Pachinko

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Historical Fiction
2017 Grand Central Publishing
Finished on July 20, 2019
Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. 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.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. 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.


Spanning nearly 80 years (1910-1989) and close to 500 pages in length, this thought-provoking saga was a very quick and easy read. I nominated Pachinko for my book group, after reading more than a half-dozen rave reviews by some of my trusted blogging friends (all of whom, by the way, gave it a 5-star rating). I typically read only at bedtime and was worried that it would take me several weeks to read the book, so I started well ahead of our August meeting and was surprised that I finished it in just one week. I was quickly drawn into Sunja's story and the pages flew by. 

I had a mixed reaction to the novel, which I had been looking forward to reading for many months. I had envisioned a great historical novel in the same vein as Beach Music (Pat Conroy), Atonement (Ian McEwan) or A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles). Taking into account all of the accolades and positive reviews, I felt confident recommending it to my book club without any prior knowledge or personal opinion of the book. 

Min Jin Lee tells a compelling and highly readable story and I came to care about Sunja, Yangjin and Kyunghee much more than any other characters that appear later in the novel. I would have liked more depth into the lives of those later characters and felt as though parts of the narrative were rushed or glossed over, given snippets of details as time flashed by. One minute a child is born and after turning the page to a new chapter, the reader discovers that the character is now a teenager or married with four children. Those transitions between generations felt abrupt and disjointed, resulting in an uneven read, both in plot and character development. 

I love historical fiction and enjoyed reading about this time of history in Korea and Japan, but this too was not dealt with in great detail. Or not as much detail as I would have liked. I was not familiar with the racism, bullying and distrust of Koreans by the Japanese and found this aspect of the book very timely and, sadly, all too similar to what our country is currently experiencing.  I wanted to love this saga, but it fell short and was underwhelming. The ending was so abrupt, had I been listening to the audio, I would have felt certain that the final track was missing from the production. I had looked forward to being swept away, confident this bestseller would wind up on my Top Ten list for the year, but sadly it did not live up to all the hype. I'm not sorry I read it, but it was not the gorgeous, lyrical or memorable novel I had hoped it to be, and not one I will be recommending.