"Pachinko: A Journey Into the Hidden World of Japanese Immigrants by Min Jin Lee"

Pauly C: An interesting read where you are never quite sure where you are going to end up. Set against an interesting time in history that I enjoyed learning about

Australia on Nov 04, 2023

Amanda Rodrigues: Uma história de amores, perdas, sofrimentos, mudanças. Muito bom acompanhar as gerações e evolução dos personagens. Vale muito a pena a experiência. Autora fantástica.

Brazil on Oct 25, 2023

ladybgood: Will not review by summarising (re-writing!) the entire novel.

Loved Loved this book. Even though there are several frustrating moments where some significant characters completely disappear by either dying (a favourite American novelist trope!) or just vanishing to goodness knows where.

To write over four generations with the second generation as the key witness reminds me of the Howard Spring Novels. I realised I had missed them.

The significance of the Korean migrants and the following generations who would never be accepted as Japanese was disturbing as the reader watched them try rise and still "fall" in the tight social Japanese structure that would not accept them while the fear of deportation still hung over the fourth generation despite being 2 born in Japan.

As a historian, finally decided to read up on the Korean War, particularly the Japanese colonial period and was amazed at how much I actually did not know.

Pachinko helps put the human side across, despite it being a novel, subsequently have learnt that many Korean descendants in Japan have similar stories of discrimination.

Like many others, found the ending rather abrupt....

United Kingdom on Jul 16, 2023

Rhodawriter59: I originally watched some episodes of the Pachinko dramatization on Apple TV. Because of the excellent acting and engaging script, I became quickly engrossed in the production. After learning the story would be released in 4 seasons, I was dismayed knowing I would be at the edge of my seat for the next four years yearning to know what happens to these characters. Wishing to spare myself this misery, I looked up the book, Pachinko, upon which the drama was based, bought my copy from Amazon Kindle and read it cover to cover in two days. Being a slow reader and being that Pachinko is not a light read, I got through that book very fast simply because almost from the first page, I could not put it down.

Generally, I’m not a fan of family sagas, but I have recently begun watching Korean dramas with subtitles. While enjoying the dramas, I have become interested in Korean history and culture, so reading this book, written by Korean American author, Min Jin Lee, was an opportunity to acquaint myself with Korean culture from the lens of someone raised in a Korean household, but who also has lived and been educated in the United States.

I was grateful that, unlike the movie,...

United States on Dec 12, 2022

Gloria Rudolph: 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...

United States on May 12, 2021

marina denai rey: After reading the final chapter, I cried. Then occurred to my mind the very first sentence of the story as above quoted. It says all.

The book depicts an on-going saga of Korean immigrant families having been obliged to live under subhuman condition for generations in modern Japan, another inconvenient subject which most Japanese people have chosen not to face up to. What adds more depths and textures to storyline is a variety of distinctive characters who pursue each different dream for a better future while facing own internal identity issue in unfriendly environments. The author effectively put contrasting pairs of brothers, sisters, and husbands to stress the difference in each struggle and disappointment, and thereby underscores both enormity and complexity of the hardships they must deal with.

I am also impressed by her compassionate eyes upon not only members of the main Korean family but the surrounding Japanese characters who must live with each social stigma due to deformity, mental disorder, divorce, suicide, certain types of disease, etc. among their family members. While describing predicaments of a diaspora Korean family, she successfully points out...

Japan on Sep 14, 2019

Ralph Blumenau: WARNING: I HAVE FOUND IT IMPOSSIBLE TO REVIEW THIS BOOK WITHOUT GIVING AWAY MUCH OF THE STORY, SO READERS WHO ARE WORRIED ABOUT SPOILERS SHOULD GIVE THIS REVIEW A MISS.

The author was born in Korea, but came to the United States with her family when she was seven and became an academic there; so this novel is not a translation. The early chapters read beautifully, though the style becomes much more prosaic and the story more diffuse as it proceeds.

The novel is a four-generations family saga beginning around 1910, when Japan annexed Korea, and 1989. There is a superb description of the poor Kim family living in the early 1930s on an island off Busan on the South coast of an as yet undivided Korea. They take incessant hard work in their stride and run a tiny and crowded lodging house: six fishermen live a box-and-cox life in one room; sixteen-year-old Sunja, her widowed mother Yanjin and two servant girls sleep together another room. The local community is a harmonious and friendly one, united in their dislike for the Japanese. It is, however, very conservative about relationships between men and women.

Now Hansu makes an appearance, first as a wealthy...

United Kingdom on Mar 19, 2017