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Pachinko Recap: Mercy Is Not a Gift
It’s awe-inspiring and excruciating to watch these characters endure such painful struggles.
Pachinko ’s adaptation of the sweeping timespan of the novel isn’t a flaw — it raises the dramatic stakes by continually teasing the gap between how things started and how they might turn out — but it can pitfall into exposition. Had the scene between him and the Korean landowner been played out continuously, we might have felt the turn in her perspective more sharply; as it stands, cut up into bits, it took me by surprise that she’d agreed to sell after all when all along her objection had less to do with Abe than with her determination to hold onto the home she had to make for herself. His guess is that if they knew there were bones buried in the land, Colton Hotels would never want to buy and develop it; by keeping Abe-san in the dark, though, they would be ensuring that Abe would get himself in a mountain of debt with no prospect of making that money back.
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