“Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn’t control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope.”
Beginning in the early 1900s in Korea, we follow Sunja, the only daughter of a fisherman and his wife. As a teenager, she enters into an affair with an older wealthy influential broker, Koh Hansu, who gets her pregnant. When he reveals that he is already married with a family back in Japan, she marries a kind minister, Isaek Baek, who promises to take care of her and give her child his name. The couple then immigrate to Japan to begin a new life alongside Isaek's brother, Yoseb, and his wife, Kyunghee. From there and spanning several decades, the lives of Sunja, her sons, and grandson are forever changed.
I actually started watching the Apple TV+ series first, which then led me to reading the book so I could find out what will happen next. I liked that I did it this way because reading the book alongside watching the new episodes weekly ended up complementing each other creating a wider world that the story told. From the book, I got to understand who these characters were. Meanwhile, the show added more background or context to certain events and characterizations. The most recent episode for example provided a deeper backstory for Koh Hansu set against the true events of the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake. I thought the series and the book together provided a perfect balance, even with some of the changes the show made.
The book alone however, tells such a compelling story through time. Each character is connected by the past and the present, intricately tying everyone’s lives and affecting one generation and the next. The first half was probably my favorite of the three parts as I thought there was more gradual development and growth, whereas the latter half kind of went by swiftly. With Sunja being the central heart of the overall story however, I can understand why her beginnings in Korea to then immigrating to Japan were more detailed compared to her sons and grandson's stories. That is not say they were ignored, but it was those early life decisions from her story that became a catalyst for what became of her descendants and how they lived their lives after.
The historical aspects between Japan and Korea were just as integral to the story as they were to each of the characters’ circumstances. It was something I didn’t know about and I empathized not only with the characters, but the actual people who experienced it in real life. Min Jin Lee did an amazing job handling this and the story she wanted to tell. There was such a weight of honesty that even though Sunja and her family were fictional, their story was real.
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