Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

June 20, 2020

An interesting historical fiction novel that spans about four generations of a Korean family living in Japan in the 20th century. It’s not a book that holds a plot at all, it simply follows the lives of the family, but the prose and the scenes it describes are very well written. Additionally, I personally found the story particularly intriguing because of how little I knew about the history between Korea and Japan. I was completely unaware that there is still a fairly large community of Koreans living in Japan now, remnants of Japan’s colonization of Korea. It’s not enough to learn history just through reading novels of course, but I feel that I definitely learned quite a bit.

Receommended read for those who enjoy historical fiction, learning about Korean/Japanese history. The story is quite bleak at times and doesn’t have what I would consider a satisfying ending, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.