Perusing the streaming services, one could be forgiven for wondering if Korean television is the new French cinema — a celebrated genre-turned-marketing hook in which the brand itself is as powerful as any single entry. Netflix’s “K-Dramas” page, which features such subcategories as “K-Dramas for Beginners” and “K-Drama Bromance,” is filled to the brim with entertainment choices, all of them more or less identical in their aesthetic design. Hulu and Amazon Prime may have fewer offerings, but a similar look prevails. If the image centrale of French cinema is the cigarette-smoking Parisian, most famously seen on the poster of Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave masterpiece My Life to Live, the K-Drama equivalent is the smooth-cheeked young man. More often than not, he is leaning in for a kiss.
Pachinko, Apple TV+’s eight-part adaptation of the book by Min Jin Lee, both affirms and defies this convention. Built around an impromptu, transitory romance, it considers how a single act of passion can echo across nations and down through a single family line. Like its source novel, a deserved bestseller and a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, Apple’s series implies that no personal narrative is conceivable outside of a geopolitical context. That young man bending to his lover may be temporarily distracted, but there are armies behind him.
The show’s protagonist is a young Korean named Sunja (Kim Min-ha), who, along with her mother, Yangjin (Jeong In-ji), runs a boarding house in the fishing village of Yeongdo. The year, in much of the story’s early going, is 1932. Japan occupies the Korean Peninsula, and subjugation is a daily fact of life. Approaching a Korean vendor in a poignant midseries episode, Yangjin must plead with the man to part with two bowls of white rice, a commodity typically reserved for imperial officials. Elsewhere, in a scene notable for the speed at which it develops, Sunja is hassled, and very nearly raped, by a gang of Japanese youths.
Intervening to break up that assault is a man who soars above Pachinko’s goings-on like a minor deity. Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho) is a Korean himself but is affiliated with Japan’s yakuza, or mafia. Upon threatening Sunja’s assailants with death, Hansu seduces and impregnates the young girl himself, then offers to set her up as his mistress. When Sunja demurs, marrying instead a Christian minister named Baek Isak (Steve Sang-hyun Noh), Hansu embarks on a lifelong campaign of unsolicited protection. This choice, both blessing and curse, is one of Pachinko’s most significant watersheds. The other, undertaken shortly thereafter, is Isak’s decision to immigrate with his bride to the Japanese port city of Osaka, where much of the rest of the series is set.
Like Wuthering Heights, another multigenerational saga featuring a Byronic hero, Min Jin Lee’s novel presents obvious challenges for the would-be screenwriter. Hansu, Pachinko’s answer to Heathcliff, is a constant, but the book’s focus otherwise shifts from Sunja to her sons and grandson as the story moves chronologically ahead. Carried over to the screen, such a straightforwardly sequential telling would introduce pacing and casting headaches galore as hidebound Bronte adapters have learned to their peril. To solve this dilemma, showrunner Soo Hugh jumps instead between two timelines separated by decades. In the first, Sunja and Isak establish themselves in Osaka and survive poverty, gangsterism, and the bigotry of Japanese society. In the second, Sunja’s grandson, Solomon (Jin Ha), battles contemporary prejudice as an investment banker in 1989 Tokyo.
That Pachinko the show thus elides (or saves for a yet-to-be-announced second season) nearly the whole of the book’s middle generation isn’t much of a problem at all on its face. Few viewers will have read Lee’s novel, and audiences are unlikely to guess that much is missing. Rather, the series falters because the Solomon plot simply lacks the dramatic clout to hold up its end of the bargain. In part, this is due to fundamental storytelling confusion: Solomon spends much of his time pursuing a former girlfriend with whom we have barely seen him interact and whose narrative significance is unclear. Also to blame, however, is the show’s tiresome insistence on smoothing out the novel’s moral complexities. In Lee’s hands, the experience of Koreans in Japan is layered, irreducible to easy explanation. Apple’s show, meanwhile, is stubbornly intent on portraying even latter-day Japan as a racist hellscape that Koreans are duty bound to despise.
For an example of this approach in action, one need look no further than a storyline in which Solomon asks an elderly Korean immigrant to sell her land to his bank. In the novel, the young man acts willingly on his bosses’ behalf, maintaining his equanimity even when the transaction brings out the worst in his superiors. (“Even if there were a hundred bad Japanese,” Lee writes, “if there was one good one, he refused to make a blanket statement.”) In the show, on the other hand, racial pride requires that Solomon blow up the deal at the last possible minute. Needless to say, this betrayal is staged heroically by Hugh and company, as are similar moments in which the youngest generation of characters condemn and repudiate their Japanese neighbors.
Contrasting this facile ethnocentrism is an A plot that is often remarkable in its delicacy and beauty. As Hanso, Lee Min-ho strikes perfectly the balance between devotion and fury, casting on his erstwhile lover an eye that is at once compassionate, possessive, and yearning. Equally good is Kim as Sunja, whose subtle evolution from victim to heroine is everything her grandson’s story is not. On a purely technical level, Pachinko regularly astounds with superb costuming and production design, as well as a score that is both lovely and evocative. Yet, on the whole, the show cannot be said to succeed. Like the best Korean dramas, it bears an achingly romantic soul. Its flaws, however — didacticism, resentfulness, and a curious refusal to acknowledge change — are utterly American.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
