Book· 2017· Historical

Pachinko

by Lee Min Jin

Pachinko: 1 recorded work traces back to it.

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Pachinko

TV Series · 2022

AdaptationHIGH

Soo Hugh's Apple series of Min Jin Lee's novel, four generations of a Korean family in Japan across the twentieth century. The restructuring is the adaptation's main move. The novel runs straight through in chronological order; the series braids Sunja's youth in the 1910s and 1930s against her grandson Solomon's 1989, cutting between them within episodes. It also plays in Korean, Japanese and English with colour-coded subtitles, which makes the language question the book is about visible on screen.

About the work

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. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.