Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist) Hardcover – February 7, 2017

Read this novel during recent 2 week visit to Korea, upon suggestion of a friend.It greatly added to my interest and curiosity about Korean history and provided a constant depth of connection through delicate and intimate storytelling. I really hated this book to end. The characters and events enter your psyche and linger for a long time.

This was a excellent book. A real page turner. The origin of the story centered around the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. This book tells the story of how ordinary Korean people survived during this period and longer. The book follows a poor family during the occupation, WWII, the Cold War, and the Korean War. It touches on some of the religions followed by the Korean people in Korea and in Japan.It is easy to get caught up in the characters. There was a lot of fluff in the book. The author expanded on characters that would have not been of interest to any reader and certainly not to me.Pachinko is about a family saga set in Korea and Japan from 1910 to 1980. Sunja, daughter of Hoonie and Yangjin, is a teenaged girl living with her mother, who runs a boarding house in a fishing village in Gohyang, Korea. Hoonie is the crippled son of a poor fisherman, and Yangjin is the daughter of a poor farmer, so they are used to struggling to survive. When Sonja’s loving father, Hoonie, dies of tuberculosis when she was 13 years old, she and her mother continue to work hard to keep the boarding house above water.Sunja has worked hard all of her life. She is now in charge of shopping for the boardinghouse after her father dies. It’s what her mother does, too. Koh Hansu, a wealthy man who has a wife and 3 children in Osaka, notices 16 year-old Sunja on her shopping errands. He is attracted to her and follows her to see where she goes. One day, he sees that three Japanese boys are mocking her for being Korean. The boys surround Sunja and then start to assault her. Koh Hansu saves her from the boys and gains Sunja’s trust. Koh Hansu continues to pursue her. She does not know that he is already married and falls hard for him. He professes to love her and gives her a gold pocket watch. She wants to be his wife, and expects him to propose marriage. When she gets pregnant and he then tells her that he is already married, he offers to provide for her, but she rejects his offer as dishonorable. Koh Hansu, I believe, really loved Sunja. He says he’ll support her, but she wants nothing more to do with him.For weeks, Sonja and her mother have taken care of a kind Japanese boarder and pastor, Baek Isak, who has been ill with tuberculosis. To save Sunja’s reputation and give her child a good name, he offers to marry Sunja and take her to Osaka where his family lives. Sunja and Baek Isak move in with his brother Yoseb and his wife Kyunghee. Yoseb has contempt for the pregnant Sunja, but having no children of her own, Kyunghee welcomes Sunja and is excited about the baby. Kyunghee was so lovely and she loved Sunja. Her husband Yoseb was difficult. Baek Isak and Sonja also have a son together by the name of Noa.After Baek Isak dies, Sunja gets a job in a restaurant, since she now has no other income. Kim, the man whom she considered her boss, is really employed by Koh Hansu (Noa’s father), who owns the restaurant and got her the job.In 1940, Japan invades China and then soon joins the Axis powers with Germany and Italy. Food becomes scarce in Osaka. The restaurant closes because there is very little food to buy at the market. I believe that Koh Hansu was a decent person who learned how to survive and became rich with the help of his Japanese father-in-law. He did what he had to do to survive in my opinion. He could have been a bit nicer and moral, but that was not who he was.On the last night at the restaurant, Koh Hansu appears and urges Sonja and her friend Kyunghee to leave Osaka and go to a safe place he knows, the Tamaguci farm in the country. He tells them that the Americans are going to bomb Osaka. Kyunghee cannot convince her husband Yoseb to go since he has been offered a job as a foreman in a steel factory in Nagasaki. The women take Sonja’s two boys with them and reach safety. The Americans bomb Nagasaki. Yoseb survives the bombing but never recovers his health. Surprisingly, I think the household wanted him to die sooner.Sunja and Hansu’s son, Noa was a studious child who was so much like his stepfather, Isak, who Noa believed to be his real father. Mozasu, Isak’s biological son, struggles with the stigma of, being half Korean and is not very studious, had a harder time in school. Noa did so well in school, his father Koh Hansu wanted to pay for his education at an elite school in Tokyo. Noa, thought Hansu was just his benefactor at the time.In Japan, Pachinko parlors were often associated with Koreans. In the book, Sonja and Baek Isak’s son, Mozasu, worked in a pachinko parlor for Goro-san as a guard and then became the general manager of Paradaisu Seven. He ended up a multi-millionaire and owner of multiple pachinko parlors. I had never heard of pachinko, and after reading the book, still could not figure out what the fascination was.In the 1950s, Mosazu, Sonja and Baek Isak’s son, is hired as a guard at a pachinko parlor. Mosazu works hard in order to pay Yoseb’s medical bills, food, and rent. He also wants to help his half-brother, Noa, go to Waseda University to major in English literature. Without asking permission, Koh Hansu steps in and pays Noa’s tuition, room and board. Noa is doing well, but when his girlfriend, Aikido comes uninvited to lunch with his father and tells Noa that his father is a mobster, he confronts his mother, drops out of school and disappears.After World War II, Korea is split up by the Americans, Russians and Chinese. Even the Japanese take over some areas. The Koreans still suffer from the foreign powers’ takeover of their country.As Koreans in Japan, they are considered visitors even when they were born there. There were jobs they could never have; it was illegal to rent to them. The Koreans lived in ghettos that did not have the same services as Japanese neighborhoods. The Koreans were looked down upon in the Japanese public schools and most jobs were not available to them regardless of their training or education. Koreans were considered dirty and undesirable to Japanese citizens.When a Korean boy turned fourteen, he had to register, be fingerprinted and interviewed, and he had to ask for permission to remain in Japan, even though he was born there and has never been to Korea. This process will be repeated every three years. And this was in the 1970s, not the 1870s. Getting Japanese citizenship was extremely difficult. But Sunja’s family does get ahead, attaining a comfortable living. There were a quite a few sexual interactions in the book by unmarried couples that were surprising. The book even explored a homosexual who was friends with Mosazu. I could not figure out whether or not Mosazu knew that he was a homosexual. I know that Koh Hansu knew. Hansu could deploy private detectives everywhere with his money.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a family saga about a four generations of a Korean family that is set in Korea and Japan. It’s a National Book Award finalist, and, in what may be an even greater honor than that, it made my Favorite Books list.I have found that it is easier to explain why I don’t like a particular book or to point out a book’s flaws than it is to explain why I absolutely loved one. It’s like explaining why a rainbow is beautiful. I can talk about how the colors are pretty or how it made me feel, but there is something about rainbows, sunsets, and the best works of art that transcends easy explanation. You just have to experience them. Read Pachinko.The format of the book is straightforward. It proceeds chronologically from about 1900-ish to 1989 and follows various characters that belong to one family. It never sprawls out of control – there aren’t 37 second-cousins that you will have to keep track of – and there aren’t flash-backs and flash-forwards that could potentially cause confusion. There are occasional Japanese or Korean words sprinkled around, but their meaning is apparent from the context. I don’t speak a lick of those languages, and I followed everything without ever having to consult a dictionary. The prose is simple and straightforward, generally consisting of short, direct sentences. There’s not a lot of fluff. Therefore, the book reads quickly, despite being an almost 500 page family saga about sexism, fate, hard work, destiny, chance, war, poverty, racism, familial obligations, identity, immigration, citizenship, language, education, opportunity, community, and faith.The main characters are diverse, interesting, flawed, and generally fundamentally good people. The characters are not very Dynamic (at least in an obvious way), but they weren’t really intended to be. This isn’t a story populated with characters that have grand, clear character arcs. This made them feel more realistic to me. How many people do you know that are on a Hero’s Journey? Most people I know just try to keep their heads down, work to put food on the table, and hope for good opportunities for their children.I’ve said before that I am a fan of history, and I was generally ignorant of Korean culture in Japan. Pachinko is not some dry history lesson, though. It’s as entertaining as a soap opera.You should read it.