Pachinko Recap: Mercy Is Not a Gift
So far, Pachinko has done an excellent job balancing the demands of a large cast of characters living through various time periods. Still, while mostly swift, the two-timeline approach risks putting one at the mercy of the other, as if we are coming to understand the characters through memory rather than action. In Min Jin Lee’s book, which is told chronologically, the characters aren’t puzzled together as much as unraveled over the course of several years.
Pachinko’s adaptation of the sweeping timespan of the novel isn’t a flaw — it raises the dramatic stakes by continually teasing the gap between how things started and how they might turn out — but it can pitfall into exposition. I felt like the air had been let out of “Chapter Ten” in certain spots; the imposition to separate the storylines into chunks dragged out their events more than increased their tension. Solomon’s plot line in this episode, for example, felt stripped of momentum. Had the scene between him and the Korean landowner been played out continuously, we might have felt the turn in her perspective more sharply; as it stands, cut up into bits, it took me by surprise that she’d agreed to sell after all when all along her objection had less to do with Abe than with her determination to hold onto the home she had to make for herself. Similarly, Isak’s long, painful death felt masochistic by the time it reached its inevitable end. I love these characters, and I feel for them, but one of these feelings isn’t born out of the other. I almost felt like I wanted to pull them out of there — to relieve them from the narrative tyranny of their suffering.
But a lot happens before either of these conclusions comes to pass. Let us go through the events of “Chapter Ten.”
1945
When the episode opens, the Baek family’s neighborhood is blanketed in the uneasy calm that is the tell-tale sign disaster is about to strike. Mozasu plays war with his friends, one of whom wears an eerily prescient gas mask. A Japanese official mounted on a bicycle gives this boy’s mother a note: immediately, she begins to cry. Picked up by his older brother, Mozasu asks if Noa thinks his friend’s father’s body will ever be found. Though he doesn’t shy away from honesty when he tells Mozasu that it depends on how much of the body has been found, he also sweetly reassures his kid brother that God is watching over them.
Later that day, while Mozasu helps Kyunghee bring in the stuff from the clotheslines in time for the storm, Isak literally falls back into the house as if his son’s wisdom had summoned him. He is so beat up that, at first, he’s unrecognizable — Noa can’t be completely sure it’s him until Kyunghee turns him over on the floor. Sunja sees her husband’s condition and resolves to find a doctor, and Kyunghee wonders, not unreasonably, if it’s too late. Isak’s lips are cracked, his eyes yellowed, and his skin is a somber gray. We’re reminded of what it was like for Isak to bring Sunja to Japan in the middle of her pregnancy — he clutches her, begging her not to leave, in much the same way she’d hung onto him on the boat. But this is Sunja we’re talking about, and she won’t give up so easily. Neither, she reminds Kyunghee, would Isak: “He has beaten death before,” she reminds her sister-in-law.
The boys stay home with their aunt while Sunja goes off to find a doctor. They’re both given tasks, and it’s at once heartbreaking and spiriting how eagerly they jump on the opportunity to make themselves part of their father’s rescue. On Isak’s request, Noa goes to find Pastor Hu — the same man who, in “Chapter Nine,” encouraged Noa to be patient with his seemingly indifferent teacher — while Mozasu goes to send a telegram to Yoseb in Nagasaki. Kyunghee imparts the seriousness of the job to Mozasu — Yoseb must receive this note — and Mozasu does his job perfectly, charming even the grave-looking man behind the counter. Rushing into the church, Noa begs Pastor Hu to come along and pray with his father. “I’ve tried so hard to be good,” he says, unbearably. “The Lord cannot look away this time. Not again.”
Meanwhile, Sunja is on her own mission. She has no choice but to see Hansu, the only person who might be able to find an available doctor — most of them are working on the frontlines. Though her dignity is unshakeable, we also know that Sunja will stop at nothing to protect her family, so it’s not altogether surprising when she agrees mutely to Hansu’s proposal. He was the one who took Isak out of prison, of course — when Sunja asks why now, he explains that he was finally able to do it by promising an officer and his family safe passage out of the city — and he’ll find Isak a doctor, “the best the city has left.” In exchange, Sunja, Kyunghee, and the boys will follow him to a shelter, with or without Isak. It’s a cold move, even for Hansu. That he could manipulate a woman this way while her husband is on the verge of death and her sons are vulnerable to a bombing campaign is … I guess in line with his character.
In a moment foreshadowing the hustling man he will become, Mozasu tells Isak about his plans to be very rich. Isak tries to remind him sagely that “true wealth is to be loved.” Mozasu speaks for us all when he counters: “I want to be both loved and rich.” I keep having to swallow large knots in my throat whenever little Mozasu is in scene. As Isak labors to laugh with his son while he still can, the power goes out in their house. While Kyunghee goes to fetch some lanterns, Mozasu hands his father a toy airplane to hold on to “so [he’s] not scared.”
But for all of his advice, Isak leaves Mozasu’s dreams for the future intact. It’s Noa whose innocence shatters all at once when Pastor Hu finally makes it to the house. Almost immediately, Isak identifies him as the traitor. It was Hu who turned Isak into the police; a nasty thing to do, but to his credit, Hu doesn’t flinch from admitting his own guilt. He owns up to his ego and his pride, saying he became jealous of the attention Pastor Yoo showered on Isak once he’d arrived in Osaka. He looks hurt and ashamed. Isak forgives him immediately; their conversation is a favor to Hu, a moment of true grace. Knowing that Hu has been living with the guilt of his betrayal, Isak gives him a chance to admit to it and be forgiven before it’s too late. Isak is so good; he’s basically saintly. Part of Noa and Mozasu’s burden is carrying that oppressive goodness.
Granted, he’s still young, but Noa is not happy to follow his father’s lead. Understandably, he tells Hu that he will never forgive him, ever. Isak tries to plead with him, explaining that “mercy is not a gift or power. Mercy is an admission … survival comes at a cost.” Noa might’ve been too young and angry to understand the motivations behind his father’s act, but it seems like Isak hopes one day it’ll all come together for him. Desperate to make good on the little time he has left, Isak tries to cram his sons with wisdom. But it’s this sentiment that rings crystal clear above all the others: “No matter what, you are my sons, and I am your father.”
Sunja finally arrives with the doctor, who explains that Isak has sepsis, and only a few more hours to live. The doctor, while efficient and direct about the bad news he has to deliver, is clearly shaken by the patient’s state. He makes sure to point out that what had been done to Isak was “a terrible thing.” After announcing that there’s nothing he can do, he leaves, and Isak has his last moments lying in bed with Sunja. It’s awful: He wants to live, he wants to see the boys grow up, he wants more time. Sunja promises him that the boys will thrive. It was here that I started to get the feeling that this moment was dragging on too long — after seeing him have his last conversations with several other characters, by the time it was Sunja’s turn, I was all worn out. I’m not suggesting that things should be sugar-coated or that the difficult lives of these characters shouldn’t be presented truthfully with all their difficulties, but that a gentler approach might have been more effective. In the book, Lee’s prose is sparse, almost ascetic; when something tragic happens, it hits you with all the blunt force of a hammer. In the show, watching Isak die for minutes on end, I start to question why exactly we have to see him beg for air. In this episode, the biggest and most moving revelation of his character happens when he has Noa witness his forgiveness of Pastor Hu. I’m not sure what we learn about him by watching him take his slow, painful last breaths.
Anyway, Sunja reminds her children that there will never be another man like Isak, and she is probably right. They have a procession for him, and as his coffin is being pushed into the crematorium, alarms go off overhead. It’s an air raid, no longer a threat, now a reality; they must run to shelter. Sunja doesn’t want to leave her husband’s body, but Kyunghee pulls her away towards safety.
1989
In Tokyo, meanwhile, Solomon is doing his own begging. Leaving all pride aside, he sits with Abe-san at a bar, the Businessman of the Year trophy sitting squarely in between them. Plainly, Solomon tells him: “I came to beg for mercy.” At first, you almost think Abe might be moved, or at least that he might show some regret about how relentlessly he has squashed Solomon’s hopes and dreams. But his motivation, it turns out, is plain and simple. Abe admits that the two of them have much in common — growing up in prosperous families, they’ve developed an iron will to come out on top. But that’s also why showing Solomon any mercy is impossible. Abe’s bludgeoning of Solomon is a message to the rest of Tokyo: Don’t fuck with him.
It’s unclear why Abe seems to need Solomon as a cautionary tale since, in general, he telegraphs don’t-fuck-with-me pretty strongly. In any case, his bluntness is enough to send Solomon back to the Korean landowner’s house, looking for … something; it’s a bit unclear what. Forgiveness? Commiseration? To tell her that she was right, in that way that can sometimes seem to absolve us of our mistakes? He begs her to come in, and when he does, he sees that her house is vandalized; on her walls, phrases like “get out” have been spray-painted. Right away, Solomon confesses that her house has been targeted because of him; he’d made a deal with “someone” (wink-wink, Yoshii) to try and force her out so they could buy the plot of land from her and sell it in a deal to Shiffley’s and Abe. In hindsight, it seems silly that Solomon would’ve thought intimidation would work on this woman; this is a person, he must have forgotten, who refused 1 billion yen. Her sense of resolve is so outsized that she should be the one intimidating others. Trying to explain himself, Solomon argues: “Isn’t that how it goes? We all turn on each other for the sake of our own survival, not realizing we’re doing the work for them.”
That, of course, is exactly what the landowner had been trying to explain to Solomon all along. His openness disarms her, and she ends up telling him that she’d bought that plot of land for peanuts in the aftermath of the war. Nobody wanted to touch it because of a rumor that corpses had been brought there to be buried, a fact she had to forget to live there. Immediately, Solomon’s gears start turning. The man is just obsessed with finding a little scheme.
Solomon’s machiavellian plan is to sell the plot to Abe and then re-spread the rumor of the corpses widely. His guess is that if they knew there were bones buried in the land, Colton Hotels would never want to buy and develop it; by keeping Abe-san in the dark, though, they would be ensuring that Abe would get himself in a mountain of debt with no prospect of making that money back. Knowing that this is a bad time to take out a loan, Solomon’s long view is that the deal will ruin Abe financially while making tons of money for the landowner — and himself. When he bursts into Yoshii’s office to relay his new plan, he makes it clear that the two of them would walk away with 10 percent on the deal. He has that look again, the same one he took on when Tetsuya called him at the parlor last week to tell him he was going to have to pull out of the investment. The most important thing, he clarifies to Yoshii, is that Abe will know exactly who was behind his financial ruin.
Solomon’s ego is obviously ginormous, but as he tries to convince the landowner to just take the money, he also shows he can see past himself. It’s not lost on him why she might resent him; why even his own grandmother might resent him, for the relative ease of his difficulties in the face of what they had to go through. But not unlike the landowner herself, Solomon’s determination is made out of steel. He will not rest until he can get what he wants in the way he wants it. Abe-san will have no choice but to praise him for a hand well-played.
Pinball Thoughts
• I kept wondering how it could be possible that Abe, or Colton Hotels, wouldn’t have known about the plot of land’s cursed reputation. From the way he has approached business, it doesn’t seem like much gets past Abe. An investment that had been promised over lunch somehow found its way to his ears on that very same night. How could he have missed this seemingly huge asterisk in the description of this land?