Pachinko (2022)
Review of Pachinko, season one.
Pachinko was the reason I ended up purchasing Apple TV+. I had no idea the subscription was so cheap, so even after I finished up Pachinko, I ended up keeping it because the quality of the shows was really good and I needed it for work and doing film reviews.
I am a big Min Jin Lee fan, although I’m honestly not a fan of her books. They’re really good, I’ll give her that, but I simply can’t get into the groove of her writing style. I also cannot pay attention to a long fiction book and both of her books are massive, so I can’t digest these kinds of books easily. It’s a struggle y’all.
Anyways, I’ve been excited about this television show releasing ever since I heard about its conception. It’s been years now, but as soon as I also heard that Lee Minho and Youn Yuh-jung were attached to it, I had high expectations.
Everything Youn has been in has hit right for me, so that was a sign I was going to like Pachinko potentially. The only thing I was hesitant about, however, was the fact that this season was only six episodes—that seemed impossible. Pachinko is such a massive, sweeping tale and it seemed impossible to fit everything into six episodes. And they didn’t.
Let’s begin this review.
Pachinko tells a three-generation story across Korea and Japan, overcoming colonization and immigration.
I have read the original book, so I think that is what I will often be thinking about when I reflect on the actual television series. I think a lot fans of the book will come in with way different expectations versus someone with fresh eyes, because that book is about seven hundred pages and has a lot packed into it.
Like I said before, this series is only six episodes, so some things are 100% glossed over and some storylines might not be as clear as, say, if this show were twenty-four episodes. Because of the positive reception and press that the show did receive, though, it has been confirmed that the second season will be happening.
Pachinko is told in a nonlinear format, jumping between different stories. First we begin with young Sun-ja, who lives with her parents in 1920s/1930s Korea, near Busan. This is the era of Japanese colonialism, where Koreans were harshly banned from speaking Korean or practicing Korean culture.
The Japanese era of Korean history is a dark time for a lot of Koreans, as they were harshly discriminated against by their rulers, and those who left for Japan faced terrible conditions in Japan.
Sun-ja’s family owns a boarding house near Busan, but, one day, her father dies, leaving her mother and she alone in this cruel world. As Sun-ja grows up, she meets an older businessman, Koh Hansu, who is a Korean working in Japan. This dubs him as a traitor in the eyes of other Koreans, but Sun-ja falls in love with him.
He shows affection for her, too, buying her food and giving her a fancy watch. But when she asks about marriage, now pregnant with his child, he says he could never marry her because he has a wife and child back in Japan. Naturally, this is heartbreaking, especially because she is an unwedded woman now pregnant.
A preacher named Isak, who is staying at the boarding house at this time, agrees to marry Sun-ja and pretend that the baby is his.
The two leave behind her mother in Busan and move to Japan, where Isak’s older brother, Yoseb, lives in a Korean ghetto with his wife. The four live under tough conditions, scraping money for food, and Sun-ja grapples with the implications of having left her mother and homeland behind for a country that hates people like her.
Cut to the future. Sun-ja now has a grandson, Solomon, that was educated in the United States and now works at a big bank. He speaks Korean clumsily to his grandmother, and when the company he works for tries to buy out a Korean woman’s house, he seems unable to understand the hardships that this woman faced.
She moans about how her children are unable to speak Korean and don’t understand the culture, but when he finally brings his grandmother to speak to the woman, they reminisce about the “good rice”: Korean rice, the one that has a slight nutty taste.
Solomon’s story revolves around the fact that not only does he seem estranged from his culture and his grandmother’s story, but also will forever be seen as an outsider in dual ways.
The first is that because he is Korean in Japan, or a Zainichi, he will never truly be seen as Japanese. He’s only seen as an asset when he can try to convince the grandmother to sell their home, but because he is disconnected from the meaning behind being Korean in Japan, he is unable to truly connect with this woman at all. At the same time, he’s ostracized in his company because he is Asian, a fact that he discusses with his fellow coworker.
I think season two is probably where they will explore the avenue of the pachinko parlor on the family's history, as well as go deeper into Sun-ja’s life in Japan. There’s a lot of territory from the book they didn’t cross into, and I was surprised by the fact they didn’t mention certain things, leaving gaps in the narrative.
It’s a beautiful show, though. It felt like a movie at time with its sweeping shots of nature or how it filmed the characters in their day to day lives. I thought its visuals were gorgeous.
Overall Thoughts
It’s worth a watch. I think fans of the book may be slightly disappointed but that’s only because of the length of the series and the fact that they can only cram so much into six episodes. The acting is superb, but the standout to me is Kim Min-ha, who plays young Sun-ja. She’s absolutely incredible and I definitely can’t wait to watch her in more shows and movies.
This is her first major mainstream role, and I think it won’t be her last for sure. Pachinko also brings to life a vital time of Korean history, one full of suffering and sadness, to major audiences for the first time, so it’s something you cannot miss watching. Can’t wait for season two!
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