Pachinko is a dense show — not only with plot and character but with history and context. Last season’s finale concluded with a mini-documentary of interviews with real-life Korean women who had come to Japan under circumstances similar to Sunja’s. This expansion doubled as an argument for the value of adaptation: In different hands and a different medium, the same material can open up new possibilities of understanding the story.
I’ve mentioned the sparseness of Min Jin Lee’s prose before — her book is more than 400 pages long, but it also spans more than 60 years in chronological order, so it can only accommodate so much attention to any given period. The show, meanwhile, luxuriates in the details of everyday life for the Baek family across time. It also works to fill in some of the gaps the novel leaves to the imagination.
In the novel, when Yoseb suddenly arrives at the farm after the bombing of Nagasaki, we have no clue what his life might have been like in the interim years. In one of their boldest departures from the book, in “Chapter Thirteen,” showrunners David Mitchell and Soo Hugh lift the curtain on the unspeakable tragedy of Yoseb’s experience. Like the show itself, it’s a dense episode, probably the most intricate yet this season.
By the end of it, everything has changed for every single character. Nagasaki, 1945 “Chapter Thirteen” opens on a roughly 13-minute black-and-white segment detailing the week before America’s unconscionable se.