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.

Love for God, he’d thought, should come naturally and not out of fear of punishment.

Hansu had said that Osaka was an enormous place where you’d hardly ever see the same person twice.

Nothing about him had ever made her suspect that he was a jebi—a kind of man who could flit from one woman to another.

The only word she understood for certain was yobo, which normally meant “dear” but was also a derogatory epithet used by the Japanese to describe Koreans

This was his burden, not hers