You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, and you shoudn’t judge a TV show by its opening credits. But the title sequence for Pachinko — in which its multi-generational cast dance joyously, all flailing limbs and sliding feet, to the rollicking Let’s Live For Today by The Grass Roots, beneath the brilliant lights of a pachinko arcade — is so good that it could only introduce something spectacular.
It proves to be the case, and emphatically so. An eight-part adaptation of the internationally best-selling novel of the same name by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee, this Apple TV+ show is, like the 490-page book, epic in its scale — and enrapturing in its execution. It traces the fate of a Korean family across more than 70 years of the 20th century, flitting between timelines, traversing multiple countries, speaking Korean, Japanese and English, and employing various actors to play the same characters at different ages. In less delicate hands, it would be unwieldy; here, though, it emerges as one sublime portrait of both a family and a people.
Anyone who has read the book will notice that large swathes of its narrative are missing in the show — certain backstories and futures are hinted at rather than divulged, and some plot points have been remoulded — but never do these intricately woven characters feel anything less than whole. It all hinges on Sunja, born in the 1910s, during the early years of the Japanese occupation in Korea, to a cleft-lipped father who is shunned by society, but vows to protect her from “the ugliness of the world”.
He succeeds for a time, but his idealistic love can’t protect Sunja from witnessing the brutal treatment of her fellow Koreans at the hands of their Japanese colonisers — or, as she grows up, experiencing that racism herself. Poverty follows her for some time, too, first in Korea with her widowed mother, who runs a rural boarding house, and later as an immigrant in a claustrophobic, mud-splattered enclave of Osaka.
Pachinko is often subtle in its depictions of racism, like with the arc of Sunja’s grandson, Solomon; born in Japan and university-educated in America, now, in the late Eighties, he’s a high-flyer at a New York bank who still has to brush off casual digs about his Korean heritage. At other times, that hate manifests in sheer violence. One scene, in the penultimate episode, is particularly haunting.
But so often, Pachinko is beautiful. Sweeping shots of rural Korea from Sunja’s childhood are like a warm reverie; the glittering pachinko machines, a pinball-ish game in an arcade operated by Sunja’s wealthy son, glow with a neon enchantment; even the slithering creatures on sale at the seafood market are somehow imbued with their own tentacled charm.
The acting, too, is bewitching. All three iterations of Sunja — as a child (Jeon Yu-na), a young woman (Kim Min-ha), and a grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung) — feel piercingly authentic. Jeon is a star in the making, remarkably nuanced for her age. Kim ripples with a stoic determination. And Youn, introduced to international viewers with her Oscar-winning turn in Minari back in 2020, shows again just what kind of an actor western audiences had been missing out on in the decades prior (especially us “snobbish” British audiences, as called out in Youn’s Bafta acceptance speech that same year). She stitches together all the strands of Sunja’s story into one tapestry of a woman.
Cultural touchstones are lovingly handled. Steaming bowls of white rice, once a prohibited luxury for Japanese-ruled Koreans but now an everyday staple, are presented here like shining treasure. Barrels of Sunja’s home-made kimchi are a symbol of salvation amid hardship. It all helps to tell a grander story of displacement, belonging, sacrifice and success for the millions of Koreans who left their homeland for Japan during the occupation, and the hundreds of thousands who stayed there after the Second World War (many of whom became stateless when Korea split into two).
The theme of memory, and how the things you can’t forget will inevitably shape your future, is a key one in Pachinko. After watching these eight episodes, there will be a lot that you won’t be able to forget either.
