The first time I came across “pachinko” was during a little tour around Tokyo where the owner of the homestay I was boarding in, drove us around the city. Today, descendants of Koreans who immigrated to Japan before 1945 constitute the second largest ethnic minority group in Japan.Genre(s): Historical Fiction, Asian Literature While many Koreans repatriated, those who remained in Japan were of ambiguous nationality and faced social and political discrimination since they were not regarded as Japanese citizens, and the united Korea they’d known no longer existed. After the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II, Korea was divided into the North (Soviet-backed) and the South (U.S.-backed). Japanese military support was called in to suppress peaceful public protests throughout the day several thousand demonstrators were killed, and many more were injured and arrested. At the demonstration, 33 activists gathered at a restaurant in Seoul and read aloud a declaration of Korean independence. President Woodrow Wilson’s speech outlining Fourteen Points of national self-determination earlier that year.

The demonstration was partly inspired by U.S. On March 1, 1919, a demonstration of Korean resistance took place. Korea was under Japanese rule from annexation in 1910 until the capturing of the Korean peninsula by American and Soviet forces in 1945. Lee is currently working on her third diaspora novel, American Hagwon, and will be a writer-in-residence at Amherst College from 2019-2022. Pachinko has received many accolades, including being a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. That same year, her family relocated to Tokyo, allowing her to collect oral histories from dozens of Koreans living in Japan, and she finished writing the draft that would be published as Pachinko. She wrote many short stories and novel drafts about the Korean diaspora as early as 1996, but her first novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was published in 2007. After practicing law in New York for two years, she began studying and practicing writing while raising her son. Lee studied history at Yale, followed by law at Georgetown. Lee’s parents ran a wholesale jewelry shop in Manhattan’s Koreatown, where she and her sisters sometimes helped out. After immigrating to the United States at age 7, she grew up in Elmhurst, Queens.

Min Jin Lee was born in Seoul to a father who was a Korean War refugee and college-educated businessman and a mother who was the daughter of a well-known minister.

Pachinko book cover