In the book, the readers are informed that there are establishments that only have Pachinko devices for people to gamble away their money and the trade is looked down upon. The title ‘Pachinko’ is a Japanese word for a pinball like game played in the country, it’s like gambling in an arcade. The author employs her characters into describing political situations and scenarios, instead of writing mundane-long third person descriptions. The language is simple, engaging and peppered with a lot of Korean and Japanese phrases, which doesn’t disrupt the flow of story-telling at all. While the older one Noa is a scholar, the younger one hates studying and is constantly engaged in school-fights. Then it moves to a post-war era, focusing on the growth of her two sons, each very different from the other. It starts of with the life of her simple parents in Korea, then moves to a tumultuous World War II era, where things get harder for the family, with food always short and death around the corner. The book follows four generations of Sunja’s family. Sunja is given a shot at redemption when a Christian minister offers to marry her and give her a new life in Japan.Īuthor Min Jin Lee captures the difficult lives of Korean immigrants in a nation where they are treated like scum – forced to take jobs the Japanese don’t want & finding rentals only in ghettos that resemble pigsties.
Her dreams are shattered when she finds out he is married, a little detail he forgets to reveal until she is pregnant with his child. 16-year-old Sunja helps her mother run a boarding house and falls in love with a man she hopes to marry. Pachinko follows the story of a modest Korean family that lives in a fishing village by the sea. I didn’t want to start by giving a negative impression of the book, 75% is a LOT, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first 300 pages of this historical fiction that starts off in Korea in 1910 and then moves on to Japan in the 1930s. I could not stop turning the pages for the first 75 per cent, I read every word, excited to know how things would turn, and then came a point where I lost interest, when some paragraphs were skipped, when I didn’t mind putting the book down and sleeping away in peace. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee felt a little like that. While most readers like to refer to books as ‘friends’, some can feel like a new crush, somebody you are fascinated with, somebody you want to learn all about and don’t want to part with, until you’ve had too much and lose all interest. It’s hard to write down what you feel about some novels.
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