“Pachinko,” a beautifully crafted historical melodrama, is back for its vital second season to fill in some gaps, fiddle with loose ends, and expand the story even further beyond the boundaries of Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel. It is a transitional season that ends with little resolution and gaps to be filled, and even though it offers all of the sensual pleasures of the primary season's performances and productions, with its share of affection and death, it is rather much the center of a book.
Unlike the novel, which progresses chronologically, the series, which returns to Apple TV+ on Friday, alternates between the “present” – Osaka 1989 – and the unfolding story that takes us there. Season 1 began in 1915 before the birth of essential character Sunja (Minha Kim) in Japanese-occupied Korea, then followed her through her youth as a rustic girl to a romance with the handsome, dangerous Hansu (Lee Minho). An unexpected pregnancy led to a wedding of convenience, later of affection, to Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), a Christian preacher; together they moved to Osaka to hitch his brother Yoseb (Junwoo Han) and his wife Kyunghee (Eunchae Jung), where they became Zainichi, the term for Koreans living in Japan—a population that faces severe discrimination. (The current season is rife with prejudice, almost as a reminder of what the primary season firmly established.)
This storyline took us to 1938. The recent season begins in early 1945 (skipping much of the novel), and times are difficult as Japan anxiously prepares for an American attack; Sunja and Kyunghee are scraping by selling kimchi and the cabbage is sort of gone. Sunja's children, Noa (Kang Hoon Kim), her son with Hansu, and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon), her son with Isak, have grown up accordingly. Noa, who doesn’t know his biological father and takes after his adoptive father, is shy and studious; Mozasu is brash and unwilling to check; Isak is in prison after being arrested for sedition last season; Yoseb is working in a munitions factory in Nagasaki, which should cause a stir. But a friendly recent character, Mr. Kim (Kim Sungkyu), is helpfully hanging around, and Hansu, who keeps an eye fixed on them from near and much, will come back and get entangled.
(The Nagasaki sequence that opens the fifth episode is shot in standard format black and white before switching back to paint and widescreen after the bomb is dropped. The opening credits that follow omit the standard upbeat shots of the forged dancing to the Grass Roots' “Let's Live for Today” since it's inappropriate. Understandably.)
Almost the entire capital of the 1989 story was spent in the primary season, showrunner Come on, Hugh needed to create recent material to maintain the characters busy while the sooner narrative catches up. (At the tip of the season, they still have three many years to go.)
Older Sunja (Yuh-Jung Youn) still lives in Osaka together with her successful son Mozasu (Soji Arai), who now owns pachinko parlors – a form of pinball machine with slot machines – and a somewhat shady if popular business that was one among the few opportunities open to Koreans on the time. (Mozasu himself, a significant character within the last season, is essentially absent from this season.) Mozasu's son Solomon (Jin Ha), who studied in America, lives in Tokyo and works in high finance and real estate. In season 1, he had tried to lure an old woman out of her house within the hopes of constructing a golf resort on the property and impressing his bosses; he ended up advising her to not sign the papers, but in the present season, unfortunately, he's back on that horse and has had an entire moral relapse. (I discovered the main points of Solomon's business dealings somewhat hard to follow, or possibly just not definitely worth the effort.)
This authoritarian troublemaking might be expressed within the old Hollywood phrase: “Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets (possibly another) girl,” and so forth, whether or not we're actually talking about girls and boys. It's a well-known problem with ongoing original series, where recent conflicts should be created yearly. You expect it to steer to a different probability at redemption in some unspecified time in the future – the show is simply too sentimental, too good-hearted, not to offer him that probability.
And after all we learn enough about good old Solomon to justify our interest, just as we learn enough about good old Hansu to balance out his criminality. Parts of Solomon's story, which feature some unsavory characters, feel like a deliberate mirror image of Hansu's story; perhaps not coincidentally, they’re played by the show's best-looking actors. As for Sunja's recent, extra-textual adventures, she is going to strike up a friendship with a person on the supermarket that may enable a fascinating scene at a Mexican restaurant, something seemingly recent in 1989 Osaka.
Although historical events are acknowledged (World War II and the Korean War fall in the sooner timeline, and within the later one the Japanese asset price bubble and crash are on the horizon), the present season focuses on family life and domestic details, even when, or perhaps because, it’s disrupted. In 1989, Sanju travels alone from Osaka to Tokyo to examine on her grandson, who she senses will not be well. There is a stunning scene where she chops vegetables alongside Solomon's Japanese lover and former colleague Naomi (Anna Sawai); I almost wrote “throwaway scene,” but in truth this naturalism is important to the series, because it turns the extravagant, almost soap-operatic plot into something real.
And food, often scarce in the sooner plot, plays a job—making a meal, earning a living, making a place on the table, making a home—most tangibly in a barn that Sanju, Kyunghee, Noa, Mozasu, and Mr. Kim inhabit at the tip of the war. (Hansu's tragedy is that, whether he knows it or not, he stays an outsider at the same time as he supports the family.) The characters speak about a “life well lived,” which is certainly not the identical as living well.
Obviously this isn't the season to start out with Pachinko, but in case you haven't already, it's value starting initially. Even in case you've seen the primary season—which I assume you might have, because you've read this far—it could be value having a look back to remind yourself who all these characters are, what they're related to one another, and the difficulty they've gotten into and out of before. And if the brand new season lacks the explanatory energy of the primary, if it's more muted in tone, if Sunju isn't quite the ray of sunshine she once was, her older self will still have a probability here to say she's had a life well lived.
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