"I got lost all the time," says writer Min Jin Lee with a charming laugh, sitting in a hotel lobby in San Francisco's Japantown.

Before a promotional appearance at a bookstore, she spoke to The Japan Times about writing her new novel "Pachinko," a historical saga tracing four generations of a Korean family in Japan.

Despite the acclaim of her fiction debut "Free Food for Millionaires" in 2007, which was a best-seller in the U.S., Lee suffered existential self-doubt when producing her follow-up: the first English-language novel about the experience of Japan's ethnic Koreans.