Say melodrama, and what comes to most people’s minds is excess, campiness, or maybe a soap opera featuring an evil twin. The genre is unjustly derided — I love melodramas — and these days, when I think of the term, the faces of women suffocated and repressed by American suburbia don’t come to mind. Instead, I think of Minha Kim’s tortured, freckled face as Pachinko’s Sunja. Throughout the eight episodes in the first season of the Apple TV+ show, adapted from Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel of the same name, Kim’s face hardened from tender youth to steely determination in the face of loss and hardship. Last we saw Sunja, she’d been smiling — maybe the most she’d ever done since her life fell apart after getting pregnant with the fish broker Koh Hansu’s child.
To be completely clear, melodrama is a compliment in my book, and I’m suggesting we place Pachinko in the genre to emphasize how it works within a narrative tradition that has consistently aimed to represent the scope of women’s lives. But it’s not just Sunja’s life on the line. Pachinko spans four generations, and in last season’s finale, several family members still had pending matters. Foremost amongst them: What is Solomon thinking, at literally any point? What will be of his involvement with Yoshii? Where and how did Sunja get the pocket watch back from Koh Hansu? What ended up happening to Isak, and to Noa? (This last one worries me the most. I almost couldn’t sit through the sequence in “Chapter Eight†when little Noa had to simultaneously interpret for his mother at the police station as Japanese officers held Isak under arrest.)
The episodes in the second season, like in the first, jump back and forth between what are now the 1940s and the late 1980s. In an effort to keep track of all events across timelines, I’ll divide them up into sections each week.
1945
“Chapter Nine†opens on a snowy train station in Osaka. In a hat and scarf, Hansu checks on a cargo shipment of dark-colored minerals. It’s 1945, and the war is nearing a breaking point: Looking concerned, the Japanese man whom Hansu tasks with keeping an eye on the shipment asks, “Who will it be, then? The Soviets or the Americans?â€
Since we left Sunja in the market, seven years have gone by, and her business seems now to be thriving. She’s selling confidently and loudly; she even has regulars now, among them a certain Mr. Kim, who, to my eyes, appears to be flirting. I might’ve gotten a nice feeling that everything was going well if it weren’t 1945, Sunja weren’t on her last batch of kimchee, and cabbage supplies weren’t running low. The boys, Noa and Mozasu, seem to pick up on Kim’s friendliness; they exchange knowing looks before a fleet of American planes drop flyers written in Japanese all over the market, threatening Japan to surrender before things get worse.
One of Pachinko’s main melodramatic strains is its focus on the question of how and if a person can escape the ties that bind them to their family’s destiny. In the show’s very first episode, Yangjin went to visit a shaman shortly before Sunja’s birth, hoping to lift a family curse that had already seen the death of a number of infants. Though they’re still kids, the differences in Noa and Mozasu’s personalities already clue us into the fact that they might approach this question in opposite ways.
In a rare lighthearted sequence, Japanese colleagues at school make fun of Mozasu’s Korean lunch, but he won’t have any of it. Instead of retreating, he shuts down the haters by quite literally standing up to them. He explains the different items in his lunch box from the top of his desk. “This is beoseot gangjeong,†he says. “It’s usually spicier, but there’s no more chile peppers.†Even lacking heat, it’s still a triumphant bite. Elsewhere in the school, confronted with the same mockery as his brother, Noa reads to block out his classmates’ cruelty. He later vents to the pastor at church that his teacher just turns the other cheek to these displays of hostility. The pastor encourages him to endure, and later in the episode we learn why the teacher might have reinforced Noa’s quiet defiance. A Korean man passing as Japanese himself, he suggests that Noa use his fierce intelligence to go to university and make a new life for himself.
Noa’s focus on letters, an inclination inherited from his father — whom he still believes will come back from imprisonment — emphasizes another question that haunts every member of this sweeping cast: the difference between survival and enrichment. Koh Hansu might say that while survival is imperative, a person should never let themselves be played for a fool. We see him having dinner with his Japanese father-in-law and a roomful of suited men, who, it becomes clear, are involved in the mineral trading we saw in the episode’s opening sequence. Though Hansu is indispensable to the deal, which supplies the military with this resource for arms, he is still an outcast. His Korean identity as well as his violent reputation are brought up and mocked; he clenches his jaw through the disrespect, and to his credit, his father-in-law steps in to vouch for his generosity and urge him to take a few breaths away from the table. When he does, he overhears a couple of guests saying they’ve already evacuated their families out of the city in preparation for the arrival of the Americans.
Not afforded the same luxury of foresight, meanwhile, the Korean community prepares to fight. Mozasu puts on a formidable display of temerity against a dummy fashioned out of straw. He is reprimanded by Sunja for being too good at stabbing them with a wooden stick; they need to remain intact in order to be used again. “That’s the point,†Mozasu quips, “take the enemy down so they won’t be able to get up again.†My favorite thing about kid-Mozasu, besides his ingrained sense of mischief, is how often and easily he can make Sunja laugh. When she briefly takes her eyes off her son, she spots a poor-looking family. Through her conversation with the young mother, a Korean immigrant with bruises up her forearms, we learn that Yoseb has been away working at a munitions factory in Nagasaki, a revelation that made me literally clutch my chest. Though life is difficult, this young mom is upbeat; she wants to smile for her children. Naïvely optimistic, she proposes they sell bootleg rice wine at the black market together. Sunja is on her last batch of kimchee, but she’s cautious. I was convinced she wasn’t going to go through with it until, by the kitchen sink, she argues to Kyunghee that they have no other option. She can hear her son’s stomach grumbling in the night, and for her own part, Kyunghee is no stranger to the urgency of their circumstances: Finding worms in their rice rations, she wondered if she shouldn’t just leave the bugs there, to better fill the kids’ stomachs. It’s inarguable — rice wine it is.
The camera pays close attention to Sunja’s hands as she washes and handles the rice in a callback to the touching sequence last season when Yangjin prepared a bowl of white rice each for her and her new husband, Isak. Here, as then, Sunja is taking her destiny into her own hands, refusing to concede passively to the oppression of her circumstance. “I’m good at selling,†she tells Kyunghee, and it’s in moments like these that Sunja is most herself. Of course, because this is Pachinko, it’s not long until something goes awry: Sunja is arrested in a black-market raid. She spends the night in jail, but the next day, when the judge sentences each of the prisoners, he lets her go with just a warning.
The mystery of why she was so swiftly pardoned while other first offenders were sentenced to three weeks in jail is solved by the mysterious Mr. Kim, who is waiting for her outside the station. He drives her to a beautiful, big house. At this point in the episode, the letters in my handwritten notes start getting progressively bigger. Eloquently, they announce, “it’S GOING TO BE KOH HANSU.†Sunja holds her breath as he tells her that he’s been watching her; Mr. Kim is not a flirty regular but an employee tasked with keeping an eye on her and the children. It’s Hansu’s curse that, no matter how generously he might be acting or intending to act, he is incapable of doing something for Sunja without coming across as … scary, dangerous, sometimes just plain wrong. He knows the Americans are coming, and he wants Sunja and Kyunghee to take the kids to a house in the countryside which he has set up for them. To no one’s surprise, Sunja won’t go. She doesn’t want to abandon Isak on the chance that he’ll be released from jail. It’s not frustration at the fact that she is refusing safety that gets to Hansu, or even that she is indifferent to his secret devotion: It’s that he can see, maybe for the first time, that Sunja has really come to love Isak, despite the fact that he can’t guarantee her safety. I’d feel bad for him if he weren’t so infuriating.
1989
In late-’80s Tokyo, Solomon is scheming away. When we first see him in “Chapter Nine,†he’s pitching to a couple of investors, asking them to put money in his new independently run fund. When the investors question how his “sympathies†might have played a role in why the deal with the Korean landowner fell apart, he argues that everyone involved was “too emotional.†However, it’s not only his neutrality that the investors are worried about; they want to know more about his relationship with Yoshii. With a confidence bordering on the psychotic, he assures them: “I have nothing to do with that man.â€
Solomon won’t be easily deterred. He tries a college acquaintance on the phone — it’s a no-go — and later goes to lunch with his old friend, Tetsuya, who breaks the news that, while he has managed to raise the extraordinary sum of zero yen for his fund, Abe-san is receiving the lavish Japan’s Businessman of the Year Award that very same night. Not only that, he’s on a “warpath,†determined to intercept Solomon’s efforts. Luckily for him, though, Tetsuya is feeling smug. Whereas once he might’ve been jealous of Solomon’s success, now he is able to contribute a pity investment to his fund: 200 million, out of pettiness and loyalty. Solomon was the only kid who was nice to him when Tetsuya was new in school, which is the kind of thing you never forget, not even while eating kajillion-dollar omakase. Golden leaf showers over their abalone sushi piece, an annoyingly heavy-handed touch to an otherwise subtly performed scene.
In Osaka, Mozasu is opening a brand-new pachinko parlor, and Solomon comes for the opening. Sunja is looking cute and chic in a white tweed skirt suit, and she beams when Solomon gives them the good news of Tetsuya’s investment. Mozasu takes the chance to tell Solomon that he and Sunja have also decided to throw their hats in the ring: They hand him a check for 100 million yen, raised from a loan with the new parlor as collateral. Solomon knows Japan’s economic bubble is on the brink of bursting, and the check makes him nervous. But this is only the start of what will turn out to be an eventful night.
Tetsuya reaches him on the phone in the parlor. Hearing news of his investment in Solomon’s fund, Abe-san has “threatened to destroy [them] both,†a vague insinuation that is still powerful enough to make Tetsuya pull his money. Solomon nods in understanding while his eyes take on the crazed look of someone about to actually lose his shit. It happens a bit later, in the grocery store with Sunja. They go there to pick up a cake and some plastic cups, and the man behind the cake counter, who got Sunja’s order totally wrong, is vile. Amongst other offenses, he tells her to learn how to speak “proper†Japanese and that they should take their business to stores “for people like [them].†It’s the last straw for Solomon, who, in a true Ivy League moment, screams at him: “Who the hell do you think you are? I went to Yale University!â€
Of course, Solomon isn’t unjustified, but Sunja isn’t happy about his outburst. “You scared me tonight,†she tells him, and the sight of his grandmother’s disapproval is too much for him to bear. He looks wounded as he tells her that while he is sorry he scared her, he “can’t live always feeling sorry for [her].†He rips up the check she’d given him along with Mozasu and throws it in the trash. Next, we see him locking eyes with Abe-san at the award ceremony. It’s so satisfying to see that just his presence there is enough to throw Abe off his balance. It’s game on!
Pinball Thoughts
• I really love Pachinko’s opening sequence. I’m so happy to see it back for season two, with a new song, new dancing, and new outfits! I never skip it.