Description "A powerful story of resilience and compassion." —Barack Obama (Former U.S. President) A story that has moved readers around the world—crossing cultures and generations, a new classic is born! The celebrated novel Pachinko by Korean American author Min Jin Lee is now published in a brand-new translation! Spanning four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, Pachinko is the global bestselling epic novel by Min Jin Lee, now meeting Korean readers again through a fresh translation from Influential. Written over the course of thirty years by 1.5-generation Korean American author Min Jin Lee, Pachinko was published in 2017 and became a New York Times bestseller. It has been translated and published in 33 countries worldwide, named a "Best Book of the Year" by more than 75 major 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 in 2022 with the release of the Apple TV+ series of the same name. Now, readers can once again experience Pachinko (in two volumes), the acclaimed work that moved the world to tears with a Korean story and has become a new classic of the twenty-first century. "History has failed us, but no matter." An epic saga of a Korean family in Japan, overlooked by history The novel begins in Yeongdo, Busan, during Japanese colonial rule and unfolds across Korea and Japan over nearly a century, reaching all the way to Japan in 1989 at the height of the bubble economy. Sixteen-year-old Sunja lives with her mother, Yangjin, running a modest boardinghouse. When she meets Hansu, a fish broker who travels frequently to Japan, she begins to imagine a wider world beyond Korea for the first time—but after becoming pregnant with his child, she is devastated to learn he already has a wife and child in Osaka. Meanwhile, Isak, a young minister who comes to stay at Sunja's boardinghouse, sees her as his destiny and proposes marriage. Sunja marries Isak and moves with him to Osaka to begin a new life. But as a Korean woman facing discrimination and contempt, Sunja must endure and work "until she can work no more" (p. 338) to protect herself and her family—a life that is long and hard. Following Sunja's turbulent family history, the story naturally intersects with modern Korean history—liberation, the Korean War, and division—revealing the largely unknown lives of "Zainichi" (ethnic Koreans in Japan) in a way that leaves readers deeply moved. Author Min Jin Lee is a Korean American writer who immigrated to the United States with her family at the age of seven. As a 1.5-generation immigrant and history major, she became interested in the turbulent international politics and tragedies of modern Korean history brought about by Japanese imperialism, and resolved to write about "people history has cast aside." But it took thirty years from when she first learned of the existence of Zainichi Koreans while studying history at Yale, to the eventual publication of this book. While living in Japan with her Japanese American husband and interviewing numerous people, she discarded all her earlier drafts and began writing again from scratch, convinced that the story needed to become "an ordinary individual's story in the face of historical catastrophe." The protagonist shifted from Solomon, a third-generation Zainichi Korean, to Sunja, and the title changed from Motherland to Pachinko. After years of research, interviews, and 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—a chronicle of an immigrant family that steadfastly builds a home for itself, undaunted by history's great waves. The author has said that the title "Pachinko" represents both "the unpredictability of life, much like gambling, where outcomes cannot be foreseen," and "the tragic lives of Koreans in Japan who, in a foreign land filled with hatred and prejudice, had no choice but to turn to the pachinko business as their only means of survival." It is the story of immigrants who must leave their homeland, put down roots in a foreign land, and live forever as outsiders.