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Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List
Service95 Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List

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Min Jin Lee reading list - books artwork

Min Jin Lee’s Recommended Reading List

Pachinko author Min Jin Lee shares her favourite translated novels, from Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman to Park Wan-suh’s Who Ate Up All the Shinga?

Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
Sayaka Murata’s brilliant novel follows 36-year-old Keiko Furukura, who has devoted half her life to working part-time at a Japanese convenience store, or a konbini. What makes this work so delightful and immersive is how Keiko subverts societal norms and lives her life as a deeply original person.

Human Acts: A Novel – Han Kang
Set against the backdrop of the May 1980 Gwangju Uprising and the tragic loss of a young boy named Kang Dong-ho, this seven-chapter novel is a modern masterwork of historical fiction. By skilfully alternating between narrators and protagonists, Kang paints an elegiac portrait of how a 20th-century South Korean tragedy marked ordinary lives.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 – Cho Nam-joo
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is a powerful work of fiction based on the life of its titular character, exposing the inequalities and pressures faced by women in South Korea. Through Kim’s story, told unsentimentally, Nam-joo makes a smart case against culturally reinforced misogyny and inequity.

The Makioka Sisters – Junichirō Tanizaki
Like a classic 19th-century marriage plot novel but told with modern wisdom, Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters portrays a once-prominent Osaka family and the challenges they encounter while arranging a suitable marriage for one sister while contending with the defiant nature of another. In the context of post-World War II Japan and the period of Allied Occupation, the novel traces the engaging journeys of the Makioka women.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga? – Park Wan-suh

In Wan-suh’s Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, the writer recounts her tumultuous upbringing during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War. With clear-eyed prose and marvellous details, Wan-suh captures the atmosphere, deprivation and social upheaval of the time, while portraying the complexities of collaboration, assimilation and resistance within Korean society. Wan-suh’s warmth and humanity shine through the work.

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