book review of pachinko

By Min Jin Lee

‘Pachinko’ by Min Jin Lee is a historical fiction that utilizes a unique plot narrative that resonates with all people in terms of family bond, struggle for survival, and the will to reclaim one’s identity in a strange world.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

Epic and compelling, ‘ Pachinko ’ by Min Jin Lee takes the reader by hand for a mixed ride filled with joy and family bond, pains and sorrow, denial and discrimination accustomed to being in a land far away from, and outside, one’s area of protection.

A Sweeping Tale of Four Generations of a Korean Family

Min Jin Lee’s masterpiece ‘ Pachinko’ follows the story of a poor Korean family down to its fourth generation in what is a mixed ride of love, loss, and struggle to find oneself in a stranger’s land.

Sunja becomes the all-important central character connecting all four generations of a Korean family. She is the beautiful daughter of Hoonie, a man born disabled, who, unlike her three senior siblings, survives and grows into a strong woman and later the matriarch of the Baek family.

She has a tough start to life as Hoonie her father passes away when she turns 13, and by 17 mistakenly becomes pregnant for Koh Hansu, the handsome and rich fish dealer who’s also a dangerous gang member of the ‘Yakuza’. Hansu rejects to marry her making her life a disgrace and a living hell.

Sunja rises through the disappointment to raise her children Noa and Mozasu until they become responsible people in a (foreign) Japanese society that treats non-natives with biases and discrimination. Min Jin Lee uses her experience as an immigrant to tell such a relatable and emotional story in ‘ Pachinko.’

A portrayal of True Family Values, Love, and Survival

For the most part, Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’ is a novel that beautifully exhibits a tremendous amount of true family love, loss, and the gumption for survival that it portrays in a four generational tale of a Korean family.

The reader sees These epic combinations come to play from the start of ‘ Pachinko ’ with Hoonie’s aging parents who are forced to shower their only son, Hoonie – born with disabilities, with love and affection, survival values, and ethics – just the right quantities that he needs to take care of himself is a cruel world for when they are no longer there to protect and provide for him.

Hoonie, despite his disabilities (as he was born with two disorders in cleft palate and clubbed foot), does well to transfer these survivalist values, love, and affection to his miracle child, Sunja – who also transmits the same to her children and grandchildren.

An Emotionally Aggravating Loss to Generational Characters

When it comes to deaths and losses one finds the reader’s emotion is being aggravated on several accounts – thanks to the many instances of emotional deaths of characters each page is made to grapple with.

From Hoonie’s two brothers dying from illness to his aging parents passing away three years after he marries Hoonie himself. Sunja’s three senior siblings down to Baek Isak, Hana, and Yumi die a poetic death so that her son lives, and then there is Noa’s painfully unexpected suicide hitting us just right when he was larger than life and had more reasons to live for.

An Insight Into The History of ‘ Zainichi ’ Koreans

At best, ‘ Pachinko ’ is one of the few books that give the readership a short, yet complete insight into the history of the start of the ‘ Zainichi ’ race that still exists today in Japan.

‘ Zainichi ’, as a Japanese word, roughly translates to mean a new foreigner, and is designated by Japan to non-citizens to remind them that they will never become one of them. They are then met with systemic discrimination, ostracization, and dehumanization.

The reader learns from the book ‘ Pachinko ’ that the history of ‘ Zainichi ’ is traced back to around 1910 when Korea was annexed by Japan.

How much of a good read is Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’?

Min Jin Lee’s ‘ Pachinko ’ is without a doubt a good read and this has been proven by the number of high-profile reviews it’s gotten from top publications and personalities, such as Barack Obama.

How successful was ‘ Pachinko ’ post-publication?

Upon its release, ‘ Pachinko ’ immediately caught the eyes of the literary committee because of its historically insightful storytelling of Asian ethnicity. The book also was runner-up for the 2017’s National Book Award.

Is ‘ Pachinko ’ based on a true historical account?

Min Jin Lee included research for the final draft of ‘ Pachinko ’ by interviewing real-life Koreans who lived in Japan to get their experience and thoughts, however, this doesn’t make the book a true-life account and so is still considered a fiction.

Pachinko Review

Book Title: Pachinko

Book Description: Min Jin Lee's 'Pachinko' is an epic tale of a Korean family's endurance through colonialism, earthquakes, and WWII.

Book Author: Min Jin Lee

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Grand Central Publishing

Date published: February 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Number Of Pages: 504

'Pachinko' Review: A Multigenerational Epic on the Racial Feud between Korea and Japan.

‘ Pachinko ‘ by Min Jin Lee is a sweeping four-generational epic based on the survival struggles of a poor Korean family in the midst of social and economic hardship brought upon by colonialism, earthquake, and World War II. The thrills of the story are neverending as it is a joy to the reader. It’s revealing and proves itself an abridged version of an interesting, yet untold history shared by Korea and Japan. With ‘ Pachinko ‘, there are so many life lessons to learn, and some of them are about value for family, others are on survival strategies and approaches to fitting into a strange, far away land outside of the home. The reader doesn’t have to understand the Korean language or be Asian to harvest from the wealth of interesting historical information portrayed in the book by Min Jin Lee.

• An abridged history of the racial feud between Korea and Japan 
• Teaches vital life lessons on survival strategies and family values 
• Easily readable, as stories flow into each other with seamless transitions
• Story is slightly one-sided, leaving out the Japanese accounts
• Too many less significant characters 
• Enormous inclusion of ethnic prejudices and ostracization

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About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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Pachinko review: a masterpiece of empathy, integrity and family loyalty

Min jin lee tells an endearing tale of hardship and inhumanity suffered by koreans.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Yaa Gyasi's debut novel Homegoing in these pages and praised the author's use of time and generational discord to tell a story that combined politics, history and gender with page-turning appeal. The same compliment could be offered to Min Jin Lee, whose novel Pachinko was one of the most popular choices among writers offering their summer reading selections to The Irish Times .

Pachinko tells the story of Korean immigrants living in Japan between 1910 and today, a family saga that explores the effects of poverty, abuse, war, suicide, and the accumulation of wealth on multiple generations. When the novel opens, we are introduced to Hoonie, “born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot”, who enters into an arranged marriage with Yangjin and despite their age difference – he is 28, she is 15 – a mutual respect and affection builds between them, not least because of their shared love for daughter Sunja.

It is Sunja who will prove the most important character in the novel. As a teenager, she is seduced by a yakuza, Koh Hansu, leaving her pregnant and unmarried, but when a sympathetic young missionary asks for her hand, it seems her disgrace will be avoided.

One of the most endearing elements of Pachinko is how honourable most of the characters are. Husbands love their wives, children respect their parents. Even Koh Hansu, who has played fast and loose with the affections of a young girl, spends decades trying to help Sunja, and although she is dismissive of him in later life, their relationship remains one of the most intriguing in the book.

Impoverished circumstances

But for all the love scattered across the pages, there is hatred too. The monstrous degrees of hardship, disrespect and inhumanity suffered by the Koreans makes for painful reading. They live in impoverished circumstances, are paid less than their Japanese counterparts, are spoken to as if they were dogs and, in one powerful scene, are forced to register time and again as strangers in a land in which many of them have in fact been born. Lee writes of this maltreatment with a stoicism that reflects the fortitude of her characters. Surviving is what matters to them, not human rights.

As the generations continue, we are introduced to Sunja’s sons, Noa, studious and intellectual, and Mozasu, passionate but disinterested in education. The choices both boys make in their lives stand in stark contrast to each other but they pursue their goals with equal conviction, albeit with markedly different results. No spoilers, but suffice to say that as the boys’ lives diverge they arrive at opposing fates. Ultimately, the importance of family honour proves so strong that revelations from the past lead to the most heart-breaking tragedy.

Pachinko itself is a Japanese version of pinball and while pachinko parlours become the family business later in the novel, it also stands as a metaphor for the lives they lead. In a game of pinball, the initial strike of the ball against the flipper determines how the game will play out. For Sunja and her descendants, it is what happens at birth that determines their fate. Over the years they may bounce off the sides of the machine, ricocheting against the bumpers, kickers and slingshots, but there is a sense that fate has decided how their lives will develop from the moment the plunger hits the ball.

Generational sweep

While Pachinko is only Min Jin Lee's second novel – her first, Free Food for Millionaires , will be reissued later this summer – it is the work of a writer in complete control of her characters and her story and with an intense awareness of the importance of her heritage. In its generational sweep, it recalls John Galsworthy's The Forsyth Saga , replicating some of that classic novel's focus on status, money, infidelity and cruelty as it explores the effect of parental decisions on children, and the children of children. As Faulkner put it, "the past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

This is a long book but is told with such flair and linguistic dexterity that I found myself unable to put it down. Every year, there are a few standout novels that survive long past the hype has died down and the hyperbolic compliments from friends scattered across the dust jacket have been forgotten. Pachinko , a masterpiece of empathy, integrity and familial loyalty, will be one of those novels.

John Boyne's latest novel is The Heart's Invisible Furies (Doubleday)

John Boyne, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a novelist and critic

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

National Book Award Finalist

by Min Jin Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2017

An old-fashioned epic whose simple, captivating storytelling delivers both wisdom and truth.

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 Japan’s 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 boarders—a sickly but handsome and deeply kind pastor—offers 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. Sunja’s 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 son’s 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 Sunja’s 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.

Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-4555-6393-7

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016

LITERARY FICTION

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NEVER LET ME GO

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2005

A masterpiece of craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish Academy.

An ambitious scientific experiment wreaks horrendous toll in the Booker-winning British author’s disturbingly eloquent sixth novel (after When We Were Orphans , 2000).

Ishiguro’s narrator, identified only as Kath(y) H., speaks to us as a 31-year-old social worker of sorts, who’s completing her tenure as a “carer,” prior to becoming herself one of the “donors” whom she visits at various “recovery centers.” The setting is “England, late 1990s”—more than two decades after Kath was raised at a rural private school (Hailsham) whose students, all children of unspecified parentage, were sheltered, encouraged to develop their intellectual and especially artistic capabilities, and groomed to become donors. Visions of Brave New World and 1984 arise as Kath recalls in gradually and increasingly harrowing detail her friendships with fellow students Ruth and Tommy (the latter a sweet, though distractible boy prone to irrational temper tantrums), their “graduation” from Hailsham and years of comparative independence at a remote halfway house (the Cottages), the painful outcome of Ruth’s breakup with Tommy (whom Kath also loves), and the discovery the adult Kath and Tommy make when (while seeking a “deferral” from carer or donor status) they seek out Hailsham’s chastened “guardians” and receive confirmation of the limits long since placed on them. With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly destroy very real, very human lives—without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have “tried to convince themselves. . . . That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter.” That this stunningly brilliant fiction echoes Caryl Churchill’s superb play A Number and Margaret Atwood’s celebrated dystopian novels in no way diminishes its originality and power.

Pub Date: April 11, 2005

ISBN: 1-4000-4339-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005

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by Kazuo Ishiguro ; illustrated by Bianca Bagnarelli

by Kazuo Ishiguro

ABSOLUTE POWER

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 1996

The mother of all presidential cover-ups is the centerpiece gimmick in this far-fetched thriller from first-novelist Baldacci, a Washington-based attorney. In the dead of night, while burgling an exurban Virginia mansion, career criminal Luther Whitney is forced to conceal himself in a walk-in closet when Christine Sullivan, the lady of the house, arrives in the bedroom he's ransacking with none other than Alan Richmond, President of the US. Through the one-way mirror, Luther watches the drunken couple engage in a bout of rough sex that gets out of hand, ending only when two Secret Service men respond to the Chief Executive's cries of distress and gun down the letter-opener-wielding Christy. Gloria Russell, Richmond's vaultingly ambitious chief of staff, orders the scene rigged to look like a break-in and departs with the still befuddled President, leaving Christy's corpse to be discovered at another time. Luther makes tracks as well, though not before being spotted on the run by agents from the bodyguard detail. Aware that he's shortened his life expectancy, Luther retains trusted friend Jack Graham, a former public defender, but doesn't tell him the whole story. When Luther's slain before he can be arraigned for Christy's murder, Jack concludes he's the designated fall guy in a major scandal. Meanwhile, little Gloria (together with two Secret Service shooters) hopes to erase all tracks that might lead to the White House. But the late Luther seems to have outsmarted her in advance with recurrent demands for hush money. The body count rises as Gloria's attack dogs and Jack search for the evidence cunning Luther's left to incriminate not only a venal Alan Richmond but his homicidal deputies. The not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax provides an unsurprising answer to the question of whether a US president can get away with murder. For all its arresting premise, an overblown and tedious tale of capital sins. (Film rights to Castle Rock; Book-of-the-Month selection)

Pub Date: Jan. 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-446-51996-0

Page Count: 480

Publisher: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995

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There are some books you walk away from feeling like a fuller version of yourself. There are certain rare reads that don’t feel finished after the final page, that you can quietly recognize will resonate within you always. Min Jin Lee’s PACHINKO is, undoubtedly and triumphantly, one of these books.

Resonant with the techniques of many great American novels and Yaa Gyasi’s phenomenal HOMEGOING, PACHINKO spans the generations of one Korean family from the early 1900s through nearly present day. It begins with a poor yet proud couple in a boarding house. Their beloved daughter, Sunja, finds herself mesmerized by a wealthy lover. When he betrays her, a young yet sickly minister offers to take her to Japan to begin a new life. As the war sets in and the danger deepens, Sunja and her family find themselves confronting poverty and prejudice, exiled from their homeland. The generations that follow struggle to make their way, through high-flying careers, heartbreaking losses, and the luck and allure of pachinko parlors.

"Whether you are familiar with Korean sociocultural mores or you’ve never so much as had kimchee, PACHINKO is an absolute must-read for any lover of astonishingly beautiful, necessary literature."

Lee explores the devastation of the World Wars on an intimate level through the too-often unheard perspective of small town Korean families. She delves into the racist divide between Japanese colonizers and Korean natives, and the intricacies of identity, family and belonging. She navigates Korean sex and gender roles, mental health, queerness, loss, longing and duty with a balanced hand. As the narrative moves through the gnarled family tree, each and every character reveals their desires and dreams, their weaknesses and their magnificent capacity for love and honor. My heart ached for them all. Each is deeply felt, and each has an essential tale feeding the immensely poignant saga of this family. Despite the broad scope of this project, not a single character lacks in depth or purpose to the plot. They grow within these pages, and following their journeys is a powerful experience.

The voices within PACHINKO evolve along with the family and the era, and Lee’s writing is consistently exceptional. She captures sentiment through language, and weaves in Korean and Japanese phrases and honorifics. The words breathe off the page in easy rhythms and draw you in. This reader happened to understand most terms without looking them up, but it’s easy enough to fill in the blanks if you’re unfamiliar. Overall, they serve to strengthen the world-building, and to further dedicate this book to the people and landscape to whom it belongs.

In her acknowledgements, Lee reveals that she first had the idea for this story in 1989, but held onto it and rediscovered it upon her husband’s work transferral to Tokyo in 2007, when her encounters with Korean Japanese people inspired her to delve into the work once again. We readers are lucky that she held on and held out, because the book is perfectly whole in this edition --- and because now is a crucial moment to highlight the intricacy and complexity of non-Western identity and displacement.

Lee delivers an authentic evocation of Korean culture through the bloodline of one family, from the traditions that helped shape modern Korean identity to the mixed marriages of the modern day. Whether you are familiar with Korean sociocultural mores or you’ve never so much as had kimchee, PACHINKO is an absolute must-read for any lover of astonishingly beautiful, necessary literature.

Reviewed by Maya Gittelman on February 9, 2017

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

• Publication Date: November 14, 2017
• Genres: Fiction , Historical Fiction
• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• ISBN-10: 1455563927
• ISBN-13: 9781455563920

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Reviews of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

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Book Summary

A new tour de force from the bestselling author of Free Food for Millionaires , for readers of The Kite Runner and Cutting for Stone .

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.

Yeongdo, Busan, Korea History has failed us, but no matter. At the turn of the century, an aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra money. Both were born and raised in the fishing village of Yeongdo—a five-mile-wide islet beside the port city of Busan. In their long marriage, the wife gave birth to three sons, but only Hoonie, the eldest and the weakest one, survived. Hoonie was born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot; he was, however, endowed with hefty shoulders, a squat build, and a golden complexion. Even as a young man, he retained the mild, thoughtful temperament he'd had as a child. When Hoonie covered his misshapen mouth with his hands, something he did out of habit meeting strangers, he resembled his nice-looking father, both having the same large, smiling eyes. Inky eyebrows graced his broad forehead, perpetually tanned from outdoor work. Like his parents, Hoonie was not a nimble talker, and some made the mistake of ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• " History has failed us, but no matter ." How does the opening line reflect the rest of the book—and do you agree?
• In a way, Sunja's relationship with Isak progresses in reverse, as her pregnancy by another man brings them together and prompts Isak to propose marriage. How does Lee redefine intimacy and love with these two characters?
• "Their eldest brother, Samoel, had been the brave one, the one who would've confronted the officers with audacity and grace, but Yoseb knew he was no hero.…Yoseb didn't see the point of anyone dying for his country or for some greater ideal. He understood survival and family." What kinds of bravery are shown by different characters, and what motivates this bravery?
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Although some of the central events of the novel, like World War II and the atomic bomb drop at Nagasaki, are familiar territory for fiction, Lee prioritizes out-of-the-ordinary perspectives: her Korean characters are first the colonized, and then the outsiders trying to thrive in a foreign country despite segregation and persecution. I recommend Pachinko to readers of family sagas and anyone who wants to learn more about the Korean experience... continued

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(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster ).

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Beyond the Book

"If you are a rich Korean, there's a pachinko parlor in your background somewhere," Min Jin Lee writes in her novel Pachinko . Several of her Korean characters end up working in pachinko parlors, despite their differing levels of education and their previous experience. Pachinko is essentially an upright pinball machine. Gamblers pay to borrow a set of small steel balls that are loaded into the contraption. Pressing a spring-loaded handle launches them onto a metal track lined with brass pins and several cups. The aim is to bounce the balls off the pins and get them to land in the cups before they fall down the hole at the bottom. A ball landing in a cup triggers a payout, in the form of extra balls dropping into the tray at the ...

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Deeply felt and unpredictable, 'Pachinko' follows the epic rise of a Korean family

John Powers

Oscar-winning actress Youn Yuh-jung plays the older Sunja is the Apple TV+ series Pachinko . Apple TV+ hide caption

Oscar-winning actress Youn Yuh-jung plays the older Sunja is the Apple TV+ series Pachinko .

Early in the Apple TV+ series Pachinko , an arrogant whiz kid named Solomon — who is of Korean ancestry, but was born in Japan — is trying to secure a huge real estate deal by getting an old Korean woman to sell her house in Tokyo. After regaling him with memories of her painful life, the woman suddenly says, "Tell me honestly. When old people talk of suffering, isn't it tiresome?" Solomon replies, "Isn't that the point? To burden us."

Book Reviews

Culture clash, survival and hope in 'pachinko'.

He's wrong, but not completely. You'll see why when you watch this adaptation of Min Jin Lee's bestselling novel , a deeply felt crowd-pleaser by a Korean American team — showrunner and writer Soo Hugh, and directors Kogonada and Justin Chon. Chronicling a Korean family's difficult rise over 70 years, Pachinko offers a cornucopian narrative that's at once a multi-generational epic, an immigrant saga, a history lesson, a portrait of cultural bigotry, a high-class soap opera and a celebration of women's capacity to survive even the darkest circumstances. Awash in big emotions, this is not a series shy about trying to make you cry.

Fiddling with the novel's time-frame, Pachinko interlaces two time periods. The first starts during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 20th century with the birth of Sunja, a poor girl who is obviously special. When she reaches her teenage years — where she's played by the amazing newcomer Kim Min-ha — Sunja wins the love of two very different men: a handsome gangster (played by Korean heartthrob Lee Min-ho) and a saintly Protestant minister (Steve Sanghyun Noh), who marries her, then moves them to Japan, where they live in Osaka's wretched Korean ghetto.

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'i feel like i'm an olympian': youn yuh-jung on her historic oscar nomination.

The second strand takes place in 1989 Japan, where Sunja is now a grandmother brilliantly played by Youn Yuh-jung , who won the Oscar last year for Minari . The action centers on her smug, yet anxious grandson, Solomon (played terrifically by Jin Ha), who works at a New York bank and has returned to Japan to close the business deal I mentioned earlier.

Solomon thinks such a financial coup will let him escape the stigma that comes from being both Korean and the son of a low-class man who owns a parlor where people play pachinko, the pinball-like gambling game whose unpredictability becomes the story's central metaphor. Unlike his grandmother, who mourns her lost home in Korea, Solomon yearns to shed the skin of his heritage and become a modern cosmopolitan defined purely by his personal talents.

Time doesn't allow me to do justice to Pachinko 's Dickensian profusion of vivid characters, who are beautifully acted to a one and who variously speak in Korean, Japanese or English (complete with color-coded subtitles). Nor can I begin to tell you just how much stuff happens over the eight episodes. You get death, murder, suicide, love affairs, arrests, diseases, broken homes, broken hearts, fires, earthquakes, a few preposterous coincidences and many intimate moments of great delicacy.

Through all these changes there are a few constants, including the hardship, loss and misery that was Korea's lot after the nation's 1910 annexation by Japan, which proceeded to exploit its resources and workers. Such material exploitation is made all the worse by the vicious anti-Korean bigotry of the Japanese, who called the Korean people "cockroaches." When Solomon steps into Japanese boardrooms in 1989, he's still treated as a man with inferior blood who can't really be trusted.

The other constant is the Korean indomitability embodied in Sunja who, thanks in no small part to Kim and Youn's memorable performances, is both the show's spine and its beating heart. Sunja takes all manner of buffeting, yet refuses to knuckle under — either to circumstances or the Japanese. Even as she thinks longingly of her homeland or the distinctive taste of Korean rice, she finds herself wondering, What good does it do to cling to the past?

Pop Culture Happy Hour

At the oscars, 'parasite' makes best picture history.

In their different ways, Sunja and Solomon both dream of Koreans finally winning their proper respect. And this series reminds us that they've done just that — in pop culture terms, anyway. Just think. Parasite was the first foreign language film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar. Squid Games conquered the world's small screens. The K-Pop band BTS has international teens swooning. And now comes Pachinko , a show whose groundbreaking vision of Korean history in both its cruelty and triumph, will be remembered as a television landmark.

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• <em>Pachinko</em> Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

Pachinko Is a Gorgeous Adaptation of a Literary Masterpiece, Marred by One Baffling Choice

W hen Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the occupation was more than just a political reality. As Korean resistance met with ever harsher responses from the colonial government, Japanese leaders took aim at the culture itself. A strategy of forced assimilation meant the destruction of cherished art, historical documents, and buildings dating back centuries. Koreans saw their language, religion, commerce, agricultural industry, and news media supplanted by the invaders’ institutions; they even had to adopt Japanese names. Meanwhile, with scarce employment prospects in their homeland, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had little choice but to relocate to Japan, where they were mostly relegated to menial jobs and faced brutal discrimination.

This atrocity, whose impact on the Korean people still reverberates in the present, forms the backdrop of Min Jin Lee ’s magnificent 2017 novel Pachinko . The rare National Book Award finalist that is also a bestseller, populated by rich characters and suffused with emotion, Lee’s story comes to television with a lavish adaptation premiering March 25 on Apple TV+. By all accounts, it was not easy bringing this epic, multigenerational, multilingual saga of immigration and family to the small screen. Creator Soo Hugh ( The Whispers ), working with filmmakers Kogonada ( After Yang , Columbus ) and actor turned director Justin Chon, as well as a uniformly excellent ensemble cast, beautifully conveys the sweep and spirit of the novel. The only major misstep is a structural choice that undermines Lee’s carefully paced storytelling.

Spanning most of the 20th century, Pachinko opens in the woods of rural, Japanese-occupied Korea in 1915. Yangjin—a young woman born into poverty, married to the cleft-lipped son of a family that owns a boarding house and reeling from the deaths of three consecutive infant sons—has come to secure a blessing for her fourth pregnancy. “There is a curse in my blood,” Yangjin (Inji Jeong) tells the female shaman. Then the action jumps three-quarters of a century and halfway around the world, to New York in 1989. An ambitious young finance guy, Solomon (Jin Ha), strides confidently into a meeting with a pair of white, male superiors, who unceremoniously inform him that he’s not getting a promotion they all know he’s earned.

When we meet Yangjin, she’s just months away from giving birth to the show’s heroine, Sunja, whose life will be shaped by what she endures during the occupation. Solomon is Sunja’s grandson. And this eight-episode first season (of four that Hugh hopes to make) patiently fills in the intervening decades, though not with the simplistic tale of immigrant bootstrapping that newcomers to Lee’s story might expect. In one of the two parallel narratives, set in the ’30s, a teenage Sunja (played with grace, vulnerability, and grit by Minha Kim) becomes entangled with a Korean businessman, Koh Hansu (South Korean megastar Lee Min-Ho), whose flexible morals have helped him prosper in Japan. Their romance catalyzes her departure for Osaka—although, again, not for the reason you might assume. The other core story line follows Solomon’s return to Osaka, where his family still lives, with a plan to prove he’s worthy of a VP title by facilitating a crucial deal that only an employee of Korean heritage could possibly close.

There is a symmetry to this structure, one that magnifies some of Pachinko ’s most salient themes. Even though they’re poor in the ’30s and relatively rich in the ’80s, the family is constantly forced, in both eras, to choose between impossible binaries: money and integrity, safety and authenticity, assimilation and persecution. But it’s not exactly difficult to glean these ideas from Lee’s chronological structure, which I greatly prefer. There’s a trend toward multiple timelines in TV these days; complicated storytelling has become the marker of prestige drama—of television as art. Yet Pachinko was art long before it was TV. The bifurcated narrative only adds too many transitions that disrupt the series’ emotional throughline and sows confusion around characters that turn up episodes before they’re properly introduced. Readers eager to see the book’s absorbing middle chapters onscreen will have to cross their fingers for a renewal.

Such a big miscalculation might sink a weaker show, but in every other sense, Pachinko —like its heroine—is too singular and alive to fail. As portrayed by Kim in her youth and Minari Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung in older age, Sunja epitomizes immigrant persistence without devolving into a stock character. Hugh avoids reducing her to either a martyr or a plucky success story. It was a wise choice, and one that has only become possible in the streaming era, to mix Korean, Japanese, and English dialogue; color-coded subtitles efficiently convey how characters combine tongues and code-switch. The art direction surpasses that of TV’s most immersive historical dramas, including The Crown . Complementing this intricate mise-en-scène and the cast’s fiercely physical performances is cinematography that lingers on textural details: the hem of a wedding dress, the pudgy foot of a newborn, the snowy brilliance of Korean white rice.

Yes, this adaptation is less than perfect; the disservice it does to the structural integrity of a novel that gains momentum and poignancy as the decades progress shouldn’t be understated. The overall impression is of an epochal masterpiece cut into snippets and reassembled out of order. That’s frustrating. Even when you account for its shortcomings, though, TV’s Pachinko remains the rare show of both artistic and historic import. Everyone should see it. But maybe read the book first.

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By Min Jin Lee

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a story of a Korean family in Japan across generations.

With the backdrop of the Japanese occupation of Korea, Pachinko follows the lives of a family living in Korea that re-establishes itself in Japan. The narrative progresses through the years and the events of WWII, and we see the family's struggles and the sacrifices made in the name of survival. Even as the story near modern day, its characters are never quite free of their history and the events of the past.

Pachinko is a story of a family told across generations, whose lives are shaped by the events and attitudes of the world around them. It's a moving and intimate story that deals in universal themes and struggles.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Full Plot Summary

Book I introduces an old fisherman and his wife who turn their small home in Yeongdo, Korea into a boarding house. Their only surviving son, Hoonie, is a cripple who marries a nice but impoverished girl, Yangjin. The young couple has a daughter, Sunja. Hoonie dies of tuberculosis when Sunja is 13. Afterwards, Yangjin keeps running the boarding house by herself for income. When Sunja is 16, she meets a fish salesman, Koh Hansu, who seduces her, and Sunja gets pregnant. Hansu is married with children and cannot marry her. He offers to take care of Sunja financially, but she wants nothing to do with him.

Meanwhile, a religious man comes to stay at the boarding house, Baek Isak, who has tuberculosis, and they nurse him back to health. When he is better, he asks Sunja to marry him after hearing about her unfortunate situation. Sunja and Isak move to Osaka, Japan, to live with Isak's brother and sister-in-law, Yoseb and Kyunghee. Isak becomes the assistant pastor at a church. One day, some debt collectors come demanding payment on a debt that Yoseb incurred when paying for the costs for Isak and Sunja to come to Osaka. Sunja sells a watch Hansu had given her to pay off the debt. Right after, her baby, Noa, is born.

In Book II , young Noa now how has a baby brother, Mozasu. However, Isak gets arrested for religious activities. Afterwards, Sunja starts selling kimchi to help make ends meet. Soon, Kim Changho, a restaurateur, offers to employ both Sunja and Kyunghee to make kimchi for his restaurants, for a generous salary. They accept. When Noa is 8, Isak is finally released from prison, weak and sick, but he dies soon after.

One day, Hansu shows up saying that Osaka will soon be bombed by the Americans and that Sunja needs to leave. He's been keeping tabs on her, and Kim works for him which is why they were offered the kimchi job. He brings the family to a farm where they will be safe, though Yoseb goes to Nagasaki for a new job. Hansu brings Yangjin to the farm as well. Yoseb is badly injured when Nagasaki is bombed.

After the war, the family moves back to Osaka and rebuilds their house larger with the money the farmer gave them. Kim also stays with them and continues to work for Hansu, who now is a gangster running a "protection" racket. As Noa grows up, he is studious and well behaved, while Mozasu doesn't like school and gets into trouble. Mozasu befriends a Japanese outcast, Haruki, whose mother is a seamstress. To keep him out of trouble, a neighbor who owns a pachinko parlor, Goro, hires Mozasu to work for him. Meanwhile, Noa gets into the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo.

Against Yoseb's advice (he knows Hansu is a bad man), Sunja asks Hansu for the money for Noa's tuition, which Hansu readily pays in addition to room, board and an allowance. Noa meets a pretty girl at school, Akiko, and they date for a long time. (Meanwhile, Mozasu marries Yumi, a girl who works for Haruki's mother.) When Noa breaks up with Akiko, she angrily tells Noa it's obvious Hansu is his real father and that Hansu is clearly a Yakuza gangster which is how he affords all these things. Noa confronts Sunja, and is furious when she confirms it even though he wasn't a gangster when they met. Noa quits school and leaves to start a new life, not wanting to be found.

In Book III , Noa now works as an accountant at a pachinko parlor in Nagano, and everyone he knows thinks he's Japanese. He gets married and has kids. When Hansu finally tracks him down, Sunja goes to see him and Noa kills himself. Meanwhile, Haruki marries one of his mother's assistants, Ayume, although he is gay. One day, she sees him engaged in a sex act with a young man, but never says anything.

Mozasu owns his own pachinko parlor now and has a son, Solomon, but Yumi soon dies in a car accident. Hansu shows up at the funeral, but he still hasn't located Noa yet. Solomon is a cheerful boy who attends an expensive international school. Mozasu dates a woman who was previously divorced and has three kids. Her daughter, Hana, gets pregnant and stays with her mother for a while. Hana is 17, but she seduces 14-year-old Solomon and convinces him to give her money. She then runs away, leaving Solomon heartbroken. (She ends up becoming a sex worker and dying of AIDs.)

Solomon goes off to Columbia University and works at a bank in Japan afterwards. His Korean American girlfriend comes with him, but is unhappy there. When there's a complication at work, Solomon is fired. His girlfriend wants to move back, but Solomon realizes he is Japanese even if Japan sees Koreans as foreigners. Solomon decides to stay and join his father in the pachinko business, even if it is un-prestigious compared to banking. The book ends with Sunja visiting Isak's grave and learning that Noa visited the grave all the time, even while he was living in Nagano. Sunja buries a photo of Noa in the dirt at the gravesite.

For more detail, see the full Section-by-Section Summary .

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Book Review

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee has been on my reading list and sitting on my bookself, looking lovely and forlorn, for some time.

With the wildfires, lightning storms and heat wave in Northern California, I decided to head to the coast for a spell and found some time to read it while chilling out in Monterey and listened to some of it via audiobook in the car while doing a little sightseeing. After reading it, I wish I had done so earlier, since it’s as good as the reviews say.

Pachinko is an understated but powerful story that is grounded in its historical context. The book starts with the Japanese invasion of Korea, and it highlights the difficulty of the lives of peasants and the discrimination Koreans faced at the hands of the Japanese during their occupation of Korea. As it proceeds, the effects and after-effects of WWII are reflected in the everyday lives of this Korean family living in Japan.

In Pachinko, the characters grapple with difficult decisions where there are often no good options, where the best option puts their integrity at risk or where any of the available options put their values to the test. Theirs is a family struggling to survive, comprised of individuals who are struggling to survive and whose lives are the result of many small decisions that are made according to the exigencies of the situation. And generations later, their children are still the product of those decisions that were made many years ago.

The meaning behind the title of the book is an apt, though perhaps not very subtle, metaphor. Min Jin Lee compares life to a game of pachinko, an gambling game where the player drops a ball down rows of pins to see where it ends up, which determines the payout. There’s a little choice in how you maneuver and semblance of personal agency involved, but mostly it’s a lot of luck and you never really know how the pins have been adjusted or tweaked to know how things will play out. At one point, Mozasu, one of the characters, tells his friend that “life’s going to keep pushing you around, but you have to keep playing.”

I don’t know that I entirely agree with that was a view on life, but it’s hard to argue that there’s not at least a pachinko-esque aspect to many parts of life.

One of the strongest aspects of Pachinko is how deeply rooted it is to the historical context of that time. Many will recognize how the treatment of Koreans by the Japanese is reminiscent of the treatment of racial minorities by Western countries. Even the Koreans born in Japan are treated like criminals and risk deportation. The book also highlights the precarious position of women during those years. It also examines the high price that must be paid and the sacrifices that are made by parents to improve the lives of their children.

Throughout Pachinko, there are so many parallels to Western history that can be seen, it makes me wonder why there isn’t a greater push to teach this type of history in schools.

Even as the racial slurs against Koreans decrease, the policies in place have kept the Koreans poor and that poverty is thrown around as an insult against them, not unlike the treatment of black people in America. The Koreans that do manage to become wealthy do so through less respected venues like running pachinko parlors, and then are marginalized socially because of their association with those trades. It’s not unlike the treatment of Jewish people who entered finance due to their exclusion from other profitable trades, which morphed over time to a stereotype about their people.

Some Criticisms

As much as I really enjoyed the book, I think there’s a few storylines that seemed incomplete or not really explored. Haruki being gay, for example, I think wasn’t given proper attention other than having his wife spot him performing a sex act, which seems like not a very complete or fair reflection of Haruki’s sexuality what it’s consequences.

I also wasn’t entirely satisfied with the ending of the book. It sort of just ends, but I suppose it’s the journey that counts in this case. I wasn’t looking for everything to be tied up neatly with a bow, but the ending felt like Lee sort of just decided she was done writing and stopped instead of concluding anything.

I also think that there was a weird sexuality to it in terms of the things that Lee chose to sexualize, which was almost elusively young women and the gay man in the book. I think those choices are questionable. I didn’t really understand what purpose it was supposed to serve or why we needed to know the shape and size of every woman’s breasts in this book. It bothers me because Asian women are already over-sexualized in media so adding to it, in a not particularly constructive way, seems counterproductive.

Audiobook Review and Apple TV+ Adaptation

Some quick notes. The audiobook is quite good. I definitely recommend it, the woman narrating does a great job. Also, there’s an adaptation of it coming soon to Apple TV+. For all the details, see Everything We Know about the Pachinko Apple TV+ Series .

Read it or Skip it?

Pachinko is a powerful book that interwines the story about the fate of a family against the backdrop of history in a way that is informative and engrossing. The Japanese invasion of Korea and the treatment of Koreans in Japan is also an often neglected history outside of Asia and is well-worth exploring and discussing, due to the important lessons it holds.

Beyond that, it’s just a good book that’s solidly written and that tells a compelling narrative. It’s easily one of the best books I’ve read this year so far, and I would recommend it any book clubs for sure, even if it’s not a new release. I’m really hopeful that the upcoming Apple TV+ adaptation will encourage more people to read this book, because it’s one that deserves to be read.

See Pachinko on Amazon.

Book Excerpt

Read the first pages of Pachinko

Movie / TV Show Adaptation

See Everything We Know About the 'Pachinko' Adaptation

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It is one of my next reads. Wonderful review! 😍

Loved your review. I read it very recently and thought the same. Perhaps you’d be interested in reading my review

I love d story and it serve as a good lesson to all people who read this book.

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Review: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

“The Japanese could think what they wanted about them, but none of it would matter if they survived and succeeded” [Min Jin Lee, 2017: 117]. 

Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko had a long road to publication, almost thirty years, being first conceived as an idea by the author in 1989. The story spans four generations, and tells of Korean immigrants who come to Japan to seek a better life in 1933. This family then faces all manner of hardship, including poverty and discrimination, in the new country. For example, we follow Sunja, a daughter of a cleft-lipped, club-footed man, who takes her chance to marry a missionary, Isak, and goes to Japan to give birth there to her son, whose father, Hansu, remains a powerful man in Korea. In Japan, she meets her brother-in-law and his wife, and their life to survive begins. This emotional novel is a real page-turner and this is so not only because of its fascinating story set in a particularly turbulent time period. Pachinko is sustained by its vivid characters whose resilience in times of hardship is somehow both admirable and chilling. The characters’ determination to survive and succeed in conditions which are designed to make them fail will not leave the reader uninvolved. 

In Pachinko , the story starts in the 1910s and it ends in 1989, meaning that the characters in the novel experience the effects of the Japanese colonisation efforts, the Second World War and the post-war recovery. We follow different characters throughout the novel, first Sunja’s parents in Korea, then Sunja and her husband Isak in Japan, then Sunja’s children – Noa and Mozasu, and then Mozasu’s son. The plot also moves forward rather rapidly and jumps forward in time frequently. This does not mean that the story is any less interesting, however. It is absorbing right to the end, or almost right to the very end. Min Jin Lee makes historical and cultural observations throughout, and, by following the lives of the characters, we really get to know about the situation in Japan and the day-to-day hardships the characters experience as they try to adjust to their new life in a foreign country. Guilt, doubt and hope all mingle in the story, and religions and different classes clash. In the context of much deprivation, including discrimination, persecution and poverty, morality has the capability to be bent, and Min Jin Lee bravely explores this topic as well. Besides, the relationship between parents and children is one of the most prominent and fascinating themes. In Pachinko , parents want the very best for their children, and, to that aim, will not mind sacrificing a lot. It is also clear how much hope parents put in their children and how close Korean immediate families really are. The narrative goes “ Back home, having two healthy and good sons was tantamount to having vast riches. She had no home, no money, but she had Noa and Mozasu ” [Min Jin Lee, 2017: 209].

Even though it is not easy to keep up with all the characters in the novel (hence, feel sympathy for all of them), one of the most admirable features of the book is that different characters’ perceptions count. There is no one main character in this novel, and we are shown how different people cope with threatening circumstances and how they try to survive in a country which treats them as second-class citizens. For example, Noa, Sunja’s son, is very sensitive and has a belief that if he will be a perfect student who gets high marks and who is determined to persevere and work hard, then the society of Japan accepts him for who he is, recognising his humanity. His brother Mozasu, on the other hand, is not so sensitive, and does not mind to be employed in unprestigious positions as long as this is what he wants to do and he has a roof over his head. The point of the author is also that perspectives on national identity/discriminatory condition change as new generations in a family emerge. Pachinko is eye-opening in this respect because a person’s integration or belonging to a country in the novel also depends on their background, language-acquisition, views on their condition, their own temperament and desires, as well as on their ability to cope.

Having said that, Min Jin Lee is also clear in her thesis – nothing is going to change for Koreans in Japan, echoing the destiny of any foreigner settled in Japan, one of the most “closed” countries in the world, that remains somewhat averse to the concept of full integration of foreigners in terms of giving them full societal acceptance as “being one of us”. This is echoed in the title of the book. A pachinko machine is used to play a game of chance, but, as one of the characters note in the novel, the game may be fixed in advance in such a way that it is very unlikely or impossible that you will ever win. The same could be said about the characters in the novel – they may try to receive acceptance of the country they immigrated to and hope for the best, but, because unspoken rules have already been set, they will never win in this “game”. Only Hansu, a yakuza, seems to feel at home and successful in Japan despite being Korean, but he also clearly achieved this status through criminality.

The aim of the author to demonstrate the plight of those whom history may have forgotten, i.e., Korean immigrants to Japan, is admirable and, as readers, we truly sense this conviction to show the injustice in Min Jin Lee’s story. There are passages in the novel such as “ [Isak] felt an overwhelming sense of brokenness in the people ” [Min Jin Lee, 2017: 63], and “ every Korean must be on his best behaviour over there [Japan]. They think so little of us already. You cannot give them any room to think worse of us” [Min Jin Lee, 2017: 94]. Heartstrings will be pulled when reading this novel and it is impossible not to sympathise with the Koreans caught in a country which is so hostile to them, even to a person whose grandparents were born in Japan. However, there is also this feeling throughout the novel that the author strikes home this message of “hardship” too many times, as though her readers will not quite grasp the full importance of remembering those people or appreciate the horror of their situation back then to the full extent. Sometimes, there is a feeling that the narrative is just there to underscore the belief of the author of the appalling discrimination and treatment of Koreans in Japan, and that also means that the novel gets a little depressing and, definitely, a tad repetitive in its message.

Moreover, sexually-explicit passages are included in the story for no other reason than simply being there, and the story introduces too many new characters, with their own stories and life events, for no apparent clear purpose. For example, Pachinko jumps from one family to another without hesitation, describing in-depth Noa and Mozasu’s girlfriends and their family circumstances, something which becomes overbearing and needless since the main characters are hardly these brothers’ spouses or love interests. Realism and idealism also clash rather oddly in this novel. It may be all realistically traumatic when Tess of the D’Ubervilles [1891]-inspired heroine Sunja starts selling kimchi on streets out of desperation, but then we also have this idealistic turn when Rhett Butler-inspired character Hansu, who only knows how to serve himself (through crime), comes as an almost gallant protector of the heroine and tries to “rescue” her through the decades.

Pachinko is an easy-to-read, highly emotive novel with some great insight into the history of Japanese-Korean relations and the characters, even though it also loses its momentum towards the end and sometimes feels like a presentation to convey the message of the author on the plight of Koreans, rather than a stand-alone novel to be enjoyed in its own right.

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7 thoughts on “ review: pachinko by min jin lee ”.

Tu blog me ha parecido muy interesante, Diana. Volveré a visitarlo para leer atentamente los fantásticos artículos que publicas en él. Saludos! 🙂

Like Liked by 1 person

Muchas gracias! También me gusta tu blog.

I’ve finished Pachinko very recently and I loved it. 🙂

I am glad! It is a very good book especially in a way it introduces and portrays another culture and that country’s history through its characters 🙂

Yeah, though I work for a Korean company, it’s still nice reading about them and their culture. 🙂

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Min Jin Lee Looks Back at ‘Pachinko’

The second in a series of conversations with authors appearing on our “best books of the 21st century” list..

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As part of its recent “ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “ project, The New York Times Book Review is interviewing some of the authors whose books appeared on the list. This week, Min Jin Lee joins Gilbert Cruz to discuss her novel, as well as the book she’s read the most times — George Eliot’s “Middlemarch.”

“I’m willing to say it’s the best English language novel, period,” Lee says. “George Eliot is probably the smartest girl in the room ever as a novelist. She really was a great thinker, a great logician, a great empathizer and also a great psychologist. She was all of those things. And she was also political. She understood so many aspects of the human mind and the way we interact with each other. And then, above all, I think she has a great heart.”

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

Gamble on Min Jin Lee's winning novel 'Pachinko'

Korea went through a lot in the 20th century. It was colonized by Japan for decades, then split into two due to the interests of foreign powers. Its people died from war and from deprivation, and many of them left, scattering to other lands.

A large number wound up in Japan during Imperial Japanese rule, and while some repatriated, many remained, despite explicit, legal discrimination — the U.S., as it turns out, does not have a monopoly on xenophobia.

This is a lot of history to pack into one novel, but Min Jin Lee is nothing if not ambitious. Pachinko (Grand Central, 485 pp., ***½ out of four stars), her follow-up to her lovely debut Free Food for Millionaires , spans the better part of the century, from 1910, the year Japan annexed Korea, until 1989. It follows multiple generations of one ethnically Korean family in its never-ending search for a comfortable place in the world.

There are several protagonists, but the backbone is a steady, quietly principled woman named Sunja. Her unplanned teen pregnancy and subsequent marriage to Presbyterian minister Baek Isak take her from her parents’ boardinghouse in a small fishing village near Busan to her in-laws’ home in a Korean enclave of Osaka, where she raises sons Noa and Mozasu.

Before her departure, she gets this piece of advice from a woman in her village: “Sunja-ya, a woman’s life is endless work and suffering. There is suffering and then more suffering….no matter what, always expect suffering, and just keep working hard.”

Pessimistic, to say the least, but this turns out to be true, not just for Sunja, but for almost everyone in the Baek family (also called the Boku or the Bando family — not even their name is a certainty in Japan). Lee is an obvious fan of classic English literature, and she uses omniscient narration and a large cast of characters to create a social novel in the Dickensian vein.

Her protagonists struggle with the whims of history, with survival and acceptance in a land that treats even native-born Koreans as foreigners — “For people like us, home doesn’t exist,” notes Koh Hansu, a shadowy guardian of the Baek family, with immense wealth of vaguely disreputable origin, the only kind available to Koreans in Japan. They also swallow what seems like more than their fair share of tragedy over eight decades.

The novel is frequently heartbreaking — its scope doesn’t deter attachment to individual characters, and when bad things happen, the swift pacing and wide-angle view make them seem even more brutal, if at times too sudden. This is the rare 500-page novel that would benefit from some extra flesh, particularly in the last third.

Like many Koreans in Japan, the Baek family gets into the pachinko business, a scorned line of work that “gave off a strong odor of poverty and criminality,” at least to the Japanese.

Pachinko is an unfair game — a gambler’s pinball with strong house odds — one that lends itself rather easily to metaphors about life. “There could only be a few winners and a lot of losers,” one character reflects. “And yet, we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.”

Steph Cha is author of the Juniper Song mysteries.

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‘pachinko’ stars yuh-jung youn, jin ha confront family and business conflict in season 2 trailer.

Parallel stories emerge in the time-hopping, trilingual first look at the Apple TV+ drama's return.

By Etan Vlessing

Etan Vlessing

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A Korean family’s generational struggles with war, forbidden romance and business survival continue in the second season trailer for Apple TV+ ’s Pachinko , which dropped on Monday.

Parallel storylines in the latest series teaser have Minha Kim starting in Osaka, Japan, in 1945 as younger Sunja making dangerous decisions to ensure her family’s war-time survival, before Minari Oscar winner Yuh-Jung Youn as an aged Sunja, now a grandmother, is shown with her Western-educated grandson Solomon Baek (Jin Ha) in 1989 in Tokyo.

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“Do not forget who you are. Can you do that?” Sunja, now the older family matriarch, asks Solomon at one point in the trailer. After all, the story of the Baek family across four generations — and told in the Korean, Japanese and English languages — begs the question: Is Solomon Korean, Japanese or American?    

The quizzical look on his face as his grandmother warns him not to forget his family heritage suggests Solomon doesn’t know himself as he pursues a business relationship with a Japanese businessman in the second season of the generational saga. “I’ll find a way. You know I will,” Solomon tells Naomi, played by Shogun star Anna Sawai.

The second season trailer also cycles back to Sunja as a young adult, played by Minha Kim, who reconnects with her former lover Koh Hansu (Lee Minho) in wartime Osaka after 14 years apart. Sunja asks how he found her. “I never lost you,” he answers back.

Pachinko creator Soo Hugh has said repeatedly she has a four-season plan (with eight episodes in each) to tell the sprawling multigenerational story based on Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel of the same name for Apple TV+.

Produced by studio Media Res, Pachinko is created and written by Hugh, who serves as executive producer. Pachinko is executive produced by Media Res’ Michael Ellenberg and Lindsey Springer, and Theresa Kang for Blue Marble Pictures.

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‘Pachinko’ Season 2 Trailer: Lee Min-ho and Minha Kim Reunite During World War II in Generation-Spanning Drama

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Apple TV+ has unveiled the trailer for “ Pachinko ” Season 2. Based on the 2017 novel by Min Jin Lee, the second eight-episode season will premiere globally Aug. 23.

“Pachinko” chronicles four generations of a Korean family who moved to Japan before the start of World War II. According to an official synopsis for Season 2, “the parallel stories pick up in Osaka in 1945, where Sunja is forced to make dangerous decisions for her family’s survival during World War II, and in Tokyo in 1989, which finds Solomon exploring new, humble beginnings.”

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The first season of “Pachinko,” which premiered in March of 2022, was nominated for an Emmy Award for outstanding main title design. It would go on to take home honors at the 2022 Gotham Awards for breakthrough series and the 2023 Critics Choice Awards for best foreign language series.

Soo Hugh serves as series creator, writer and executive producer with Michael Ellenberg and Lindsey Springer for Media Res and Theresa Kang for Blue Marble Pictures. Leanne Welham, Arvin Chen and Sang-il Lee serve as directors of Season 2.

Watch the trailer below.

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Pachinko season 2 risks repeating these two critical errors from season 1.

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25 Best Historical K-Dramas, Ranked

The equalizer season 5 gets new premiere date & it's sooner than expected, this unresolved supernatural story is the perfect starting point for season 16.

• Pachinko season 2 repeats season 1's mistakes by focusing on Solomon and sidelining other important characters.
• Sunja's relationship with Hansu should not be romanticized, as it undermines her strength and resilience.
• Following the original Pachinko book more closely would have made for a better adaptation as the changes are concerning.

Content warning: the following article contains discussions of sexual violence

There are already indications that Pachinko season 2 is about to repeat season 1's mistakes. Critics widely praised Pachinko season 1 for its stunning cinematography and top-notch performances from its cast, including Emmy-nominated Shōgun actress Anna Sawai . However, there are a few details that deviate heavily from the original 2017 Min Jin Lee novel that made the show a little problematic, and these appear to be returning in season 2.

Pachinko season 1 uses a nonlinear narrative to tell the story of multiple generations of women whose ancestry originates in Korea. The past century of Korean and Japanese history was tumultuous, and the series follows the family through these hardships, from Korea's pre-Japanese occupation, Japan's annexation of Korea, discrimination against Koreans in Japan, World War II, and post-war Japan's recovery and boom. As Korean people, Pachinko shows the family's struggle on the fringes of Japanese society, and how these issues filter through each generation in different ways.

Many K-dramas have modern settings, but historic period shows like Mr. Queen and Hwarang: The Poet Warrior Youth are among the best K-dramas going.

Pachinko Season 2's Continued Solomon Focus Is Not That Interesting

Season 1 also diminished the far more compelling story of sunja's firstborn son.

Pachinko season 1 spent much more time on Sunja's (Youn Yuh-jung and Min-ha Kim) grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha) than the original book. In fact, Solomon isn't in the book much, and he isn't integral to plot or character development. It's likely the series decided to center Solomon as it grounded the story in a modern context, giving it a hook that showed how familial histories impact outcomes across generations. And while fleshing out Solomon's character for this purpose was useful, Pachinko season 1's insistence on following the grandson's life did neither the book justice nor the series any favors .

With Solomon's character at the center of much of Pachinko season 1, the series left one major character out - to the detriment of the narrative. In the book, Sunja's firstborn son, Noa, features much more prominently , and it's his story and fate that has a big impact on all other characters, including Solomon. Noa is seen as a baby in season 1, but little else. The Pachinko season 2 trailer suggests that some of Noa's childhood could be part of the story, but it's unclear how much and how close it will stick to Lee's novel.

Pachinko season 2 returns to Apple TV+ on August 23.

Based on the trailer, it appears Pachinko season 2 will similarly follow the trend of centering Solomon and his life in late 1980s Japan while sidelining other, arguably more important characters. Doing so risks taking away from the original story and would leave bigger questions regarding the motivations of the characters. It also dilutes the impact of the more compelling generational narratives present in the book.

Sunja & Hansu’s Relationship In Pachinko Season 2 Should Not Be Romanticized

Hansu is not the good guy.

Another problematic element from Pachinko season 1 that appears to be resurfacing in season 2 is the change to the relationship between Sunja and Hansu (Lee Min-ho). This characterization of their relationship misses the point from the original source material. It also undermines Sunja's experience and the gravity of her struggles, diminishing the impact of her resilience and strength in the face of exploitation.

Hansu is a wealthy and manipulative businessman in his 30s who takes advantage of a young and naive teenage girl. In the Pachinko novel, it's clear that Hansu grooms Sunja, lies to her, and forces himself on her. Once pregnant, he abandons her, and leaves her vulnerable and desperate. He returns from time to time as a sense of responsibility occasionally seizes him, and he does seem to have some concern for her and their child. However, he's not a heroic figure in any sense, as their problematic relationship is far from romantic.

It's understandable for TV adaptations of books to take liberties with some aspects of the original material, and sometimes, these changes can improve the text or provide additional context that the novel misses. This is not one of those instances. When it comes to Hansu and Sunja's relationship, it's deeply concerning that the Apple TV+ show would take a more romanticized perspective . Yes, the book and series reflect different times when such things were socially tolerated, but doing so draws away from Sunja's character and the strength and perseverance she faced under immense hardship.

Following The Pachinko Book More Closely Would've Made For a Better Adaptation

Pachinko could've been an excellent single-season show.

For anyone who read Lee's original book, Pachinko season 1 likely felt drawn out and missing great chunks of important detail . Theoretically, a faithful adaptation of the story would've fit neatly into a single eight-episode series, one and done.

In most instances in the Pachinko series, the liberties that the production took worked out well. There have been a lot of added and changed details that have improved the story and made it into something bigger. These aspects are commendable and help audiences get a more visceral feel of the onslaught of issues Korean women faced in occupied Korea and their lives as Zainichi in Japan. However, emphasizing Solomon's role while downplaying Noa, and making Hansu into a romantic lead is problematic as it forgets what was important in the original story.

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Created by Soo Hugh, Pachinko is a Drama series created for Apple TV that was released in 2022. The series stars Soji Arai, Jun-woo Han, and Jin Ha. The series follows multiple characters as they attempt to navigate their lives in New York, Japan, and Korea.

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Dj in controversial olympics opening ceremony scene files police complaints following death & rape threats, ‘pachinko’ season 2 trailer continues sunja’s saga as the end of world war ii hits japan.

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The trailer for Season 2 of  Pachinko  has arrived (above), and so has the end of World War II in the multigenerational saga that spans decades.

“Your grandfather, he always wanted me to fly,” Sunja ( Minha Kim ) tells her son Noa Baek (Kang Tae ju) in the clip as a kite flies out in the fields where Sunja and her sister-in-law Kyunghee (Eunchae Jung) work. Sunja and Kyunghee look up to see bomber plans flying in droves toward their hometown of Osaka, Japan.

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‘Pachinko’ Sets Season 2 Premiere Date, Unveils First-Look Photos & Main Title Sequence

Based on Min Jin Lee’s New York Times bestselling novel of the same name, Pachinko is a sweeping and deeply moving story of love and survival across four generations, told through the eyes of matriarch, Sunja. Season 2 of the Apple TV+ series will premiere Friday, August 23 with one episode, and one episode will follow weekly through October 11.

In Season 1, viewers meet Sunja when she still lives in Korea, and she falls in love with Koh Hansu, who declined to be with her when she got pregnant with his child. A sickly preacher Isak (Steve Sang-Hyun) came along and offered to marry Sunja after she and her mother nursed her back to health. With Isak, Sunja had her second son Mozasu Beak (Soji Arai). Mozasu’s son Solomon ( Jin Ha ) took a hit to his reputation over a failed deal he tried to make last season.

According to the log line, “In Season 2, the parallel stories pick up in Osaka in 1945, where Sunja is forced to make dangerous decisions for her family’s survival during World War II, and in Tokyo in 1989, which finds Solomon exploring new, humble beginnings.”

Season 2 also stars Yuh-Jung Youn as Older Sunja, Anna Sawai as Naomi, Junwoo Han as Yoseb Baek and Sungkyu Kim, . The series features Korean, Japanese and English, with color-coded subtitles to match each language.

RELATED: ‘Pachinko’ Sets Season 2 Premiere Date, Unveils First-Look Photos & Main Title Sequence

Find newly released images for Season 2 below:

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• AV Undercover

Pachinko returns with a new trailer and more sweeping drama

The critically acclaimed series returns to apple tv+ next month.

Two years after its first season, Apple TV+’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s bestseller, Pachinko , is poised to make a comeback. Earlier today, the streamer debuted the first trailer for Pachinko ’s second season, revealing a new time period and greater challenges. Still anchored in 1989 by Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung as Kim Sunja, a Korean immigrant living in Tokyo, the second season moves to the next phase of young Sunja’s life.

In 1945, Osaka, she reunites with Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) after 14 years apart. Set during the final days of World War II, Sunja must prepare for the next phase of her life as the U.S. lays waste to the country. Meanwhile, in 1989, Sunja’s grandson, Solomon, is at the end of his rope and, according to the synopsis, “exploring new, humble beginnings.”

Pachinko still looks beautiful. Its crisp cinematography, stylized cities, and wealth of international locations keep Pachinko a step above your standard decade-spanning romance. Plus, Apple has BLACKPINK’s Rosé singing Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida,” which can’t help but juice up the emotion.

We were big fans of Pachinko ’s first outing. In her review of season one , The A.V. Club ’s Saloni Gajjar gave the show an A- and wrote of an unjust world in which Pachinko was a one-season wonder. “Only three months into 2022, it’s hard not to proclaim Pachinko as one of the best new shows of the year, or years even,” she writes. “Luckily, season one hasn’t covered the entirety of the novel, leaving room for plenty more to uncover in any future installments. Here’s hoping. Because it would be something of a travesty if a multigenerational story this exceptional didn’t get a second shot.”

Pachinko premieres on Apple TV+ on August 23, with new episodes available each Friday through October 11.

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