Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

I’m not all that keen on long family sagas, spanning three or four generations. There’s never enough room for proper character development or any kind of thoughtful analysis or detail around the events that happen. There’s just too much to cram in so the whole thing degenerates into ‘and he did this and then she did that and a year later this happened and another five years later we’ve suddenly all moved on and something else has happened and all the kids have grown up in the meantime …’ But having said all that, I quite enjoyed this book because I knew nothing at all about Korean history or about their relationship with Japan. So this book charts the story of various generations of Koreans who were colonized by the Japanese, moved to Japan, lived through the war (which barely rates a mention in the book!), got involved in running pachinko (gambling) parlours and then all more or less died. The theme of the entire thing is the struggle Koreans had, and possibly still have, with the extreme racism of Japanese towards them, even if they have been born in Japan. So I found it worthwhile reading the book, even though I don’t think it was particularly well written.