Apple+ has been quietly setting up an impressive lineup of TV programs and knocking them out of the ballpark.1 Among others, you have: Severance, Silo, Slow Horses, See, Extrapolations, Lessons in Chemistry, Presumed Innocent, Lady in the Lake, and the subject of this review.
Pachinko is a period drama adapted by Soo Hugh, from the 2017 book by Min Jin Lee, that tells the story of a fictional family in Korea, beginning with the early days of the Japanese occupation and following them over the course of sixty years.
The title refers to the industry of game parlors that sprang up in Japan in the 1920s, and has become a part of contemporary popular culture. Korean immigrants and Japanese alike play and mostly lose at pachinko. As the story unfolds, however, the title suggests deeper meanings.
[mild spoilers ahead]
The story’s structure couples two timelines, one in the colonial-era Korea (1910s) of the teenage protagonist, Sunja Baek (Yu-na Jeon), the other in the Tokyo and Osaka of 1989, where the Baek family has long since become affluent thanks to pachinko. In Osaka, we see Sunja as an elderly woman (Yuh-Jung Youn). She is not only what sustains the family over six decades, but she also gives season one its narrative cohesion. I learned that the original drafts of the book centered on the second timeline only, starting in the 1970s, and that the main character was Sunja’s grandson, Solomon. This, Ms. Lee scrapped in favor of telling the story from the point of view of a member of the older generation because she found it infinitely more vital.2
Even so, Solomon (Jin Ha) is the second main character of the later timeline, and much of that plot thread revolves around his life. Despite growing up in a middle-class environment, Solomon encounters obstacles in forging a career and also struggles with the same racial discrimination that impacted his grandmother's life. The idea that traumas suffered by a past generation are passed on to the following one are made clear.
As the drama unfolds, affective relationships are disrupted by the twisting and turning of fate. We see the great earthquake of 1923, in the Kantō region of Japan. Children grow up without their father or mother, or die before their parents do. Sunja’s first love becomes a broken dream, with marriage an impossibility and a child on the way. Her lover, Hansu, (Lee Min Ho) can easily be perceived as the villian of the story, until episode seven, when we see the full extent of all he has suffered. He also spends a lifetime as Sunja’s shadowy benefactor. Her hard luck seems to have been further mitigated when a pastor with tuberculosis comes into her life, is cured by her and her mother, and then proves willing to marry her. Sounds like a deus ex machina, but no. Nothing lasts long enough to make any difference. Decades later, Solomon loses his sweetheart, Hana, to AIDS. “Love is not enough” is a recurring theme. As one of the characters remarks, “Just because we love them, doesn’t mean we know them.”
Besides loss, the other overarching theme is success. Hansu tells his son, “It’s not enough to just survive.” Min Jin Lee has professed a deep love for the book Middlemarch by George Elliot. Love, loyalty, success, and integrity are universal themes that resonate through it, and the Baek family narrative pays homage in this sense in the way all these virtues are touched upon in the book and in the series.
The acting, art direction, cinematography and editing are irreproachable, and a special shoutout goes to the composer, Nico Muhly, Howards End (2017-8). His scores are intimate, sweetly sad, and delicate. The music has tremendous protagonism. Not that it is obstrusive in any way, on the contrary, it colors and supports the action, and does it extremely well.
The series opens in the earlier times with these poignant compositions, and they complement the affection and family bonds seen in the rural phase of the Baek’s story. I think they make a great first impression, and as a backdrop to the youthful naivete of the protagonist and her first experience of love, they also create a needed sense of intimacy.
To the filmmakers’ credit, the flashback and forward sequences are seamless. It’s an ingenious solution to the problem of how to film a multi-generational story, which is chronological in the book. Past informs future, and the two timelines are deftly balanced to the benefit of both. Repercussions are more keenly felt. Handled with less skill, this might have run the risk of seeming like parentheses, or intrusive backstory.
Initially, I thought Pachinko would turn into a soapy sort of show because it contains many moments of high emotion, but it immerses viewers in its intensity, presenting dramatic and moral conflicts that are right on the edge of melodrama without succumbing to it. I think this is because the characters are satisfyingly nuanced, and the excellent direction by Kogonada and Justin Chon is consistently restrained. (You might need kleenex though; there are some very sad scenes.)
With characters forced to consider so many sweeping ethical and philosophical themes, you might also think the show could be tainted with a moralistic/didactic quality, but this doesn’t happen. At least not for this writer. I found it rich and thought-provoking.
As the season comes to a close, we see that despite Sunja’s illiteracy and poverty, she does more than just survive. Yet her strength of character cannot overcome the hard circumstances that plague her all her life, nor can it provide the agency that would have prevented so much suffering. If Pachinko is a game of chance where only the house wins, Sunja’s life proves to be a challenge met bravely and in good faith, but with a great sense of defeat.
Lastly, there had been complaints about the incongruence of the title sequence. Mike Hale of the New York Times wrote:
“….[Pachinko] works overtime to ingratiate itself with all possible viewers. That desire is evident in the opening credits sequence, set to a pop tune, the Grass Roots anthem “Let’s Live for Today”: The central cast members, in their period costumes but out of character, dance among the pachinko machines, sliding and spinning and mugging for the camera. It’s hard to imagine anything more out of tune with Lee’s book.”
It should be noted that culturally speaking, the pachinko industry is definitely low-brow. It’s gaudy and a bit sordid. A pachinko parlor is kind of like Asian Tom Waits. Forgetting that most people who will watch the TV series (regrettably) will not have read the book, Hale’s comment is mean, and it denigrates somewhat ineffectually. It also misses the point.
If anyone cares to use their visual brain, they will notice that the title sequence is split in two: a gregarious half is juxtaposed by grainy historical images of Koreans of the occupation era. These images contextualize, while the other set idealizes. Aren’t we like this? We have stark realities to cope with, and we try to see them in the best light or go mad. No one in Pachinko wins. No one is happy. They are just sha-la-la-la living for today. The Baek family survived because they took one day at a time, and I think the title sequence shouldn’t have to adhere to the book, whereas it very much has to adhere to the film version of it. In my last TV review, about a very different program, I made mention of music as a great tool for conveying irony. This is evident here as well.
Hale also threw shade on Pachinko the series because of other departures from the book. I fear many people who have read it will agree with him. The difference between books and their film adaptations is a thorny and fascinating subject, and one that merits another post, but IMHO, it’s not wrong to consider a book and its filmed version as two separate things. A great deal of ingenuity is needed to convert a literary work into a filmic one—not all literary elements can serve as film elements—therefore, filmmakers needs a certain independence from their source material. The choices are up to the visual intelligence or ‘vision’ of the director. I’ve scoured the internet for her comments, but apparently Min Jin Lee has not weighed in at all on this. Perhaps she will say something about it at the end of S2.
Pachinko is about the psychological impact of broader socio-political realities of Japanese-Korean relations within the context of this family, and there is a wealth of read world information to support the fictive depiction of this. The season finale of season one concludes with a collection of interviews filmed in 2021 in Tokyo. They feature women survivors of the WWII era, offering more authenticity and insight into the subject of the Zainichi, a term meaning ‘residing in Japan’. These documentary-style interviews highlight that the Korean diaspora still does not have full rights as Japanese citizens.
"Zainichi people's existence is significant because we are witnesses to history."
So says Chung Hyang Gyun, a nurse who was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and Korean father, and has lived all her life there. She was denied the chance to take the state exam to become a supervisor at a public health center because she is considered a foreigner.
Min Jin Lee has stated in an interview with Gilbert Cruz of the New York Times, that she wrote the book in the hopes that more people would become sensitized to their plight, and Pachinko certainly goes out of its way, not to “ingratiate itself” to the viewing public, but to dignifying the struggles of Zainichi everywhere in the world.
Season two is now airing.
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