Pachinko S1E1 Review: A girl is born under occupation, a grandson tries to outrun it
Kogonada's premiere braids 1910s Busan and 1989 Tokyo into one inheritance, watching a family choose survival as a daily, deliberate act.
The first hour of Pachinko opens on a woman kneeling before her in-laws’ altar, confessing that three sons have died before their first birthday and that she fears a curse runs in her blood. Almost as soon as the show has shown us that grief, it cuts to a banker on a high floor in New York being told he has not gotten the promotion he was promised. The premiere asks viewers to hold those two scenes in the same hand, then keeps doing it for the next fifty minutes. By the end, the same family has produced a daughter who refuses to be sold short at a fish stall and a grandson who knows exactly which bonuses to negotiate in writing. The throughline is not nostalgia. It is the long shape of survival under empire, refracted through one bloodline.
A boarding-house prayer and a corporate refusal share the same hour
The premiere’s opening minutes are structured as a kind of chord. Inji Jeong’s Yangjin tells her ancestors that her father offered her up gladly to a family whose son had a cleft lip, that she has tried to do right by her husband, and that three boys have already been buried. Her voice never rises. The shame is folded so tightly into the language that it could pass for politeness.
Cut to 1989. Jin Ha as Solomon Baek sits in a Manhattan conference room while a senior banker tells him the 43rd floor has decided he is not ready. Solomon lists his wins flatly: the Teestone merger, the Brixley buyout, top of his leaderboard for two years running. None of it moves the verdict. When he comes back with a pitch later that hour, he names the deal that could change his number, and he names what he wants in exchange: VP title, raise backdated to that day’s date, year-end bonus reflective of the firm’s payday, all in writing.
Two scenes, two negotiations, both about being held in a house that will not call you family. Yangjin asks her in-laws’ ancestors to lift the curse. Solomon asks the 43rd floor for a contract. Director Kogonada lets the bargaining sit side by side without forcing the metaphor. The show trusts the rhyme to land on its own.
Sunja’s market lesson is the show’s quiet thesis
The middle stretch belongs to young Sunja, played as a child by an unnamed young actor and later, as a teenager, by Minha Kim. Her father, the boarding-house fisherman with a cleft lip whose marriage we just heard described from the altar, takes her to the Busan fish market. The Japanese police drag a vendor away mid-sentence. He begs. They tell him to beg at the station. Sunja, very small, asks her father if the man did something bad. He answers carefully: nowadays it is hard to judge guilt or innocence.
Then he takes her to Mr. Kim’s fish-cake stall and lets her negotiate. The merchant tries to lowball at thirty. Sunja, polite and unbluffable, says the catch is worth three times that and threatens to walk it down the aisle to the daegu jorim man who paid double for a smaller fish. Mr. Kim laughs and lands at eighty. He tries to hand her a coin for her work. She refuses on instinct. Her father lets her take it.
The scene is brief, but everything Pachinko wants to say about its women is in it. Sunja learns three things in roughly six minutes of screen time: that the state can take a man from a market for sentences he has not finished saying; that the right price exists and you can name it without raising your voice; and that kindness, when it is offered, can be received without losing standing. The vendor jokes that she will not be satisfied running a boarding house. The premiere lets that line breathe because the rest of the show already knows it is true.
Her father’s later vow to her, told in two parts across two scenes, anchors the hour’s emotional spine. He explains that when she was a week old he promised to ward off all the ugliness of the world for as long as she drew breath. Later, dying of what looks like tuberculosis as a radio announces the death of Emperor Hirohito on the second timeline, he tells her he had once wondered why happiness passed him by, until her mother arrived, and then she did, and he understood he had to prove himself worthy of them. The premiere is brave enough to give that speech and trust the actor playing Sunja’s father to underplay it. Nothing in his face announces that the speech is a goodbye. The audience figures it out before Sunja does.
Mr. Song, a song, and the cost of saying the obvious
The boarding-house dinner scene is the premiere’s most disquieting sequence and the one that most clearly signals what kind of show this intends to be. The boarders sing a Korean sea song around the table. Sunja’s father praises Mr. Song’s lucky daughter and incredible wife. Then Mr. Song, drunk on rice wine and grief, lays out the indictment plainly. They took the land. They took the rice and the potatoes and the fish. They told Korean women to stop wearing white. They make us eat like them, talk like them, and still see us as outsiders. If each of us killed one of them, he says, we might at least sleep better.
The men around the table tell him to stop. Sunja’s father patches the room with hospitality and sends everyone to bed. By morning, Mr. Song is gone and the police are at the boarding house door. The officer asks about Mr. Song’s whereabouts, then turns slowly to the host. The interrogation is calibrated to humiliate. Sunja’s father is shouted down for speaking out of turn. The officer warns there will be no second chances, then compliments Yangjin’s cooking and tells her he will be back to see if it is as good as they say.
The episode then shows what happened to Mr. Song. He is dragged through the village, beaten, and forced to keep walking. He sings the sea song from the boarding-house table. The officers tell him to be quiet. He sings louder. The blows land. Sunja, watching from the crowd, learns the fourth thing the premiere is teaching her: that the people who speak the truth out loud are removed, and that the song they were singing five minutes ago does not stop them from being removed.
It is a brutal sequence, and Kogonada films it with the same composure as the fish-market haggle. The camera does not punish the audience with the violence. It refuses to look away from the singing either. The choice is the show’s ethical signature.
Solomon’s Tokyo and the grandmother who sees through him
The 1989 thread, which threads in and out of the period story, has a different texture but the same nerve. Solomon flies to Osaka, hugs his father, gets ribbed by Goto-san, and gets called the son of a pachinko man by Hirota. The gentle teasing comes packaged with a televised news item about Mr. Yoshii, a financier whose grandfather’s record makes him untrusted, and whose preferred line is that his grandfather is dead and gone and nothing to do with him. Solomon’s father, sliding pachinko balls into a machine, says clean money and dirty money make no difference. Money is money.
The scene with Solomon’s grandmother is the premiere’s other emotional load-bearing wall. Youn Yuh-jung as the older Sunja makes him fetch an egg, scolds him for being too thin, scolds his father in absentia for being a slave to his work, and tells him she knows he is ashamed of the pachinko parlor whether he says it or not. She knows what shame looks like, she says, because she has a lot of experience with it. Then she asks him straight whether he is going back to America. He answers as if it were a logistical question. She tells him he is safer there. He asks what he is supposed to be safer from. The scene does not answer. The hour does.
The grief that haunts Solomon’s present is Hana, a childhood friend whose old hairclips he still keeps and whose disappearance he still pays a detective to look into. Etsuko, Hana’s mother, finds the clips in his bag and asks why he keeps them. He says sentimental reasons. The conversation closes with Etsuko telling him his mother would be proud of him, which is the closest the premiere gets to releasing him from anything.
What this episode argues
Pachinko is a show about inheritance and the premiere announces this without lecturing about it. Yangjin’s curse, the police officer’s threat, Mr. Song’s song, the father’s vow, and Solomon’s wishlist of contract terms are all the same gesture made in different languages. Each character is bargaining with a system designed to disown them, and each is being asked to keep their voice down while doing it.
The trilingual fluidity of the episode is part of its argument, not decoration. Korean for the boarding house. Japanese for the police interrogation and the Osaka kitchen. English for the New York promotion meeting. The show does not gloss the political tilt of any one tongue; it lets the audience feel which language carries which threat. When Solomon switches into Japanese to charm Goto and into English to negotiate his bonus, the language itself is the negotiation. The same way Sunja learning to price a fish at eighty is the negotiation.
Verdict
The premiere of Pachinko is uncommonly assured for a show this ambitious. Kogonada balances four time periods and three languages without ever letting the structure feel like a stunt, and the writing trusts its actors to underplay the heaviest material. Youn Yuh-jung in two short kitchen scenes establishes the grandmother who will carry the rest of the season. The young Sunja sequence at the fish market is the kind of small, exact filmmaking most prestige dramas attempt and very few achieve.
The hour’s only minor friction is structural: the cross-cutting between the boarding-house arrest and Solomon’s New York refusal is so deliberate that a first-time viewer may briefly hold the show at arm’s length while learning its grammar. By the time the Hirohito broadcast bleeds into Sunja’s father’s deathbed speech, the grammar has snapped into focus and the premiere has earned the size of its claim. This is a show that takes Korean colonial history seriously as a subject, not a backdrop, and asks its audience to take it just as seriously.
Rating: 9.0/10