Min Jin Lee : Pachinko

Looks like the toy section in a Walmart, doesn't it ?    It's actually a pachinko hall in Japan - pachinko being a mechanical device that's  fun to play like a pinball machine, and gambles your money away like a slot machine.

For many Japanese, it's addictive to play --- but it's also low-class to operate,  so most of the industry is  run by  the shunned Korean  minority --- and that's how it fits into this melodramatic  novel about a Korean family living in Japan.

As demonstrated in WWII, the Japanese don't show much respect for Asian ethnicities other than their own   - and they are especially contemptuous of Koreans. So there is some degree of revengs as pachinko makes some Koreans rich and some Japanese poor

The author tells us that she was inspired to write this book by the story of a Korean boy who killed himself after his Japanese classmates wrote hateful messages in his yearbook.

Her novel is basically a melodrama of good, innocent, long suffering, hard working, family-devoted Koreans being abused by cruel, perverse, greedy Japanese.  The only good  Japanese are those at the bottom of society - those  whom other Japanese have rejected.  

That structure is a bit tedious and predictable -- as is the author's taste for heart wrenching sorrow.

It's a feel good story as people who were once poor, starving, and abused become affluent through honest hard work and dedication to each other.  But none of them becomes successful at anything other than the pachinko business.

There is zero social idealism, here, outside the firm boundary of the family.