Book Review: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Release Date: February 7, 2017
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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 pregnant–and that her lover is married–she 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 characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

Pachinko is the kind of epic family saga that I love. It spans four generations by my count. It starts with Sunja, a naive girl who is seduced by a wealthy, older married man. Rather than becoming the rich man’s mistress, she accepts a humble minister’s offer of marriage. She must keep her child’s true father a secret which causes complications for a long time and a lot of people. Life is hard in Japan for Sunja and her family because Koreans are horribly discriminated against.

I learned so much from reading this book. I didn’t know anything about the history between Japan and Korea, especially not how much the Japanese hated Koreans and vice versa. I had also never heard of the game pachinko or pachinko parlors, which can have ties to the mob. Both Korean and Japanese people have strict customs and manners, especially in the early years of this book, and I enjoyed learning more about those as well.

The characters in Pachinko are rich and deeply flawed. I felt like I knew them since both the actual book and the timeline the book covers are long. I spent a lot of time with them. Even so, I didn’t want it to end. Pachinko has won several awards and rightly so. Highly recommended.