Back to Blog
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee5/24/2023 Both were born and raised in the fishing village of Yeongdo-a five-mile-wide islet beside the port city of Busan. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.Īt the turn of the century, an aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra money. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones.” “There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. In this gorgeous, page-turning saga, four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |