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Pachinko Recap: Mutual Distrust
The show’s pace threatens to short-change the smaller parts of the story that I care about most.
While at various times in the first half of the season, the stakes for the family were extremely high — survival and safety foremost among them — as we’ve progressed, the story has mostly shifted gears into domestic melodrama territory, with the exception of the Nagasaki interlude in “Chapter Thirteen.” Under a bilingual banner that reads “Our Noa is going to Waseda University!”, people are talking, drinking, eating, and crying, and the spirits are so high that not even the arrival of Hansu in a white linen suit can spoil the moment for Sunja. No doubt satisfied with his son’s excellent effort, Hansu’s mind is free to focus on other things: Yoshii Isamu, Kurogane’s marriage to his daughter Keiko, and Kim’s nagging idea about leaving Japan to go fight in Korea, which we’ll get to a bit later.
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