'Pachinko' explores the dark legacy of Japan’s colonisation of Korea

chopsticks, paper lanterns, photographs of our unsmiling relatives back home in the village in their strange country clothes.

Like Fowler at the end of The Quiet American, she is looking for someone to whom she can confess her guilt, own her complicity. But when she admits her deed to her father, Juan Pablo, she gets adulation in return. Klay’s prose is stirring and precise:

While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different

“Watch your mouth! Don’t you know what kind of trouble we could get in if you start spreading that nonsense around?” “But when I married you, everyone in your village knew that your great-grandmother and your great-great-grandmother were powerful shamans before Liberation …” “Damn it, woman! Keep it down! We’re descended from poor farmers. That mea