Pachinko has been described as a Japanese vertical pinball machine. The goal of the game is to fire balls that fall through a maze of metal pins into a hole. The balls that go through let you play a slot machine with the chance of winning more balls. It's partially a game of skill and partially a game of chance.
Pachinko is the second novel by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee. Born in Seoul, she arrives in the USA when she is 7. She studied law and worked in NY then lived in Tokyo for 4 years. Her husband is half Japanese.
Published in 2017, Pachinko is an epic historical novel that follows Korean characters who eventually migrate to Japan and who become subjected to issues of racism and stereotypes between 1910 and 1980, a period that includes the Japanese occupation of Korea and World War II.
It is the first novel written for an English-speaking audience about Japanese–Korean culture. Pachinko was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction.
Sypnosis
In a small fishing village lives a family whose beloved daughter falls pregnant by a married Yakuza (member of transnational organized crime syndicates originating in Japan.
The family faces ruin. By chance, a Christian minister, Isak, offers to marry the girl and take her to Japan. She thus follows a man she doesn’t know ito a hostile country whose language she cannot speak, where she has no friends and no home.
That is the beginning of a story of 8 decades, 4 generations. It is an epic tale of family identity, love, death and survival.
It tells us about the difficulty of integration, the discrimination against foreign newcomers and their struggle and resilience.
One feels the empathy, the integrity and the family loyalty through the whole story.
We all thought the book was very interesting because we didn’t know of the history in that part of the world and the relationship between Koreans and Japanese people. Some of us thought it was too long but personally I was mesmerised and interested by the cultural aspects of the book and the well described duality of human nature.
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