Review by New York Times Review
MIN JIN LEE'S stunning novel "Pachinko" - her second, after "Free Food for Millionaires" (2007) - announces its ambitions right from the opening sentence: "History has failed us, but no matter." "Pachinko" chronicles four generations of an ethnic Korean family, first in Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 20 th century, then in Japan itself from the years before World War II to the late 1980s. The novel opens with an arranged marriage in Yeongdo, a fishing village at the southern tip of Korea. That union produces a daughter, Sunja, who falls in love at 16 with a prominent (and married) mobster. After Sunja becomes pregnant, a local pastor offers her a chance to escape by marrying him and immigrating together to his brother's house in an ethnic Korean neighborhood in Osaka. Together, they embark into the fraught unknown. Pachinko, the slot-machine-like game ubiquitous throughout Japan, unifies the central concerns of identity, homeland and belonging. For the ethnic Korean population in Japan, discriminated against and shut out of traditional occupations, pachinko parlors are the primary mode of finding work and accumulating wealth. Called Zainichi, or foreign residents, ethnic Koreans are required to reapply for alien registration cards every three years even if they were born in Japan, and are rarely granted passports, making overseas travel nearly impossible. From a young age, Sunja's oldest son sees being Korean as "a dark, heavy rock"; his greatest, secret desire is to be Japanese. His younger brother, Mozasu, even after he accumulates great wealth through his pachinko parlors, confides to his closest Japanese friend: "In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastards, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make or how nice I am." Mozasu's son, Solomon, learns this too quickly after graduating from an American university. He returns to Tokyo on an expat package with the Japanese branch of a British investment bank, then is fired once his ethnic Korean connections are no longer needed for a business deal. Still, Solomon is of a new, less wounded generation. He believes there are still good Japanese people and sees himself as Japanese, too, "even if the Japanese didn't think so." Like most memorable novels, however, "Pachinko" resists summary. In this sprawling book, history itself is a character. "Pachinko" is about outsiders, minorities and the politically disenfranchised. But it is so much more besides. Each time the novel seems to find its locus - Japan's colonization of Korea, World War II as experienced in East Asia, Christianity, family, love, the changing role of women - it becomes something else. It becomes even more than it was. Despite the compelling sweep of time and history, it is the characters and their tumultuous lives that propel the narrative. Small details subtly reveal the characters' secret selves and build to powerful moments. After Sunja arrives in Osaka, her modest life is underscored when she enters what is only the second restaurant of her life. When her husband, Isak, is finally cleared of trumped-up charges and released from jail looking "both new and ancient," their oldest son is "unable to take his eyes off his father for fear he'd disappear." Their reunion is moving yet understated: Isak simply holds his son's hand and says: "My dear boy. My blessing." Dozens more characters amplify the vortex of points of views: a hostess bar girl, a farmer who has "no wish for the war to end just yet" so that he can benefit from the higher black-market prices to realize "his grandfather's dearest wish" of buying the adjoining land. The numerous shifts are occasionally jolting, but what is gained is a compassionate, clear gaze at the chaotic landscape of life itself. In this haunting epic tale, no one story seems too minor to be briefly illuminated. Lee suggests that behind the facades of wildly different people lie countless private desires, hopes and miseries, if we have the patience and compassion to look and listen. KRYS LEE is the author of the novels "Drifting House" and "How I Became a North Korean."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A decade after her international best-selling debut, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Lee's follow-up is an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared name because, as the opening line attests: History has failed us. In 1910, Japan annexes Korea, usurping the country and controlling identity. Amid the tragedies that follow, a fisherman and his wife survive through sheer tenacity. Their beloved daughter, married to a gentle minister while pregnant with another man's child, initiates the migration to Japan to join her husband's older brother and wife. Their extended family will always live as second-class immigrants; no level of achievement, integrity, or grit can change their status as reviled foreigners. Two Japanese-born sons choose diverging paths; one grandson hazards a further immigration to the other side of the world. Although the characters are oppressed by the age-old belief sho ga nai (it can't be helped), moments of shimmering beauty and some glory, too, illuminate the narrative. Incisively titled (pachinko resemble slot machines with pinball characteristics), Lee's profound novel of losses and gains explored through the social and cultural implications of pachinko-parlor owners and users is shaped by impeccable research, meticulous plotting, and empathic perception.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Lee's (Free Food for Millionaires) latest novel is a sprawling and immersive historical work that tells the tale of one Korean family's search for belonging, exploring questions of history, legacy, and identity across four generations. In the Japanese-occupied Korea of the 1910s, young Sunja accidentally becomes pregnant, and a kind, tubercular pastor offers to marry her and act as the child's father. Together, they move away from Busan and begin a new life in Japan. In Japan, Sunja and her Korean family suffer from seemingly endless discrimination, and yet they are also met with moments of great love and renewal. As Sunja's children come of age, the novel reveals the complexities of family national history. What does it mean to live in someone else's motherland? When is history a burden, and when does history lift a person up? This is a character-driven tale, but Lee also offers detailed histories that ground the story. Though the novel is long, the story itself is spare, at times brutally so. Sunja's isolation and dislocation become palpable in Lee's hands. Reckoning with one determined, wounded family's place in history, Lee's novel is an exquisite meditation on the generational nature of truly forging a home. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In early 1900s Korea, Sunja is the only surviving child of humble fisherman Hoonie and wife Yangjin. After her father's death, 13-year-old Sunja works at a boardinghouse with her mother, only to surprise the family with a pregnancy by an older married man. When another guest, a Christian minister, offers to marry her and take her to Japan, Sunja starts a new life. What follows is a gripping multigenerational story with plenty of surprising turns that culminate in 1989. VERDICT Lee's skillful development of her characters and story lines will draw readers into a delicate and accurate portrait of Korean life in Japan in the mid-to-late 20th century. (LJ 10/15/16) © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An absorbing saga of 20th-century Korean experience, seen through the fate of four generations.Lee (Free Food for Millionaires, 2007) built her debut novel around families of Korean-Americans living in New York. In her second novel, she traces the Korean diaspora back to the time of Japans annexation of Korea in 1910. History has failed us, she writes in the opening line of the current epic, but no matter. She begins her tale in a village in Busan with an aging fisherman and his wife whose son is born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot. Nonetheless, he is matched with a fine wife, and the two of them run the boardinghouse he inherits from his parents. After many losses, the couple cherishes their smart, hardworking daughter, Sunja. When Sunja gets pregnant after a dalliance with a persistent, wealthy married man, one of their boardersa sickly but handsome and deeply kind pastoroffers to marry her and take her away with him to Japan. There, she meets his brother and sister-in-law, a woman lovely in face and spirit, full of entrepreneurial ambition that she and Sunja will realize together as they support the family with kimchi and candy operations through war and hard times. Sunjas first son becomes a brilliant scholar; her second ends up making a fortune running parlors for pachinko, a pinball-like game played for money. Meanwhile, her first sons real father, the married rich guy, is never far from the scene, a source of both invaluable help and heartbreaking woe. As the destinies of Sunjas children and grandchildren unfold, love, luck, and talent combine with cruelty and random misfortune in a deeply compelling story, with the troubles of ethnic Koreans living in Japan never far from view. An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
