Description "A powerful story of resilience and compassion." —Barack Obama (Former U.S. President) Our story, one that has moved hearts around the world—a new classic that transcends culture and generation! The celebrated novel Pachinko by Korean American author Min Jin Lee is now newly published! A global bestseller depicting the story of a Korean family living in Japan across four generations, Min Jin Lee's epic novel Pachinko has been newly translated and published by Influential, bringing it to Korean readers once again. Pachinko is a sweeping saga 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 and has since been 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, the 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 when Apple TV+ released its acclaimed television adaptation of the same name. Now recognized as a new classic of the 21st century that moved the world to tears with a Korean story, Pachinko (in two volumes) can once again be experienced in this new edition. "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 the Japanese colonial era, and spans nearly a century, following the story across Korea and Japan up through 1989, at the height of Japan's bubble economy. Sixteen-year-old Sunja, who runs a modest boardinghouse with her mother Yangjin, meets Hansu, a fish broker who travels frequently to Japan, and for the first time begins to imagine a wider world beyond Korea. But after becoming pregnant with his child, she is devastated to learn that he already has a wife and child in Osaka. Meanwhile, Isak, a young pastor staying as a guest at Sunja's boardinghouse, comes to see her as his destiny and proposes marriage. Sunja marries Isak and moves with him to Osaka to begin a new life. Yet as a Korean woman facing discrimination and contempt, Sunja's life becomes an arduous struggle to protect herself and her family, working "until she could work no more" (Book 1, p. 338). Following the turbulent history of Sunja's family, the story naturally intertwines with Korea's modern history—liberation, the Korean War, and national division—offering a moving glimpse into the previously little-known lives of the Zainichi, ethnic Koreans living in Japan. 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 a history major, she became deeply interested in the tragedies of modern Korean history born from unstable international politics and Japanese imperial invasion, and resolved to tell the stories of "people history has carelessly set aside." Yet from the time she first learned of the existence of the Zainichi while studying history at Yale, it took thirty long years before this book was finally published. After living in Japan with her Japanese American husband and conducting countless interviews, she discarded all her earlier drafts and began writing anew, convinced that the story needed to become "an account of ordinary individuals standing against 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 masterwork blending documentary-level detail with extraordinary novelistic empathy. "Pachinko is a foolish game, but life is not." A quiet journey toward a trilogy of the Korean diaspora Pachinko is also a story about home—a chronicle of an immigrant family steadfastly building a home for themselves despite being battered by the great waves of history. The author has explained that the title "Pachinko" represents both the unpredictability of life, much like a game of chance, and the tragic reality faced by Koreans in Japan, who were forced to turn to the pachinko business as their only means of survival in a foreign land full of hatred and prejudice. It is the story of immigrants who left their homeland to put down roots elsewhere, forever living as outsiders...