1.
도서 제목과 저자
title : Pachinko
author : Min Jin Lee
2. 해당 도서의 주요 내용
(as learned in class) The whole story is about a family who started off in Korea and then Japan during
1910~1990. A total of four generations are on it, and it shows the many ways they grew up and
adapted to the discrimination and poverty as ‘Koreans in Japan’. To shorten the whole story into a single
paragraph would be impossible, as it simply shows episode after episode on everyone of the family. In
short, it is a fictional biography of a family.
3. 도서를 읽고 느낀 점을 자유롭게 적으시오
As you may think I decided to read this book because of our English teacher, who brought the first page
of it to class. As most I hated it but the story itself seemed interesting, so I bought it almost
immediately after the exams and started reading it the following Monday. I was shocked for the first
100 pages or so, amazed for the next 100, then started to get confused over things for the rest of the
book. It was still interesting though.
I wasn’t sure about Ko Hansu from the moment he was mentioned on the book. Sure, back then girls
married young and the men old, but when I heard his age, I was quite shocked, how could he be
interested to a girl half his age? And while he is already married? And why did he not tell her that in
advance? I was disgusted at him the moment he said that he couldn’t marry Sunja because he was
already married. Still, I couldn’t understand why Isak wanted to marry her. I mean, I could understand
why he was doing it, but I couldn’t understand why he would go that far for God. That leads to another
point, the scene where the pastor from the church in Busan was berating on Sunja before marrying her
to Isak. I don’t believe in any kind of religion, so I won’t admit I understood sin or whatever. But the way
the pastor attacked Sunja when she didn’t know anything about it seemed unnecessarily cruel. Sure, it
is still a problem if you get pregnant without a father and not married, but the way everyone told her
off was too much. In the back part of the book, when Yangjin is ill with cancer she suddenly tells Sunja
off about everything she done when she was young. In that part too, in that part of the story she had
already raised her children (though one committed suicide) the best she could, but Yangjin goes on that
everything she did when she was young was foolish and made horrible consequences. What she said
was true if you take out her own perspective but was what Sunja did that much of a crime? She did
everything she could do to raise her children in harsh times and only accepted help when there was no
other choice. Is blood that important?
The way Isak’s brother and his wife lived was another shock to me. For some reason I imagined them
living in a nice house, not an expensive one, but enough to live without fear of poverty. When the book
started describing the state of the street they lived on, I think I tried to not believe it, to think they were
living at the far end of the street, in a nicer house. It seemed like Sunja escaped from one reality but to
me it seemed much worse in Japan. The events following seemed too harsh too. I know the author did
a lot of research on it, so I know it must be true, but I didn’t want to believe this was the reality for all
the Koreans in Japan at the 1920~1930s. Not allowed houses, jobs, anything.
I admired the way Sunja kept working throughout her whole life. As I said before she tried to give her
sons the best and tried to do it independently. I was mad at Hansu the same way she was mad at him
and felt reluctant every time he approached her to offer any sort of help. But she had to, anyway.
When Noa started to get older and be attendant to his studies, I felt sort of sorry for him that he wanted
to become Japanese. Until his suicide in about age 45, he almost never admitted he was Korean, acting
to be a Japanese, and was scared that anyone would find out. He committed suicide after his mother,
Sunja, visited him after a decade of silence. I don’t understand why. Was he ashamed that his mother
came back, looking Korean, asking him to come home? But commit suicide because of that?
Toward the back I was just sad to see everyone on the book trying to become someone. They weren’t
Korean, Japanese, and American. They were discriminated wherever they went and had to lose jobs. It
seemed so unfair, to not belong anywhere. Now we all have at least the identity of ‘Korean’, but to
think that I won’t be able to say so seemed…wrong. To think about it, not having to seems to be the
best relief I could have.
이 책이 나에게 미친 영향(혹은 이 책의 가치)을 적으시오
As I always learned about the Japanese occupation by textbooks, it came different to me to read about
it in a novel. The family in here does not really care about the things happening in Korea, but of their
survival. This reminded me that even in that period ‘ordinary’ people lived. This book was originally
written for American readers, who doesn’t really learn what happened in the country the main
characters came from, so I don’t understand what the author wanted the reader to feel. Maybe they
could all see it as a fictional story, that would never happen in where they are. But except for the part
where Sunja’s family keeps getting unwanted help from a rich ‘yakuza’, it read like a nonfictional
writing. I know this book was adapted as a TV series(or was it a movie?), and the only part I saw was
old Sunja living in a big house with a wide yard that definitely wasn’t 1999 Japan or Korea. I wonder
what the TV show shows.
Thank you for reading my long ramblings. I realized I need to add a lot more words to my grammar.
