From 1910 to 1945, Japan occupied Korea and controlled every aspect of the Korean life. This book presents three plays by two prominent Korean writers who ventured to voice anti-Japanese sentiments in their plays despite the harsh censorship of the time.

A heartwarming tale of courage, resilience and hope from master storyteller and winner of the prestigious Newbery Medal, Linda Sue Park. When her name was Keoko, Japan owned Korea, and Japanese soldiers ordered people around, telling them what they could do or say, even what sort of flowers they could grow. When her name was Keoko, World War II came to Korea, and her friends and relatives had to work and fight for Japan. When her name was Keoko, she never forgot her name was actually Kim Sun-hee. And no matter what she was called, she was Korean. Not Japanese. Inspired by true-life events, this amazing story reveals what happens when your culture, country and identity are threatened.

During the Japanese occupation of Korea, young intellectuals like Se-dŏk Ham, eager to transform the traditional Korean ways, introduced Western arts, philosophy, and technology and styled themselves as bringing enlightenment. It was in this edgy, tumultuous world that Ham's plays were first performed. With the end of World War II and the collapse of the Japanese colonial government, Ham opted to side with North Korea. Subsequently, he was blacklisted for more than forty years in the South as a leftist and communist defector. Publication or performance of his works as well as any form of scholarly investigation into his life and work were banned until 1988. That year, on the eve of the Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea "rehabilitated" him along with a number of other artists known to have supported communist North Korea. The literary reputation of Ham is giving new impetus to a global examination of Korea's colonial literature and this is the first volume of his plays to be translated into English.

During the Japanese occupation of Korea, young intellectuals like Se-dŏk Ham, eager to transform the traditional Korean ways, introduced Western arts, philosophy, and technology and styled themselves as bringing enlightenment. It was in this edgy, tumultuous world that Ham¿s plays were first performed. With the end of World War II and the collapse of the Japanese colonial government, Ham opted to side with North Korea. Subsequently, he was blacklisted for more than forty years in the South as a leftist and communist defector. Publication or performance of his works as well as any form of scholarly investigation into his life and work were banned until 1988. That year, on the eve of the Summer Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea ¿rehabilitated¿ him along with a number of other artists known to have supported communist North Korea. The literary reputation of Ham is giving new impetus to a global examination of Korea¿s colonial literature and this is the first volume of his plays to be translated into English. Jinhee Kim is Assistant Professor of Korean/Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University.

This collection of essays, based on international collaboration by scholars in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States, is the first systematic, interdisciplinary attempt to address the social, political, and spiritual significance of the modern arts both in Japan and its empire between 1920 and 1960. These forty years, punctuated by war, occupation, and reconstruction, were turbulent and brutal, but also important and even productive for the arts. The volume takes a trans-war (rather than an inter-war) approach, beginning with the cultural politics of painting, poetry, and fiction in Japanese-occupied Korea and Taiwan following World War I. The narrative continues with the impact of Japan's war in China and the Pacific War on major Japanese novelists, playwrights, painters, and filmmakers, before moving on to the final stage, Japan's defeat and initial recovery. During the Allied Occupation of Japan and in its aftermath, Japanese artists both confronted and dismissed the question of war responsibility by preserving, reviving, or reinventing the political cartoon, Kabuki drama, literature of the body, and the aesthetics of decadence. Contributors: Haruko Taya Cook, Kyoko Hirano, Youngna Kim (Kim Youngna), H. Eleanor Kerkham, David R. McCann, Marlene J. Mayo, J. Thomas Rimer, Mark H. Sandler, Rinjiro Sodei, Wang Hsui-hsiung (Wang Xiuxiong), Alan Wolfe, Angelina C. Yee.

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*