Mapped
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
The Osaka of a Korean family who cross the strait and never quite arrive: the Ikaino ghetto where they are packed into a lane of tin-roofed houses, and the Tsuruhashi market where the women build a life from a kimchi cart and, in time, a sweets stall. The book's Osaka is a working city of tenements and railway arches; its edges reach back to Busan and forward to Yokohama.
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The Makioka Sisters
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The slow decline of a genteel Osaka merchant family in the years before the Second World War, told through four sisters and the long, failing effort to find a husband for the shy third sister, Yukiko. The Kansai world is exact: the comfortable house at Ashiya between Osaka and Kobe, the fading main family house in old Osaka, the modern port city of Kobe, and the annual pilgrimage to see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, the still point of the family's year.
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