Download or read book The Pachinko Parlour written by Elisa Shua Dusapin and published by . This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Winter in Sokcho, which won the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Women's calves, men's shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko in an apartment in an abandoned hotel and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris, and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by. The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven't been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, their tender relationship growing, Mieko's determination to visit the pachinko parlour builds. The Pachinko Parlouris a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel within a family. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin's writing glows with intelligence.

Download or read book Pachinko National Book Award Finalist written by Min Jin Lee and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and National Book Award finalist, Pachinko is an "extraordinary epic" of four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family as they fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan (San Francisco Chronicle). NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017 * A USA TODAY TOP TEN OF 2017 * JULY PICK FOR THE PBS NEWSHOUR-NEW YORK TIMES BOOK CLUB NOW READ THIS * FINALIST FOR THE 2018DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE* WINNER OF THE MEDICI BOOK CLUB PRIZE Roxane Gay's Favorite Book of 2017, Washington Post NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * #1 BOSTON GLOBE BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER * WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER * WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER "There could only be a few winners, and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones." In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee's complex and passionate characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history. *Includes reading group guide*

Download or read book Winning Pachinko written by Eric Sedensky and published by Tuttle Publishing. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pachinko, a game played by over 30 million Japanese, is synonymous with glaring lights, mind-rattling noise and smoke-choked parlors. To the uninitiated, the game's phenomenal popularity is nothing less than an enigma. The unofficial truth is that pachinko is one of Japan's biggest forms of gambling. For non-Japanese, the hush surrounding this money-making aspect has contributed to misunderstandings about the game. Now, with Winning Pachinko Eric Sedensky opens parlor doors to the English-speaking world and guides readers through the essentials of play - where to buy balls, how to select a machine, and most importantly, how and where to claim one's booty of cool cash. A glossary of pachinko terms, useful diagrams, and photographs accompany the text.

Download or read book The Proletarian Gamble written by Ken C. Kawashima and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-17 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism. Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean “minority,” he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize—as when they became involved in Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (the Japanese communist labor union)—their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.

Download or read book Dreaming Pachinko written by Isaac Adamson and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2003-05-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tokyo, July 2001: Hard-boiled reporter Billy Chaka is back in the neon metropolis interviewing a has-been pop singer turned pachinko fanatic for Youth in Asia magazine. Looks like an easy assignment until he witnesses a beautiful young woman suffer a seizure in the Lucky Benten pachinko hall. When she is later found dead beneath the expressway, Chaka becomes embroiled in an apparent blackmail plot involving a Ministry of Construction official, a brash nineteen-year-old girl, a shadowy entity known only as "Mr. Bojangles," and four silent figures who have a penchant for showing up uninvited inside Chaka's hotel room. As the bodies pile up and the mystery deepens, Chaka must untangle the lies, obsessions, and seemingly supernatural events that link the dead woman to a forgotten, bloody incident from the desperate closing days of World War II. Spellbinding and hilarious, Dreaming Pachinko will take you on a surreal thrill- ride through the city of the future -- a place where no one can escape the past.

Download or read book The Pachinko Girl written by Vann Chow and published by Tokyo Faces. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Emotionally complex and filled with passion. I am sure it will captivate readers from East and West." "Vann has a unique knowledge of Japan." Winner of the Wattys Award. An unforgettable, breathless debut fiction by author Vann Chow, THE PACHINKO GIRL is the winning selection of an international book award with over one hundred forty thousand submissions. While the book appears to be a murder mystery, the author explores and exposes a slew of human rights issues such as gender inequality, hyper-sexualization of teens, homosexual discrimination, racial discrimination, and workplace bullying among others in Japan through the eyes of a foreigner with his friends from different walks of lives and professions in her seminal debut fiction series.Synopsis: An American businessman Smith who loved to linger in Pachinko parlors every night in his lonely life as a foreigner in Tokyo met Misa, a young Japanese hostess working there by chance. He quickly found out that Misa was entangled into a web of gang-controlled business operations that involved illegal drugs distribution, money laundering and prostitution beneath the harmless facade of Pachinko casinos. Knowing her personal woes, he gave her his winnings to help her out to survive a difficult patch and change paths. That large sum of money quickly incriminated them to false accusation of sex trade. Meanwhile, a film director Tanaka investigated the death of his idol Sergey Ribery, the legendary French arthouse movie-maker who happened to have filmed Misa in his last work in which she was seemingly strangled to death in the story. Tanaka sought the help of a psychologist who may shed some light into the strange casts of characters involved in the case, but the doctor was later murdered. Who did this? And what was he or she trying to cover up?

Download or read book Tokyo Ueno Station National Book Award Winner written by Yu Miri and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

Download or read book Japan written by James Mak and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1997-10-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of twenty-six essays furnishes concise explanations of everyday Japanese life in simplified economic terms. They begin with such questions as, Do Japanese live better than Americans? Why don't Japanese workers claim all their overtime? Why don't Japanese use personal checking accounts? Why do Japanese give and receive so many gifts? The essays are written in non-technical, accessible language intended for the undergraduate or advanced placement high school student taking an economics course or studying Japan in a social science course. The general reader will find the book a fascinating compendium of facts on Japanese culture and daily life.

Download or read book Free Food for Millionaires written by Min Jin Lee and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 711 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The brilliant debut novel from the New York Times-bestselling author of Pachinko. 'Ambitious, accomplished, engrossing... As easy to devour as a nineteenth-century romance.' NEW YORK TIMES Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend and a degree in economics. The elder daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, Casey inhabits a New York a world away from that of her parents. But she has no job, and a number of bad habits. So when a chance encounter with an old friend lands her a new opportunity, she's determined to carve a space for herself in a glittering world of privilege, power, and wealth – but at what cost? As Casey navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society, its many shades and divides. Addictively readable, Min Jin Lee's bestselling debut Free Food for Millionaires exposes the intricate layers of a community clinging to its old ways in a city packed with haves and have-nots. 'Explores the most funadmental crisis of immigrants' children: how to bridge a generation gap so wide it is measured in oceans.' Observer 'A remarkable writer.' The Times

Download or read book Diplomacy of a Tiny State written by Khoon Choy Lee and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 1993 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mr Rajaratnam's words Lee Khoon Choy ?possesses in great measure the qualities necessary to make a good ambassador?. With the skill of an experienced journalist, Lee Khoon Choy has recorded his impressions and observations in these memoirs of an ambassador.

Download or read book Winter in Sokcho written by Élisa Shua Dusapin and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As if Marguerite Duras wrote Convenience Store Woman--a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author

Download or read book Braised Pork written by An Yu and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chinese woman embarks on a dream-like journey through Beijing, Tibet, and mysterious worlds beyond in this novel of “startlingly original imagination” (Guardian, UK). One autumn morning, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her lavish Beijing apartment to find her husband dead in their half-full bathtub. Like something out of a dream, Jia Jia discovers a pencil sketch of a strange watery figure next to the tub. The mysterious drawing launches Jia Jia on an odyssey across contemporary Beijing, from its high-rise apartments to its hidden bars, as her path crosses some of the people who call the city home, including a jaded bartender who may be able to offer her the kind of love she had long thought impossible. Unencumbered by a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia travels into her past in search of unspoken secrets. Her journey takes her to the high plains of Tibet, and even to a shadowy, watery otherworld. An atmospheric evocation of middle-class urban China, An Yu’s Braised Pork explores the intimate strangeness of grief, the indelible mysteries of unseen worlds, and a young woman’s empowering journey of self-discovery.

Download or read book I Love Japan written by Craig Briggs and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2004-12 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Japan is an intriguing country and culture that both delights and confounds the visitor. In I Love Japan, Craig Briggs gives you uncommonly insightful yet amusing insights into living, working and playing in Japan. In this collection of short and witty essays, Briggs brings you Japanese culture real and unfiltered--through the eyes of a keenly observant, sensitive, and often times smart-assed foreigner. About traditional Japanese cuisine: "Part of the enjoyment of eating soba is the 'slurping'--taking air in rapidly over the soba and enhancing the dining experience. Choking on soba, however, does not enhance the dining experience. And "losing your lunch" in such a traditional setting will also make you "lose face"." Experience the tradition of sumo wrestling and cherry blossom viewing. Understand the danger of climbing Mt. Fuji or of just taking a commuter train at rush hour. Learn and laugh about quirky Japanese refinements to common, often unsightly acts like public drunkenness and trash recycling. And, visit some of the countries surrounding Japan and be thankful you live in Japan instead. Part travel guide and part survival kit, I Love Japan is the only book with the courage to tell you just what really is happening in Japan.

Download or read book The Kinship of Secrets written by Eugenia SunHee Kim and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2018 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Calligrapher's Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart.

Download or read book Designing With Light and Shadow written by Kaoru Mende and published by Images Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past the focus of urban illumination has been purely functional. Designing with Light and Shadow, however, is a treatise on the work of Kaoru Mende + Lighting Planners Associates, a Japanese firm, which purposely creates spaces to leave a lasting

Download or read book Mahjong Parlor of Love written by Meteo Hoshiduki and published by Kobunsha Co., Ltd.. This book was released on with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honjo, a popular professional mahjong player, has been taking a part-time job under manager Shiga, who runs a small mahjong parlor. However, his true intention is to become the manager's "woman"... Not wanting to miss out on a popular professional mahjong player, the manager accepts Honjo's offer of a live-in position and inadvertently begins to live with him...? Other unique BL stories include a glasses-sporting subordinate at a major mahjong chain and a tsundere president, as well as a comic set in the pachinko industry!

Download or read book The Girl He Took A Paige King FBI Suspense Thriller Book 3 written by Blake Pierce and published by Blake Pierce. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Paige King, a Ph.D. in forensic psychology and a new arrival at the FBI’s elite BAU unit, has an uncanny ability to enter serial killers’ minds. She has seen the worst of the worst—but when a new serial killer strikes, victims turning up dead with magic tricks left at the scenes, Paige is baffled. What could the meaning be behind these macabre hints? “A masterpiece of thriller and mystery.” —Books and Movie Reviews, Roberto Mattos (re Once Gone) THE GIRL HE TOOK is book #3 in a new series by #1 bestselling and critically acclaimed mystery and suspense author Blake Pierce. Up against her most challenging case yet, Paige must use her encyclopedic knowledge to decode the meaning of the strange magic clues. Can she discover what the killer wants, and why? Or by the time she figures it out, will it be too late? A complex psychological crime thriller full of twists and turns and packed with heart-pounding suspense, the PAIGE KING mystery series will make you fall in love with a brilliant new female protagonist and keep you turning pages late into the night. Books #4-#8 are also available! “An edge of your seat thriller in a new series that keeps you turning pages! ...So many twists, turns and red herrings… I can't wait to see what happens next.” —Reader review (Her Last Wish) “A strong, complex story about two FBI agents trying to stop a serial killer. If you want an author to capture your attention and have you guessing, yet trying to put the pieces together, Pierce is your author!” —Reader review (Her Last Wish) “A typical Blake Pierce twisting, turning, roller coaster ride suspense thriller. Will have you turning the pages to the last sentence of the last chapter!!!” —Reader review (City of Prey) “Right from the start we have an unusual protagonist that I haven't seen done in this genre before. The action is nonstop… A very atmospheric novel that will keep you turning pages well into the wee hours.” —Reader review (City of Prey) “Everything that I look for in a book… a great plot, interesting characters, and grabs your interest right away. The book moves along at a breakneck pace and stays that way until the end. Now on go I to book two!” —Reader review (Girl, Alone) “Exciting, heart pounding, edge of your seat book… a must read for mystery and suspense readers!” —Reader review (Girl, Alone)