8.67 | 240 reader reviews
Author Min Jin Lee | Translator Lee Mi-jeong | Munhaksasang | 2018.03.09 Original title Pachinko (National Book Award Finalist) Pages 368 | ISBN 9788970129815 | Format oversized variant. Pachinko first became famous as a star-studded drama on Apple TV. A novel written by Min Jin Lee, a 1.5-generation immigrant in the United States. I have not yet managed to read volume 2.
Not long ago, after reading the story of Na Hye-seok, the inner circumstances of our people who had to live through the Japanese colonial period and the time right after liberation pained my heart, and the sorrow was so keen that it stayed with me for several days. Pachinko's setting, too, is the story of a woman who lived in Yeongdo, Busan during the Japanese colonial era and in Osaka, Japan.
It must have been the same for men, but in those days women's human rights and the respect they deserved could not be protected before hunger, poverty, and violence. One can only say they were born in the wrong era.
Pachinko 1, written in an omniscient narrator's point of view, depicts the period, the characters' psychology, and the surroundings so delicately that I could picture every scene more vividly than in any novel I had read recently. Its fast pace, too, made it impossible to put down.
Although I have not seen the drama, Hansu has already taken root in my head! I was angry, sad, and furious. Our modern and contemporary history is truly hard to look at squarely. That is how absorbed I was as I read. It was a book I could not set down midway and read in one breath.
But to keep going on to volume 2, I think I will need to step out of the immersion a little. 9/10