‘Pachinko’ Is Apple TV+’s Stunning Tribute to Korean Women

Pachinko only fleetingly concerns the popular Japanese arcade game, except that as with the gambling pastime, its story is one about chance, and the triumph and misfortune that befalls a family due to forces out of their control. Showrunner Soo Hugh and directors Kogonada and Justin Chon’s eight-part adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s celebrated 2017 novel recounts the multigenerational plight of a Korean clan beset by Japanese persecution and oppression both in their fishing village of Yeongdo and in Osaka, where they eventually relocate. Like many modern streaming efforts, it can be drawn out to the point of vexation. Yet at its finest—which is frequent—it proves a stirring portrait of the complicated experiences endured by Koreans (and, in particular, women) under colonial rule, and the consequences those ordeals had for not only themselves, but for their progeny and Korea’s national character.

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Beginning in Japanese-occupied 1915 Korea, Pachinko (March 25) pivots around Sunja (Jeon Yu-na), who’s born to a hard-working mother and a doting cleft lip-afflicted father whose demise is a formative loss for the young girl. Adolescent Sunja grows up in a country where speaking ill of the Japanese is a grave crime, as she learns when one of the men residing at her mother’s boarding house exhibits loose lips during a night of drinking, and is abducted by authorities for his misdeed. The ominous threat of detainment, ruination and worse hangs over Sunja for the remainder of her tale, which soon leaps forward nine years to find her a young woman (Kim Min-ha) working at the bustling fish market. There, she’s spied—and wooed—by Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho), a dapper and powerful fish broker with apparent ties to the underworld. A romance blossoms, resulting in pregnancy, although a happily-ever-after is not in the cards, since Hansu is married and has no intention of making an honest woman out of his mistress.

At the same time that it details Sunja’s arduous pre-WWII circumstances, Pachinko situates itself in 1989 with Solomon (Jin Ha), the grandson of Sunja (played, in this period, by Oscar-winning Minari star Youn Yuh-jung), who’s been educated in America and works for a bank that doesn’t properly value him. To secure the promotion he deserves, he joins the firm’s Japanese office, where he plans to convince a landowner named Mrs. Han to sell her property. As if that undertaking weren’t challenging enough, Solomon also begins receiving phone calls from Hana (Mari Yamamoto), his former girlfriend, who’s vanished and is rumored to be working the city’s streets—a situation that greatly upsets Hana’s mother Etsuko (Kaho Minami), who’s the second wife of Solomon’s father Mozasu (Soji Arai), the owner of a local pachinko parlor.

Solomon’s attempts to persuade Mrs. Han to relinquish her land (to the tune of $1 million) touches upon many of the themes—about heritage, responsibility, honor, independence, and exploitation—coursing throughout Pachinko. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that this thread is stretched a bit too thin, and thus the most glaring example of the downside to Hugh, Kogonada and Chon’s patient approach, which sometimes costs the proceedings a measure of dramatic urgency. Far more assured are the passages concerning Sunja in Yeongdo and, later, in Osaka, where she takes up residence courtesy of Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), a pastor whose life she saves, and who repays that debt by marrying her—thereby sparing her from a life of shameful single motherhood. Theirs is a bond forged by compassion and selflessness, and it’s tested by a myriad of obstacles and challenges, most of them stemming from Japanese discrimination and the identity-crisis issues begat by such monstrousness.

Through Sunja and her similarly beleaguered comrades (most notably, sister-in-law Kyunghee, played by Jung Eun-chae and Felice Choi at different ages), Pachinko celebrates the strength and resilience of 20th-century Korean women, whose lives were regularly defined by disconnection, dislocation, and demonization. Kim evokes young Sunja’s tenderness, fear and naivety, as well as her toughness and determination, whereas Youn captures the now-elderly character’s wisdom, regret, and guilt for surviving when so many others did not. One wishes that the magnetic Youn was given slightly more to do during the course of these eight installments. Nonetheless, her 1989 narrative—which intermittently has her aiding, and worrying about, Solomon—is in certain respects the material’s linchpin, tying together the series’ ideas about the burden of history on both the young and the old, the weight of expectations passed down from one generation to the next, the primacy of time-honored rituals and customs, and the process of forming a stable identity in a land that is not your own, and looks down on you as a second-class citizen.

The tension between personal ambition and communal ties, as well as between selfishness and sacrifice, routinely comes to the fore in the series, which weaves its tapestry with a deftness that’s never marred by exposition. While Pachinko isn’t as idiosyncratically lyrical as his recent film After Yang—thanks to its more conventional episodic TV format—Kogonada’s stewardship remains light, graceful and empathetic, and fellow director Chon likewise imbues the action with a deep reverence for the hardships braved by these protagonists. In ways alternately overt and subtle, they convey the complexities of these sociopolitical eras for Koreans in their native land and abroad, be it through color-coded subtitles for intermingled Korean and Japanese dialogue, or via Solomon’s twisted-up feelings about honoring those who came before him, resenting the fact that he can never match their suffering (and should be eternally grateful for it), and wanting to be his own man while also staying true to his loved ones.

Pachinko moves gracefully between its chosen decades, juxtaposing key moments in these individuals’ lives as a means of underscoring their shared heartaches, successes, and dreams. Surprisingly, despite concluding with a non-fiction coda about real-life elderly Korean women who emigrated to Japan in their youth, the series ends with a variety of loose ends, suggesting that a second season is potentially in the cards. With characters this engaging, and storytelling this incisive, that would be a welcome turn of events.

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