Pachinko

Yeongdo, Korea, in the early twentieth century. Sunja grows up in the boarding house run by her parents, surrounded by fishermen, lodgers and the pressures of life under Japanese colonial rule. As a teenager she is courted by Koh Hansu, a wealthy Korean broker with powerful connections. When Sunja becomes pregnant and learns that Hansu already has a wife in Japan, she rejects his offer to keep her as a mistress. Baek Isak, a young Christian minister recovering at the boarding house, offers marriage instead, and Sunja leaves Korea with him to join his brother’s family in Osaka.

The novel follows Sunja’s family across four generations as colonial rule, war, the division of Korea and Japan’s post-war transformation reshape their choices. In Osaka, Koreans face legal exclusion, poverty and persistent prejudice while trying to build secure lives through food stalls, churches, schools and the pachinko business. Sunja’s sons Noa and Mozasu, and later her grandson Solomon, pursue sharply different ideas of education, respectability and belonging. Their intertwined lives form a family saga about migration, class, identity and the compromises required to survive when history repeatedly treats an entire community as foreign.