Review: Pachinko – A Multigenerational Epic

After reading and enjoying Free Food for Millionaires, I knew I had to read Min Jin Lee’s other more famous work – Pachinko.

About Pachinko

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.

∼ Synopsis from goodreads

My thoughts on Pachinko

I read this book two months ago, but the imagery that the novel created in my mind is still fresh, especially when the newlyweds arrived in what was going to be their new house in Japan. The alleyway, the shanties, the smell of the pig in the makeshift pig pen – they were so vividly drawn.

More than that, I love how history, subtle racism, forging identities between 2 different cultures, where one is something you only inherited from your parents to one who’s rejecting but helped you become who you are. I have read similar stories, but they dealt more with the Indian refugee/immigrant experience (such as The Year of the Runaways), but most books I read covered just one or two generations. They were not sweeping and multi-generational like Pachinko. I never really thought of the impact of immigration two generations down the line, but this book forced me to think it. Considering we recently immigrated to UK, the book made me consider in a lot more detail the possible impacts this move would have on my kids and maybe even later.

This book was also an eye-opener to the tensions between Korea and Japan. And since I am not too familiar with this period of far-east Asian history, I was quite fascinated by it.

The only flaw in this book was probably the huge sprawl towards the end. As the book moves towards the later generations of Sunja’s family, there were too many characters to keep track of, and a lot of people entering and exiting the book. The sprawl, upon reflection, makes sense. We like to put history in a box and narrativize it, but in reality, it is quite unwieldy and complicated and messy, and maybe that’s what the author is conveying through her story.

So, even though I found the third part not as interesting, and the ending a little weak, overall, I adored the book, and it’s one of the best books I read so far in 2025.

I now can’t wait to see the series on Apple TV. Too bad, I don’t have a subscription yet!

Have you seen the show? Do you recommend it?