Book Group Discussion Meeting, Saturday, September 8, 2018, 2:00 PM San Leandro Main Library

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

"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."

Author: Min Jin Lee

Lifted wholesale from Min Jin Lee's official biography: Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea and immigrated to Queens, New York with her family in 1976 when she was seven years old. She is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and was inducted into the Bronx Science Hall of Fame. At Yale College, she majored in History and was awarded the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time.

Her debut novel Free Food for Millionaires (2007) was a Top 10 Books of the Year for The Times of London, NPR’s "Fresh Air" and USA Today. It was a No. 1 Book Sense Pick, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Wall Street Journal Juggle Book Club selection, and a national bestseller.

Among many other awards, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (2017) was:

• A finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
• A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017
• A USA Today Top 10 Books of 2017
• An American Library Association Notable Book
• An American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Reads
• A New York Times Bestseller

It will be translated into 24 languages.

From 2007 to 2011, Lee lived in Tokyo where she researched and wrote Pachinko. As of the fall of 2018, she will be based in Boston, where she will be working on American Hagwon, the third diaspora novel of “The Koreans” trilogy.

On July 10, 2018, she had the unique honor of being a Double Jeopardy clue in the “Literary Types” category for $1200 on the game show "Jeopardy": “Korean-born Min Jin Lee wrote a 2017 book with this Japanese pinball game as its title,” to which the contestant Becky answered correctly in the interrogative, “What is Pachinko?”

In the following video, Lee talks with an interviewer at Columbia University about Pachinko:

About Pachinko (the game)

Here is a short video about the game of pachinko, which figures so prominently in the novel. 

Further Reading 

If you have the time and inclination, here are a few more articles about the experience of Koreans living in Japan.

1. An article at the "History Channel" website, "How Japan Took Control of Korea," by Erin Blakemore 
2. An article from The Japan Times, "Japan's resident Koreans endure a climate of hate," by Philip Brazor
3. An Al Jazeera article from this June, "Zainichi: Being Korean in Japan," by Drew Ambrose and Rhiona Jade Armont, which examines a more hopeful attitude among the Korean residents of Japan due to the recent talks with North Korea