Pachinko review: ‘dazzling Korean epic’

The family epic is a shop-worn genre, but the creators of Pachinko reinvent it in their dazzling, heartfelt series about four generations of a Korean family that moves to Japan. The story starts in a poor fishing village in 1915, when Korea was under Japanese occupation, and goes through to the polished world of high finance in Tokyo and New York in 1989. But that saga is delivered with such artistry and imagination – including the passionate yet restrained emotions of the actors, the elegance of the time-shifting narrative and the show’s astonishing visual beauty – that Pachinko is unsurpassed among recent series.

More like this:
– TV’s latest obsessions
– The coolest characters on TV
– Why we got the Vikings wrong

Based on Min Jin Lee’s bestselling 2017 novel, the story centres on Sunya, played as a girl by Yu-na Jeon, in a delightful performance. For much of the story, Min-ha Kim plays her as a young woman who moves to Japan with her husband, a Korean minister. But the true heart of the series is Yuh-jung Youn, who won last year’s best supporting actress Oscar as the blunt but warm grandmother in Minari. She plays the older Sunya, who lives in Osaka with her son, Mozasu (Soji Arai), the owner of pachinko gaming parlours (arcades popular in Japan where people play a game resembling pinball). All three actresses mesh perfectly, depicting a life that includes a misbegotten romance in Korea, and years of hard work in Japan selling kimchi from a street cart to support her family. The oldest Sunya’s calm but expressive face contains them all. Wise, observant, deeply feeling and still troubled, she carries the weight of her personal past and of history.   

While Sunya’s trajectory is essentially the same as in the novel, the show’s creator, Soo Hugh (The Terror), and its directors, Kogonada and Justin Chon, have radically transformed the book. The novel’s straightforward chronology owes a debt to 19th-Century narratives. But the series opens with Sunja’s pregnant mother asking for a curse to be lifted so she will not miscarry her child, then immediately leaps ahead to New York in 1989, where Sunja’s grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha) is on the rise at an investment banking firm. From there the series keeps moving back and forth, picking up the forward movement of each timeline. This is not complication for complication’s sake, but a brilliant stroke. Many episodes from the past flow gracefully from the older Sunja as if they are her flashbacks, adding a poignant layer of memory that enhances the show’s emotional power, and gives the screen Pachinko a sharper, 21st-Century feel.

In the 1989 timeline, Mozasu has made money with his pachinko parlours. But his profession is considered disreputable in polite society, adding a thread to the themes of class and discrimination that run through the decades. In Sunya’s youth, Japanese police beat and threaten innocent Koreans in their own country. Mozasu, although born in Japan, is still considered an outsider there. The mix of languages the characters speak – Korean and Japanese with English in the brief New York scenes – call attention to the divide, with subtitles for different languages in different colours.