“Though he valued his wife and children as a kind of second chance, in no way did he see his current life as a rebirth.” His failure to commit himself emotionally to his wife is at odds with the totality of his dedication to Japanese language, culture and manners, and betrays not just a deep-seated fear of being unmasked but an acceptance of the impossibility of equality or redemption. But Nobuo’s unchanging routine and determinedly detached manner hide a terrible secret that plagues him daily: he is not, in fact, Japanese, but Korean – born Noa Baek, the son of poor immigrants despised by the rest of Japanese society. He is living a “small, invisible life” in Nagano, Japan, in 1969 – a modest but respectable middle-class existence, with a wife and four children and a job as a manager of a gambling joint where customers play the pachinko machines that lend the novel its title. Through eight decades and four generations, Pachinkois an epic tale of family, identity, love, death and survival.I n the latter stages of Korean-American author Min Jin Lee’s patient, sprawling story of a Korean family in Japan, Nobuo Ban, one of the novel’s principal characters, allows himself a moment of reflection. But then Isak, a Christian minister, offers her a chance of salvation: a new life in Japan as his wife.įollowing a man she barely knows to a hostile country in which she has no friends, no home, and whose language she cannot speak, Sunja's salvation is just the beginning of her story.
When Sunja falls pregnant by a married yakuza, the family face ruin. The couple have one child, their beloved daughter Sunja. In a small fishing village on the banks of the East Sea, a club-footed, cleft-lipped man marries a fifteen-year-old girl. It's a powerful story about resilience and compassion' BARACK OBAMA. Min Jin Lee's novel takes us through four generations and each character's search for identity and success. * The million-copy bestseller* * National Book Award finalist * * One of the New York Times's 10 Best Books of 2017 * * Selected for Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf book club * 'This is a captivating book.
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