![]() ![]() Adults play Pachinko by feeding the machine a quantity of tiny metal balls, and depending on how the balls cascade through the vertical maze (striated with steel pins altering the ball’s course), one wins or loses. One can play it by depressing a tiny lever, turning a dial, or by touch depending on the machine. Pachinko is a kind of vertical pinball game, requiring little skill. Once I became familiar with Tokyo, I noticed that wherever I went, near almost every subway stop or major shopping area, there were Pachinko parlours. However, we needed the money, and I wanted the three of us to live together, so we went. I wasn’t interested in moving there with our young son from New York. That year, my husband got a job in Tokyo. I wrote another novel about Korean-Americans in New York, which I published in 2007. Yet I knew it didn’t work, so I put it aside. That was rather disappointing because I’d put in so much effort and time to write it. ![]() ![]() I wrote a draft manuscript, and when I reviewed it with the eyes of a fiction reader, I found it to be dry and self-righteous. In this exclusive essay, Lee explores the game of Pachinko as the novel’s central metaphor and reveals how the stories of real-life Korean-Japanese people changed her focus for the book entirelyĪt first, the working title of my novel about the Korean-Japanese people was ‘Motherland’, because I thought that’s how immigrants would view their birthplace. It tells the story of Koreans in Japan during the colonial era, two wars and post-war period, through the fortunes of one family over four generations. Min Jin Lee is the author of Service95 Book Club ’s Book of the Month for July: Pachinko. ![]()
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