Pachinko

About the book

Sunja, the daughter of a crippled fisherman in colonial Korea, becomes pregnant by a married yakuza member. To avoid ruin, she marries a sickly minister and moves to Osaka, Japan. The narrative follows four generations of her family through the end of World War II and the subsequent decades of displacement. These characters endure systemic discrimination as Zainichi Koreans, navigating a society that denies them citizenship and forces them into the fringes of the economy, specifically the management of gambling parlors known as pachinko.

Readers of historical sagas and family epics find here a detailed record of the Korean diaspora in Japan. The text provides a sobering look at how geopolitical conflicts and legal exclusion shape individual identity across a century. Those who finish the book understand the specific mechanics of ethnic survival and the way institutional racism persists through shifting political regimes. It offers a clear-eyed perspective on the cost of assimilation and the endurance of familial debt in a culture that treats outsiders as permanent foreigners.

Details

Published

2017

Publisher

Grand Central Publishing

Language

EN