Later our drunken fisherman worries: “It’s too much, living with this hate. “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. 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.
“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. It’s Sunja who sensibly tells our doomed rebel fisherman to clear off out of town. 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. “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. Pachinko opens on an idyllic Korean island, blighted byJapanese officers straight out of the sadistic rotters’ playbook. 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. It reminds me of the historical television dramas I grew up with – Roots, Tenko, The Forsyte Saga. 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. This adaptation (Apple TV+) brings to life a Korea you would never have gleaned from Squid Game or K-pop. 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. Tash Aw in the Guardian praised the novel as “a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing”.
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. 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.
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