![]() “We bestow on these idiots all our progress, our schools, our education only to have a cripple spew lies in our face,” says one, on the morning after the drunken fisherman’s seditious rant. ![]() Pachinko opens on an idyllic Korean island, blighted byJapanese officers straight out of the sadistic rotters’ playbook. Pachinko sophisticatedly cuts across continents and eras, from a rustic fishing village under the Japanese yoke in 1915, to braces-wearing financial workers greed-brokering deals on green computer screens in 1989 New York and Tokyo. It reminds me of the historical television dramas I grew up with – Roots, Tenko, The Forsyte Saga. It’s a vast, sumptuous, dynastic political TV series of the kind scarcely made any more, complete with swooning strings from Nico Muhly’s score. ![]() This adaptation (Apple TV+) brings to life a Korea you would never have gleaned from Squid Game or K-pop. He meant the so-called Zainichi – Koreans, often compelled to leave their homeland after losing their livelihoods under colonial rule and winding up uprooted, anxious second-class citizens in Japan. Tash Aw in the Guardian praised the novel as “a rich tribute to a people that history seems intent on erasing”. ![]() It journeys through colonial Korea, the second world war, the allied occupation of Japan, the Korean war, to Japan’s high-growth period – all refracted through the prism of one family. When Min Jin Lee’s bestselling novel, Pachinko, was published in 2017, it was hailed as a sweeping historical epic spanning a rich era of modern east Asian history. ![]()
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