HARSH REALITY AS REFLECTED IN MIN JIN LEE’S “PACHINKO”
HARSH REALITY AS REFLECTED IN MIN JIN LEE’S “PACHINKO”

Summary/Abstract: Min Jin Lee’s novel “Pachinko”, a sweeping saga which follows four generations of a family, deals with painfully real issues: poverty, humiliation, immigration, lifelong suffering, discrimination, death. It is also a story of love, loyalty, Christianity, resilience and kindness. The tightly cinched plotline relies on minute and accurate research work. Lee’s characters too are composites and rely on numerous interviews with real people. The historical background consists of a series of actual events in the lives of poor Koreans, starting with 1910 during the Japanese colonization, World War II, and the aftermath of the war, the Korean War, and ends in 1989. This article endeavors to highlight ways in which Min Jin Lee succeeds in making fiction more real than reality itself.

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