Pregnant and dismayed to learn that he is married, she refuses his offer of financial support. The daughter of a widowed boardinghouse owner becomes infatuated with an older and, as events later show, rather shady Korean businessman who lives in Japan but travels to her fishing backwater. In Japanese-occupied Korea of the early 1930s, naive young Sunja, whose family story is told in the opening chapters, makes some fateful decisions. There’s a reason that “Pachinko” caught the attention of the awards committee: alongside a story that’s engrossing in purely human terms, “Pachinko” pulls readers into the very specific and, in the West mostly unknown, struggle of a stigmatized minority. The novel opens in Korea, but is set mainly in Japan and centers on the unfolding generations descended from a couple who emigrate from Korea to Osaka, Japan. One of the fiction finalists for Wednesday’s National Book Awards is Korean-American author Min Jin Lee’s 496-page multi-generational saga “Pachinko.” Data: Grand Central Publishing, 496 pages, $27
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