“The things left unsaid are perhaps more truthful than what is said aloud,” says a character in Pachinko, and that sentiment is borne out by Apple TV+’s stellar series, whose drama puts on an emphasis on the empty spaces between words, where love, heartache, and longing linger.
Season 2 of Soo Hugh’s adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s novel, premiering August 23, is a worthy follow-up that continues its intertwined tale of perseverance, discrimination, ambition, and the inescapable pull of yesterday on today, all of it concerning a Korean family’s hardships in Japan. Moving between decades and characters with graceful, affecting poeticism, it’s a stirring small-scale epic of heritage, hate, and hope. In its sophomore go-round, it remains one of television’s finest.
Pachinko begins in 1945 Osaka, where dashing underworld wheeler-dealer Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) is selling munitions for the ongoing Japanese war effort. While that enterprise is earning him a pretty penny, the woman he loves, Sunja (Kim Min-ha), is struggling to make ends meet with her kimchi food stand in the city’s crowded marketplace.
Sunja lives with her sister-in-law Kyunghee (Jung Eun-chae) as well as her two sons Noa (Kim Kang-hoon) and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon). Noa is Hansu’s biological offspring but he doesn’t know it; he and his sibling believe that their dad is pastor Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), who’s MIA after being arrested for seditious activism. Kyunghee’s spouse Yoseb (Han Jun-woo) is also not around; as a later episode elucidates, he’s in Nagasaki working in an arms factory.
Sunja’s difficulties are complicated by Hansu’s desire to be a part of her life and to provide for his son—neither of which pleases her. Nonetheless, the dapper gangster is intent on influencing things to his advantage, including by reuniting Sunja and her kids with Isak, who returns home in terrible health.
Coupled with her first foray into criminal activity, this is a crisis that threatens to destroy her tenuous stability, and it’s not long before everything is turned upside-down by the arrival of the Americans, whose bombers compel her to accept Hansu’s help and relocate to a remote farm. There, Sunja grapples with Hansu’s increasing sway over her children, and Kyunghee contends with budding feelings for Hansu’s right-hand man, whose presence in the household over the ensuing years strains her fidelity to her absent husband.
Pachinko fleshes out these storylines with a host of nuanced subplots (including Noa’s relationship with a racist school bully), as well as by repeatedly segueing to 1989 Tokyo, where Mozasu’s (Soji Arai) enterprising son Solomon (Jin Ha) is endeavoring to start a financial fund in the aftermath of his firing from Shiffley’s bank due to his noble stand on behalf of property owner Mrs. Han (Park Hye-jin).
This undertaking has put him at odds with Japan’s newly crowned businessman of the year, Abe (Yoshio Maki), who is committed to ruining Solomon, and it inspires in Solomon a burning need to succeed—and to crush Abe—that drives much of his tale during this season. As before, Solomon is burdened by the legacy of Sunja’s adversity and, relatedly, his fierce determination to make something of himself. His path soon leads to a scheme involving Mrs. Han that’s muddied by his burgeoning romantic relationship with Naomi (Shogun’s Anna Sawai), his former Shiffley’s colleague.
Solomon’s plight is compounded by his debt-ridden, pachinko parlor-owning father’s investment in his fund (which puts great pressure on him to turn a profit), and it greatly worries his grandmother Sunja (Oscar-winner Youn Yuh-jung), who strikes up a relationship with kind, pigeon-feeding Kato (Jun Kunimura). In this instance as in so many others, the past looms large in Pachinko, stymieing everyone’s bids to achieve connection and peace.
The series is rife with sexism, Japanese intolerance of Koreans, and lingering scars (in both 1945 and 1989) that thwart attempts to resolve the myriad problems at hand. Still, the show is never preachy; rather, its bitter prejudices, romantic entanglements, and split allegiances are natural outgrowths of its time periods and its protagonists’ particular situations.
The quest for identity is tangled up with the onerous weight of responsibility in Pachinko, and the show juggles (and commingles) its concerns with impressive deftness. Everyone in this era-spanning saga is contending with strained loyalties to others, themselves, and their Japanese homeland, in which they’re viewed as second-class citizens.
Inevitably, many opt to remake themselves in order to facilitate their goals. Bifurcation is ever-present in Hugh’s drama, including with regards to its subtitles, which are color-coded to indicate when characters are speaking Japanese and Korean. The end result is a multifaceted and in-depth portrait of subjugation and the enduring internal and external traumas it breeds.
Despite its numerous points of interest, Pachinko doesn’t shortchange any of its players, whose ordeals are wrapped up in Japan’s larger socio-political circumstances. To its credit, it places a premium on its performers, and in a stacked cast, Kim Min-ha proves the most overwhelmingly moving as Sunja, whose weary resilience in the face of repeated obstacles is the touching axis around which the rest of the action revolves. With a placidness that resonates as a sign of her strength, Kim imbues the matriarch with both tenderness and toughness, and her fraught dynamic with Hansu—whose compassion and sensitivity is married to dangerous ruthlessness and selfishness—is the proceedings’ sturdy backbone.
If Pachinko has a slight shortcoming, it’s Solomon’s enduring focus on Mrs. Han’s property, which is far less interesting than the show believes it to be. Ultimately, though, it’s a minor speed bump for a series that skillfully wrestles with momentous macro issues through various micro lenses.
Eventually leaping forward in one of its timelines, Hugh’s Apple TV+ gem boasts a lyricism that never devolves into sluggishness, and an earnestness that consistently skirts mawkishness. With sharp period details, across-the-board excellent performances, and a collection of intricate and poignant narrative threads that culminate in triumphs and tragedies, it expands upon its stellar maiden outing in the best ways possible—and, via its finale’s loose threads and cliffhangers, it thankfully suggests that it has much more story to tell.
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