Description "A powerful story of resilience and compassion." —Barack Obama (Former U.S. President) Our story that moved hearts around the world—the birth of a new classic that transcends culture and generation! The celebrated novel Pachinko by Korean American author Min Jin Lee is newly published! Pachinko, the internationally bestselling novel by Min Jin Lee that depicts four generations of a Zainichi Korean family in Japan, is now published by Influential in a fresh new translation for Korean readers. Pachinko is an epic novel written over the course of thirty years by Min Jin Lee, a 1.5-generation Korean American author. Published in 2017, it became a New York Times bestseller. Translated and exported to 33 countries around the world, it was named a "Best Book of the Year" by more than 75 major media outlets including The New York Times, BBC, and Amazon, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, captivating both critics and readers alike. Praised by former U.S. President Barack Obama as "a powerful story of resilience and compassion," Pachinko drew renewed attention when Apple TV+ released its television adaptation of the same name in 2022. Now you can newly discover Pachinko (2 Volumes), the celebrated work that moved the world to tears with a Korean story and has established itself as a new classic of the 21st century. "History has failed us, but no matter." An epic saga of a Zainichi Korean family overlooked by history This novel spans nearly a century, moving between Korea and Japan—beginning in Yeongdo, Busan during Japanese colonial rule and continuing to Japan in 1989 at the height of its bubble economy. Sixteen-year-old Sunja, who lives with her mother Yangjin running a modest boarding house, meets Hansu, a fish broker who travels back and forth to Japan, and for the first time begins to imagine a wider world beyond Korea. However, after becoming pregnant with his child, she is heartbroken to learn that he already has a wife and child in Osaka. Meanwhile, Isak, a pastor who comes to stay at Sunja's boarding house, sees Sunja as his destiny and proposes marriage. Sunja marries Isak and moves to Osaka to begin a new life. Yet as a Korean and a woman enduring discrimination and contempt, Sunja's life—having to "work until she could work no more" (Volume 1, p. 338) to protect herself and her family—is arduous and unrelenting. Following the turbulent family history surrounding Sunja, the story naturally intersects with Korea's modern history—liberation, the Korean War, and division—bringing into view the previously unknown lives of "Zainichi" (a term for ethnic Koreans in Japan) in a way that is deeply moving. Min Jin Lee, the author of this book, is a Korean American writer who emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of seven. As a 1.5-generation immigrant and a history major, she became interested in the tragedies of modern Korean history born from unstable international affairs and Japanese imperial aggression, and resolved to write the story of "people history has carelessly set aside." However, it took thirty long years from when she first learned of the existence of "Zainichi" Koreans while studying history at Yale, to the publication of this book. While staying in Japan with her Japanese American husband and interviewing numerous people, the author discarded all her previous drafts and began writing anew, convinced that the story needed to become "the story of ordinary individuals confronting historical catastrophe." The protagonist changed from Solomon, a third-generation Zainichi Korean, to Sunja, and the title changed from Motherland to Pachinko. After extensive research, interviews, and countless rounds of relentless revision, Pachinko was finally born—"a masterpiece blending documentary-level detail with extraordinary novelistic empathy." "Pachinko is a foolish game, but life is not." A quiet journey toward the 'Korean Diaspora Trilogy' Pachinko is also "a story about home." It is the chronicle of an immigrant family that steadfastly builds its home, undeterred by the great waves of history. The author has stated that the title "Pachinko" "represents both the unpredictability of life, much like a gamble whose outcome cannot be foreseen, and the tragic lives of Zainichi Koreans who had no choice but to turn to the pachinko business as their only means of survival in a foreign land filled with hatred and prejudice." Immigrants who must leave their homeland, put down roots in a foreign place, and live forever as outsiders...