this may have just become one of my favorite books of all time
I have never read a family saga before, and I don't know if they are always this amazing, but Pachinko has definitely raised my bar high.
It starts with Sunja during the Japanese colonization of Korea, and follows her through her immigration to Japan with her husband, where they start a family and have two sons.
There are so many characters in this book, but you get to know the story of every single one of them. There is no shallow character, and even though there are a lot of them, the story is very easy to grasp and connect to. She wrote about the nuances of identity, nationality, loyalty, home country, morality war, immigration, and poverty so realistically, and managed to display the complexities of these people in such an absorbing and fascinating manner.