honest review.**

If you have ever wondered about the lives of Koreans living in Japan, or never knew about it, please read this book. Pachinko is a fantastic multi-generational novel that explores the lives and struggles of a family of Koreans living in both Korea and Japan during a period of unrest and political changes. It is an intense family drama full of characters who are complex and troubled.

Combining many different Korean identities, the book shows how complex our identities are and how our relationship to culture can expose our limits and demand us to adapt. The book challenges our perceptions not only of the countries and identities in the book, but does so in a way that focuses on a whole family and the slow progression of change.

This was really a fascinating and great book focusing on several generations of a Korean family, starting in the early 1900s, and what happens when they end up in Japan. Besides being a great story, it has interesting looks at things like colonialism, discrimination (of various kinds), politics, the economy, etc. I also feel like Americans don't often read novels about the Asian experience of WWII/the Korean War, and this was very well-done in that regard. But mainly it is the story of a family. I did wish for slightly more from the end but found this to be a very engaging read overall. A-.

This is a huge book both in volume and content. I started it and was instantly drawn into the story of this Korean family. The story spans four generations, and the character development and drama of all of the people in the story is so real and absorbing, you want to keep reading.

Sunja is a young Korean girl, who becomes pregnant by a married man. A kind minister, staying in her mother's boarding house, offers to marry her and so she moves with him to Japan, leaving her widowed mother behind. An outcast in Japan, she cannot become a citizen or get a passport to travel back to see her mother in Korea. However, they are so poor, they would not have been able to travel even if they wanted to. The story continues, with them living with Isak's brother and kind sister-in-law, Kyunghee.

There is so much sadness in the story, but the overall story is one of sacrifice and hope. You get frustrated with the characters at times, but you walk away realizing that everyone has their problems and crosses to bear. The characters are flawed, yet real and kindness shows through all of them at times, reminding us that this is the way real life is. We do the best we can and make choices for our children and grandchildren based on what we think will help them.

Review posted on goodreads:

The only reason I didn't give this 5 stars is because the last quarter or so of the book felt rushed and jumped around more than the rest. There were a few side characters that had part of their story told then were never even mentioned again. And even the main story line felt a little unfinished, like I could use another couple chapters so I know what happens next!

Aside from that, Min Jin Lee did a nice job of creating a believable family, with a story that covers 80ish years. Several of the characters were very relatable, I found myself thinking that one or another's actions or thoughts were exactly what I would do or think in a similar situation. There were also times when I was arguing with the characters, wondering why on earth they did something.

One of the main themes, besides family, is dealing with racism. Having already been familiarized with the discrimination the Japanese directed at Koreans around WWII from college as well other novels, that aspect of Lee's book was less shocking and more realistic than it might've been otherwise. The way the two brothers, Noa & Mozasu, each handled their lots was so different from the other but both were completely believable.

All in all this is definitely a book I'd read again.



*received from Netgalley