A good while ago, I stumbled upon the book Pachinko by Min Jin lee. I can’t remember where I first found out about this work of historical fiction, but I instantly knew I wanted to read this once upon a time. That time was now, over a month ago. Oops.

Title: Pachinko
Author: Min Jin Lee
Publish date: February 7, 2017
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Number of pages: 490
ISBN: 9781455563937
Genre: Historical fiction

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan.
So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.

This book tells the story of four generations within one Korean family. The timeline starts in 1932 and concludes in the 1980s. When Kim Sunja marries Baek Isaek, she leaves her little Korean hometown for Osaka, Japan. Korea has been occupied by the Japanese for years at that point. The Japanese don’t like Koreans and that shows. Koreans face lots of micro-agressions and racism against them. Sunja gets to deal with this as well. Her husband Isaek is in a better position because of his work as a priest, but in the end he and his family live in poverty. They manage eventually, but not without ups and downs. This occurs to the following generations as well. When the Second World War starts on that side of the world, Sunja’s mother also moves to Japan which makes the family complete again. Trough multiple points of view, readers get a good glimpse of the problems the family faces. As stated before, everyone gets their fair share of racism. It becomes this bad, that many Korean people decide to give up their Korean identity and heritage. Especially the younger generations choose to become Japanese and don’t want to be associated with their Korean identity.

This book contains lots of new information for me. I actually don’t know anything about the Korean occupation by Japan. We get lots of World War Two in our history classes at school, but the main focus is on Nazi Germany and the European occupation. Asia gets briefly mentioned, but as far as I remember not in depth. A novel like Pachinko is a good way of creating awareness of this part in history. Unfortunately not everything about this book is that good. For instance, I struggled a lot at the start. I wasn’t even sure whether I should just DNF or continue reading. This is all because of the writing style. However, after being able to do a reading sprint, I flew through the book and was able to finish it soon. The writing style is quite formal, but that’s part of the culture I guess? Also, changing the points of view could have been done better. Now, it felt kind of rushed for me, leaving me with questions and even confusion because of the huge time gaps. I had a feeling I had to guess what happened to certain characters in the meantime. This was not good for the pace eventually. Furthermore, the ending was a bit odd. It felt again rushed and not really part of the story if it makes sense. It felt a bit strange to me.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a book that creates awareness on a quite unknown part of history. I have a feeling not many people know that Korea has been occupied by Japan for centuries. At least, I didn’t so this book contains lots of new info to me. Meanwhile, the story was not that smooth. This mainly has to do with some aspects in writing. I even thougght about DNF’ing this book because it took me a very long time to get the hang of it. In the end, I’m happy I continued reading and finished it because once I finally was invested, I wanted to know how things would develop and end.