“Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee

This is an epic about four generations of a Korean family who were forced to immigrate from Busan to Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The story starts in 1910 and ends in 1989. Eventually, the family moves to the Korean ghetto in Osaka, where they struggle to find work and food to survive World War II. As Koreans and as Christians, they were doubly discriminated against by the Japanese. Throughout the novel, there are hardships and deaths as well as births and love affairs, as each generation grows up and makes their own way through a foreign society. Much of the book is about what it is like to be an immigrant in a place that does not want you and where you are constantly treated as sub-human. There is the struggle to survive and even thrive in a place where you know you are not wanted. Lee manages to make this tragic tale hopeful at the same time. As one reads on one cannot help but root for this family and feel for every gut wrenching blow that they must endure and overcome. The characters are complicated, never clearly good nor bad, and they often struggle to make the right decisions in life. Chance often intervenes, for better or for worse, just when the winds of fate look to be blowing a certain way. Through the lens of one Korean family struggling to survive in Japan, Lee depicts the dilemma many immigrants feel about no longer having any place to call home.