AI ToolsNew
Tools to make learning and teaching easier
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
In covering five generations, Pachinko spans two countries and roughly eight decades. It starts in the tiny village of Yeongdo, Korea, where Hoonie and Yangjin raise Sunja. As with its family tree, though, the novel’s landscape expands. Upon marrying Isak Baek, a traveling minister, Sunja creates a new life with him in Japan.
Of all the journeys that the novel’s characters undertake, this move may be the most significant. As Pachinko chronicles the Korean diaspora, its setting becomes a source of characters’ cultural and social hardships. Through place, the novel explores placelessness. The Baek family members struggle for survival in Japan, putting up with squalid tenements in Ikaino, discrimination, and persecution for their faith. Cash-strapped and widowed, Sunja peddles kimchi at the train station to provide for her family. Decades later, Solomon gets fingerprinted on his birthday and loses his banking job because of his Korean identity. Three generations of hardship put the reader in direct contact with the realities of ethnic oppression.
The expansive novel brushes equally often with history. Sunja and her family escape to the countryside as Meiji-era Japan buckles from its failed war. Seismic, world-shattering events—such as the Nagasaki atomic bomb—change the course of lives. Pachinko compresses the entire 20th-century in its large sweep, leading the reader through its course of dizzying political and social change and ultimately providing a window into history’s breakneck pace.
