Pachinko

By: Min Jin Lee

Narrated by: Allison Hiroto

Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

New York Times Notable Book of 2017 

A USA Today Top 10 of 2017

July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times Book Club Now Read This

Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, 2018

Winner of The Medici Book Club Prize

Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post

New York Times best seller, number one Boston Globe best seller, USA Today best seller, Wall Street Journal best seller, and a Washington Post best seller.

A New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle).

"There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones".

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.

©2017 Min Jin Lee (P)2017 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"If proof were needed that one family's story can be the story of the whole world, then 

Pachinko offers that proof. Min Jin Lee's novel is gripping from start to finish, crossing cultures and generations with breathtaking power. 

Pachinko is a stunning achievement, full of heart, full of grace, full of truth." (Erica Wagner, author of 

Ariel's Gift and 

Seizure)

"Both for those who love Korea, as well as for those who know no more than Hyundai, Samsung, and kimchi, this extraordinary book will prove a revelation of joy and heartbreak. I could not stop turning the pages, and wished this most poignant of sagas would never end. Min Jin Lee displays a tenderness and wisdom ideally matched to an unforgettable tale that she relates just perfectly." (Simon Winchester, New York Times best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman and Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles)

"A deep, broad, addictive history of a Korean family in Japan enduring and prospering through the 20th century." ( The Guardian)

wonderful book

loved the story but wish Audible could have found a Korean American or anybody who could pronounce Korean words correctly.
it was disappointing to hear some Korean words pronounced incorrectly.

nice story narration was off putting

the story was great but the narrator sounds child like. it takes a few hours to get used to her voice, inflection, and tonality. sometimes it seemed like she was reading a childrens book.

Horrible narrator

I was really looking forward to listening to this book but the narrator ruined it for me. It sounds as if she is speaking to a kindergarten classroom. Such a shame. I couldnt get beyond the first couple of chapters.

Awkward and simple

This novel portrays the pitfalls of an author writing a story in a setting she knows very little about, especially while covering such a vast timeframe. The book is awkward - numerous evidences of the author’s ignorance and insufficient research are scattered throughout the book - from, for example, the excessive and inappropriate usage of “ne” in speech combined with the omission of the Osaka dialect, a character’s choice of university (why not Doshisha, a Christian university of a similar standing as Waseda in the Kansai region, or even another closer, cheaper and better public university?), no reference to the policies of the GHQ (the occupation led by General MacArthur) and their interplay with the Korean conflict and the lives of zainichi (in Japan) Koreans after WWII, a character’s end (guns are extremely rare in Japan), no reference to the differences on views towards zainichi Koreans between the Kansai and Kanto regions, etc. and the more mundane descriptions such as reference to dowry (there exists no Japanese custom of bride or bride’s family giving money/assets to the husband’s family) and cooking in peanut oil (no peanut oil in traditional Japanese home cooking). The list continues. It seems the author relied excessively on assumptions and hence scattered inaccuracies all over (what did the editor do?). This is very unfortunate particularly because the story takes up a theme that should be told.

Other than such awkwardness, I felt the book had insufficient character development or rather, simple characters, and partly as a result, the story was simplistic. It lacked the complexity it could have had given the historic background of the time, the length of the story and the timeframe it covered, as well as its theme.

Reminder I Should Read Reviews

So I don't have much new to add compared to other reviews. This is like an early version of a novel on Scrivener. Character sketches for every single totally irrelevant character that we run into. Telling without any, not ANY, showing. Also, getting near the point where things like deaths or other potentially emotional scenes could happen, and then skipping to some time in the future where it already happened, but we don't even get to be TOLD about it. Then there's a most incredibly ridiculous complete about-face that happens with a character, a very main character, that is not at all believable. I don't know if this ever gets resolved because I had to stop listening because it was just so bad. Don't waste your money!!

Historically interesting, but...

Narrator had sweet voice but not suited to story. Into the book, some profanity and descriptions of sexual encounters were either not credible or seemed that way because of the narration.

Reads like an apprentice novel

Min Jin Lee has an agenda, to be sure, to explore the meaning of ethnic and gender identity amidst conflicts of war, colonization, economic devastation, and so on. Unfortunately, the perspective is neither original or interestingly narrated. Filled with wooden dialog and a plethora of irrelevant detail, the book should not have made the NYTimes list of the ten best novels of 2017.

Sweeping story but uneven

This novel was a compelling read and I learned a lot about Koreans in Japan. I had read in other places about the difficulties of becoming a Japanese citizen if you were an expatriate, even if you were born in Japan. The novel is sprawling in the time that it covers and the characters. I wished it was less broadly based and more narrowly focus since I don't think I found out much about the interior lives and personalities of the characters. I ended up thinking they were all a little blank save for their hard work and perseverance. While that may make an interesting read, it did not captivate me in the ways I would have wanted it. Plot lines were elaborated only to be dropped, the death of some of the main characters are mentioned but that is all. I kept asking myself what the author wanted to impart and I can't say for sure I know. The narration was really good though, both in Korean and Japanese.

Too Much Telling

Not only is there too much telling in this novel, it is too long. Much of the dialogue is stilted and some of the sex scenes seem gratuitous. Still, some of the characters are compelling.

The destruction a good book

The first book is excellent, the story of the Korean Family living in Japan after the occupation of Japan in Korea. Learning about the Korean culture and the difficulties to integration between the two cultures. In the first book we learn, no much, the Japan intervention in War II, the lost of the German war and Japan, the occupation, only mention, of the Americans in Japan. The second book. There is a lot of repetition of feelings and situation, is like the writer thinks that we have short memory problem and she has to reflex our minds. In that moment I start passing chapters without reading. The 3rd book is even worst, she brings people, just to enlarge the book, people that to enhance the story, only make more boring.
I really hate when a writer destroy the book.
Allison Hiroto, i will never read a book reading by her. Her voice is boring, she does not know to do different type of voices, everyone sounds the same. Do not lose your money in this book, a credit is to much for it.