by Kay Curry
Northwest Asia Weekly
The cast of “Pinball Machine” at the world premiere. (Image courtesy of AppleTV+)
“What if you could create a show where the third generation had at least some kind of thematic conversation with the first generation? The sacrifices of the first generation and the burdens of the third generation…I think every family has Junja…whether you are Koreans, whether you come from an immigrant family or not. This experience of leaving your hometown and starting a new life elsewhere is because you want a better experience for your children.”
The goals of the TV adaptation of the best-selling novel “Pinball Machine” are grand — as screenwriter and executive producer Su Xiu puts it.
Lee Min Ho’s book and the show tell the saga of three generations of a Korean family whose matriarch Sunja (played by two actresses Kim Min-ha as the young and Yuh-Jung Youn as the older), immigrated to Korea during the Japanese colonization of Korea. Japan. The family struggles with hardship, which, as the show’s first “chapter” suggests, is due to a curse. As can be expected, the trials and tribulations of living in poverty under Japanese rule, but more of a constant and eternal burden of racism and a sense of not belonging – to this day – no matter where you are. The parents in the story do their best to instill good values, self-awareness, and a sense of destiny in their children, but it still feels somber.
Well said by a fisherman in the episode “Chapter 1” that no matter how hard Koreans try to fit in, they won’t be accepted by the Japanese, even if at the same time Koreans should behave like Japanese.
“Let’s do our best to enjoy our little victory,” he said. “They will never see us as one of them.”
In addition to the family curse that Sunja’s mother Yang Jin (Jung In Ji) already believes exists, the fisherman hints that South Korean children will be cursed forever from this moment on because they harbor hatred in their hearts for their unfortunate fate.
Whether in Korea itself, Japan, or outside of Asia, like Sunja’s grandson Solomon (Jin Ha), who worked for a while in a big company, Koreans never have a home.
The news sounds real. Unfortunately, the book is full of tropes (poor girl gets pregnant by a rich married man – that’s what the rest of the story is all about), and the retelling in visual form is woody and overdone. The TV series features magnificent views of Shunzi’s hometown of mountains and mirror-like waters, but each scene is full of meaning, as if the simplest transactions are inseparable from the burden of fate. Even so, when something really horrific happens, like a murder at the hands of Japanese officials, it’s by far the least impactful part of the story, most of the violence is hidden, and the officials act like robots (perhaps on purpose). – Robots – like Japanese soldiers, slaves of imperialism?).
Honestly, it fits the book very well, and it has a similar feeling that fate constantly intervenes in everyday life. In all fairness, the family’s daily life was extraordinary in its rigour. Once immigrated to Japan, they lived in a Korean ghetto known as Ikaino and were often harassed because of their race. To the Japanese, they are animals, dirty and hopeless – although their poverty and “dirty” are the fault of the environment the Japanese put them in. In the story, Sunja is linked to the gangster Hansu of Korean descent, and her married ex-lover keeps an eye on her as she is raising his son. Feeling that she has to do anything to keep her family afloat and give her children a better chance, Sunja eventually accepts Hansu’s help.However, this led to conflict within the family (the show focuses on the relationship between Sunja and her pastor husband, Isaac) [(Steve Sang-Hyun Noh]) Yes, Mozazu[ (Soji Ara]i) and his son Solomon, the third generation).
This extra “curse” associated with the gangster underworld runs through the story.
To me, this is too much a matter of principle. A moral question in the story is, does it matter how you get your money? I agree there are really bad ways to do this like implicit gangsterism, but we don’t see a lot of it – Han Su and his relatives are quite polite on screen. What we see is people doing what they can to make a living under an oppressive regime.
“Clean money. Dirty money. No difference. Money money,” said Ko Yaesawa, a pachinko shop worker, echoing Hansu’s point that in times of recession, you have to get by anyway. . This is part of the title. Mosazu ended up in the pachinko business and it thrived, but because of the gambling involved, pachinko was considered a shabby business. Not only does it symbolize this money quandary, but the nature of life that depends partly on talent, but mostly on luck — which the family has little to offer.
I think I’ve ended the story of one bad thing after another. A place where good people die or can never rest. The troubled matriarch is the heroine simply because she survived it. Once upon a time these types of stories would fascinate me, certainly for those who celebrated the book as a masterpiece and might enjoy the show, it’s a story that teaches empathy, teaches history, which warns against racism and The injustice and pain of war. This is great news for anyone who is new to it and still needs to digest it.
Everything about this drama is too “precious” to me, and the performances of several famous actors just don’t make up for it. The slow pace – like when Han Su first met Sunja for a long time in agony and paralleled her movements in the market like he will always parallel her life – is too exaggerated. we know. This portends something.
It’s hard to visually mean something so beautiful and so beautiful so frustratingly. The main difference between a book and a TV show is also hard to accept, even if any adaptation is to be expected. For example, the role of Sunja’s father, Hoonie (Lee Dae Ho), while we already knew he meant the world to his family, has now grown considerably. In the books, we get the impression that Sunja’s mother was always there during her childhood, but in the TV show, Hoonie was always there to radiate wisdom and make memories. He talks about how he will always be there to protect her, but of course you know he won’t. He said he knew he had to “get stronger to cast out the shadows of this world”. But “soon you’ll be strong yourself,” he told Sunja, “and you’ll have to prove yourself worthy too.” Indeed.
Kay can reach info@nwasianweekly.com.
