The game of Pachinko is a national obsession of Japan, a kind of vertical pinball game in which small steel balls drop randomly into a maze of various prize-yielding pockets. Although it is often viewed as a thinly veiled form of gambling, Korean-American author Min Jin Lee masterfully utilizes the complexity of its nature to trace a single family's history over the sprawl of several decades.
Set at the turn of the century in Gohyang, South Korea, Lee introduces the blossoming love story between a crippled fisherman and his wife, whose daughter—Sunja—serves as the catalyst that carries much of the book's plot. As a teenager, Sunja falls for a wealthy stranger at the home in which she works with her mother to care for their boarders. Promised wealth and prosperity, she refuses to be “bought” after discovering that she is pregnant and her lover is married. In a sudden turn of events, Sunja instead accepts an offer of marriage from a sickly minister passing by on his way to Japan. However, the decision to abandon her homeland—and the father of her son—ultimately sets into motion a dramatic saga that transpires throughout the turmoil of 1910-1989, encompassing the period of Japanese colonization, World War II, and the Korean War.
Over the course of their time as Koreans living in Japan, Sunja and her descendants struggle to build a sense of home in a society where their religion, language, and agricultural industry are continuously stripped from them by the Japanese. Each generation is confronted with a fate seemingly governed by chance—lives shaped by unshrouded loss, enduring love, and deep familial connection. As their stories unfold, they gradually strive towards freedom from the internalized isolation imposed by a world shaped by historical prejudice.
It is with this collective desire that Pachinko seeks to reconstruct the memory of a history that, as Lee states, "has failed almost everybody who is ordinary in the world". In opening the novel with the statement “History has failed us, but no matter,” Lee portrays the collective persistence of those whom history has cast aside as a radical act of survival: the forging of home not as a fixed geography, but a fluid and resistant architecture of human connection. With such an empathetic narration, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko has consequently challenged the perception of what it means to belong to a world governed by the indifferent arc of history.
Thus, much like the path of the steel ball in a pachinko machine—set in motion by arbitrary forces beyond human control, bouncing unpredictably through a labyrinth of fated opportunities—the personal destinies of Lee’s characters mirror the game of pachinko itself. In spite of yielding uncertain, rigged, and often cruel results, it still offers the chance for resistance, meaning, and self-determined belonging.