A Tale Only As Old As Time

One self-contained multigenerational epic that refutes all mythmaking.

years ago, while watching The Forsyte Saga, the 2002 adaptation of John Galsworthy’s gargantuan family drama, I began to wonder what it would be like to watch a television series that continues forever. It could be roughly like that one, I thought, or like the TV version of Roots: the story of how one bloodline registers enormous historical events on an intimate scale, told through each new generation as a barometer for the world in f lux. It’s a thought experiment, one that gets to ignore all the logistical reasons a show like that is essentially impossible.

Pachinko, the new adaptation of Min Jin Lee’s generational saga about a Korean family, is not a realization of my imagined forever story, but

it achieves all the same feats of scope and sharpness. The series slides among several decades at once: The protagonist, Sunja, is born in early-20th-century Korea, and

Pachinko spends time with her in her early childhood (when she’s played by Yuna), in her young adulthood (played by Minha Kim), and when she is a grandmother (Yuh-jung Youn). Sunja’s life encompasses multiple titanic changes in both the history of the world and of her family. As a child, Sunja lives in Japanese-occupied Korea and grows up with the omnipresence of colonial rule. As a young adult, she moves to Japan. By the time she’s elderly, her family has put down roots in both Japan and the

U.S. while maintaining a bedrock of Korean culture and identity.

Although Pachinko moves freely in and out of periods in Sunja’s life (chiefly her young adulthood in the 1920s and her grandson’s early adulthood in the 1980s), it does so in a way that resists frantic flashback-style finger-pointing. Its pace is urgent but measured. Gaps in Sunja’s life allow for surprise and discovery, but the series avoids clean, overly ordered logic. When new pieces of Sunja’s history slot into place, they tend to arrive only after you’ve roughly sussed out what they must look like, giving Pachinko’s revelations the weight of poignant inevitability. That

Pachinko entirely dodges plodding obviousness, though, feels almost like magic: It’s not quite genealogy as puzzle box, and it’s not lineage as personality test, either. Each era in Sunja’s life has its own rhythm and internal momentum. When parallels occur, or when one story’s events answer some question that arose elsewhere, those moments come quietly.

It all makes Pachinko a family epic that satisfies the minute, glorious, devastating human drama—marriages, deaths, pregnancies, affairs, gossip, betrayal, and romance. Throughout, the series is transformed by the performances of each Sunja. Youn is excellent as the elder iteration, and Kim is absolutely astounding as Sunja in her youth. There is a clarity to Kim’s performance that becomes the foundation on which the whole series rests: Every eventual transformative twist and turn in the family history seems to stem from a specific flash of emotion across her face, the code that translates

Pachinko’s immense historical weight into palpable human reality. She is also a boulder in a river, resisting the rush of overwhelming events and preventing her family from getting swept away. So many of the other performances are fantastic—especially that of Lee Minho as Koh Hansu, a figure who becomes the specter of an alternate history for Sunja— but they all exist as reflections of and responses to Kim’s Sunja.

If the drama did not work on a tiny, individual level, there’d be no grounding it. The most straightforward version sees the family as a microcosm of a particular historical thread: Sunja’s family as a window into all the pain and horror of occupation. Pachinko, though, is too deft and much, much too careful to spin another uncomplicated progress narrative. It is not a series about glorifying a simpler, more authentic past, and it is not a celebration of a more comfortable, more technologically complex modernity. If anything, it’s an admirable portrait of Sunja’s resilience. Even then, Pachinko avoids slipping into wholehearted boosterism for its protagonist. She is remarkable, and she is ordinary, and Pachinko does not see those as conflicting truths.

I have longed for an infinite family drama that can strikingly refute so many myths. Those set against a volatile timeline put the lie to shortsighted “arc of history bends toward justice” stories. They are also reminders that our current experience of a nightmarish too-muchness is not special or unprecedented. We cannot get distance from our now, but we can see a family story play out for nearly a century and feel shaken out of the unbearable intensity of being blinded by current events.

Pachinko’s opening credits are an almost uncannily precise distillation of the series: After a montage of images evoking the dark past, it shifts to a brightly lit pachinko parlor—the titular game of chance—where cast members from each era dance with ecstatic abandon to the Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live for Today.” It flattens the Pachinko timeline. Here they all are at once, while the lyrics “Live for today/And don’t worry ’bout tomorrow” play over them. Pachinko is an incredible expression of that idea and a rebuke to my desire for a perpetual TV show that I won’t soon forget. ■