“Four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by a married Korean gangster in 1933 Busan.”
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Pachinko is Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, the National Book Award finalist and the breakout literary novel that established Lee as one of the major contemporary Korean-American writers. The 496-page epic follows four generations of a Korean family in twentieth-century Japan, beginning with Sunja's pregnancy by Hansu, a married Korean gangster who has been making his fortune in Osaka. Sunja chooses to marry Isak, a young Christian missionary on his way to a Korean-immigrant church in Osaka, who agrees to claim the unborn child as his own. The novel follows the family from 1910 Busan through 1989 Tokyo: Sunja's children Noa and Mozasu, Mozasu's son Solomon, and the entire family's negotiation with the Zainichi Korean identity that Japan refuses them throughout the twentieth century.
Lee's prose is patient and precise in the literary-realist tradition that Korean-American fiction has inherited from contemporary American literary realism (Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-Rae Lee). The pachinko-parlor sections in the second half (Mozasu builds his fortune running pachinko parlors, the only economic ladder available to a Zainichi Korean in postwar Japan) are some of the strongest prose about a specific working life in contemporary American literary fiction. The novel's central historical claim (that the four generations of one family living through the Japanese colonization of Korea, World War II, the U. S. occupation, and the postwar Japanese economic boom can be read as a single coherent argument about belonging and identity) earns itself across the 496 pages.
Recommended as required contemporary literary fiction reading, as the right Lee entry point, and for fans of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Yu Miri's Tokyo Ueno Station, and Yoko Ogawa's The Memory Police. The 2022 Apple TV+ adaptation is one of the strongest contemporary literary-fiction screen productions and rewards reading the book first. The Allison Hiroto audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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