‘They grabbed our land, snatched our rice, our potatoes, our fish,” snarls a fisherman to his mates over a drink. “To take a rock in my hand and crush a soldier’s head with it, to warm my cold hands with his blood! Just to know there’s one less cockroach wandering our land. That would give me pure joy!”
His friends look worried. Such careless talk costs lives. It’s Korea in 1915, but it could be anywhere oppressed peoples have chafed against imperial rule – Dublin 1916, Amritsar 1919, Nanking 1937, Mariupol 2022.
When Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel, Pachinko, was published in 2017, it was hailed as a sweeping historical epic spanning a rich era of modern east Asian history. It journeys through colonial Korea, the second world war, the allied occupation of Japan, the Korean war, to Japan’s high-growth period – all refracted through the prism of one family. Tash Aw in the Guardian praised the novel as “a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing”. He meant the so-called Zainichi – Koreans, often compelled to leave their homeland after losing their livelihoods under colonial rule and winding up uprooted, anxious second-class citizens in Japan.
This adaptation (Apple TV+) brings to life a Korea you would never have gleaned from Squid Game or K-pop. It’s a vast, sumptuous, dynastic political TV series of the kind scarcely made any more, complete with swooning strings from Nico Muhly’s score. It reminds me of the historical television dramas I grew up with – Roots, Tenko, The Forsyte Saga. But there is a difference. Pachinko sophisticatedly cuts across continents and eras, from a rustic fishing village under the Japanese yoke in 1915, to braces-wearing financial workers greed-brokering deals on green computer screens in 1989 New York and Tokyo.
Pachinko opens on an idyllic Korean island, blighted byJapanese officers straight out of the sadistic rotters’ playbook. “We bestow on these idiots all our progress, our schools, our education only to have a cripple spew lies in our face,” says one, on the morning after the drunken fisherman’s seditious rant.
The “cripple” he is talking about is Hoonie – the kindly, cleft-lipped, hobbling father of our adorable heroine Sunja – and he won’t betray his fisherman chum to these thuggish overlords. It’s Sunja who sensibly tells our doomed rebel fisherman to clear off out of town. “I’m a man,” he tells the little girl in the opening episode’s most poignant line, “who no longer knows how to live in the world.” We cut to 1989 Osaka, where Sunja, now a beloved granny resting on the veranda, wistfully recalls this moment.
The virtue of this cutting back and forth is to reinforce the sense that the drama’s Korean characters have of living under a curse. “There is a curse in my blood,” Sunja’s mother says at the outset: all three of her sons have died in their first year and, now pregnant with Sunja, she fears the girl will die too. Later our drunken fisherman worries: “It’s too much, living with this hate. Our children will be cursed. How can all this ever end?”
Each such scene then flashes forward to 1989, where Sunja’s grandson, a Korean-Japanese Wall Street whizz kid called Solomon, is trying to broker a Trump-like hotel deal in Tokyo to make his fortune. He visits his family in the Korean township in Osaka. Is he, too, under the family curse? No doubt, that is why Solomon’s beloved granny tells him he is better off in the US.
The problem with this narrative ride through time, though, is that it overloads us with tantalising storylines. I want to care about Solomon’s sister who has disappeared and might be dead, but here she is a mere detail flagged up for future reference.
Near the end of the first episode, there is another shift in the timeline. We flash forward eight years from 1915. Sunja is now a beautiful, if impoverished, young woman, shadowed, as she strolls through her native town’s fish-gutting zone, by a strikingly handsome mysterious stranger in impeccably pressed western clothes (what kind of twerp wears a white linen suit where fish heads are flung about?) She notices she is being stared at, but he can’t keep from staring. It’s an eloquent depiction of his desire – and her intrigued disbelief that this soigné stranger desires her.
Sunja doesn’t know what horrible secrets are going to be revealed about this stranger. Those of us who have read the novel, though, do: Pachinko’s curse, if that’s what it is, is poised to strike again.
