Pachinko

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit answered to, in strongest conjuration.

—Charles Dickens

The peasants knew that a spoiled son did more harm to a family than a dead one, and they kept themselves from indulging him too much

It was as if a warm room had gotten cooler, but it was still the same room.

Some Koreans in Japan do not wish to be called Zainichi Korean because the term means literally “foreign resident staying

She felt angry with him for lying, but she felt grateful, too. She had loved him, and she could not bear the thought of him being gone from this life.

Eventually, the kitchen was pushed out to the vegetable garden to make way for the larger cooking pots and the growing number of portable dining tables that hung on pegs along the mortared stone wall.

Sliding paper doors divided the interior into three snug rooms, and the fisherman himself had replaced its leaky grass roof with reddish clay tiles to the benefit of his landlord, who lived in splendor in a mansion in Busan.

Goro’s employees were an extension of himself, he believed, and Goro was strict about their personal hygiene as well.

At this point in the course, everyone in the room despised Akiko, but suddenly he admired her courage to think so differently and to suggest such a difficult truth.

“Eliot is wrong,” Akiko said, undeterred. “Maybe the Jews have a right to have their own state, but I see no need for Mirah and Daniel to have to leave England. I think this nobility argument or a greater nation for a persecuted people is a pretext to eject all the unwanted foreigners.”