Pachinko, the new Apple TV+ series based on the book by Min Jin Lee, arrives in Japan and returns to Korea in this week’s episode.
Solomon and Sunja become amateur detectives in search of a lost woman and a missing grave site. Houses become homes, and countries swallow each other up in the search for identity. No one’s exactly happy, but the characters muddle their way toward something like peace with the worlds they’ve left behind.
All along the way, this epic show continues to impress.
Pachinko recap: ‘Chapter Five’
The year is 1931. Pastor Isak (played by Steve Sang-Hyun Noh) and Sunja (Minha Kim) have just arrived in Osaka, Japan, after a grueling sea voyage from Korea. His brother and sister-in-law Kyunghee (Jung Eun-chae) have made room for them in the little hovel they call home.
Her sister-in-law’s greeting convinces Sunja that she’s in good hands. This very warm woman is the first person to ask how she’s doing, serve her food, and insist she be allowed a minute to breathe. The site of white rice on the dinner table makes her cry.
Weeks pass, and Sunja still hasn’t gotten quite used to Japan. When Kyunghee accidentally washes an old garment of hers, Sunja cries once more. It still had the smell of home on it — and now she’s lost the one link she had to the past, to her family.
Later, she pawns the watch Hansu (Lee Min-Ho) gave her when she told him she was pregnant to pay off the debts of her host and make herself a valuable member of the household. What she doesn’t know is that Hansu immediately buys the watch from the pawnbroker.
Return to Korea …
The year is 1989. Sunja (Youn Yuh-jung) and her son (Soji Arai) are touring the markets of Busan, Korea, she last saw when she was a young woman. She empties Kyunghee’s ashes into the sea, a place she last saw when her son was still in her womb. They want to also visit her father’s grave, but it’s been moved since she lived here. They have to go through paperwork and bureaucratic rigmarole, but they’re given a lead.
Solomon is reeling from his meltdown last week. He goes to a wedding and hears bad news about how his reputation has changed overnight. The only person who makes him feel better about his decision is Naomi (Anna Sawai). She likes the version of him she’s seen since he blew up the deal, and she also knows about his phone calls to Hana (Mari Yamamoto), his missing ex-girlfriend.
They’ve known each other since they were 14. Apparently his dad was dating Hana’s mother Etsuko (Kaho Minami) for a time, and that’s how they met. Their courtship ended when he left for America and she ran away from home.
Inspired, he starts looking in the streets for her but instead finds an old friend who brings him to his shared apartment for dinner. Suddenly he feels at home, welcome and taken care of. Just as he tries to call his boss Tom (Jimmi Simpson) to give him a hot tip that might save his job, Hana calls him screaming. She’s in danger.
To be burdened with dreams
This is largely an episode about the quiet struggle of living someplace you don’t feel at home. The flood of memories that greets Sunja when she returns to Korea, the sudden sadness that comes when her father’s grave isn’t where she left it, the way Solomon only starts to feel at home when he runs into a friend (who, like Hana, ran away from his old life), the way Sunja feels so alienated in Japan as a younger woman.
We don’t get a lot of plot this week, but we do enjoy plenty of excellently handled interactions.
Naomi and Solomon’s little chat has the same fractured dynamic they’ve had all season. Solomon talks a big game about how Naomi’s careerism is sad and square. But he also clearly looks down on her because she’s a woman.
He hasn’t seen strong female role models all his life, so he still harbors a super-antiquated view of women. He doesn’t know, for instance (as we do), everything his grandmother did to ensure a future for herself, her son and eventually Solomon. I’m hoping they humble him down the road, but then it wouldn’t be unrealistic if he ends the season the same stubborn heel he was when we meet him. It is the ’80s after all.
Subtle and strong
Meanwhile, the quietly devastating stuff with the pocket watch and the fabric shows not just the writing and Minha Kim’s performance at all-time highs, but also makes for a fascinating little study of the textural differences between Japan and Korea.
It’s a huge part of Pachinko’s dynamic. Feeling and smelling cloth, seeing the inside of a watch — these are acts as intimate for Sunja as is her lovemaking with Isak. (Which, it must be said, is handled delicately and is also deeply sensuous.)
Pachinko would work an awful lot less without time taken out the plot to show the little things that break Sunja’s heart and humble Solomon along their paths. It isn’t always the big things that make a home.
Watch Pachinko on Apple TV+
New episodes of Pachinko arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
