The novel on which this series is based was published in 2017 in the United States, being a finalist for the National Book Awards. Its writer is Min Jin Lee, a Korean-American journalist and writer based in Manhattan. Pachinko was her second novel, and the title refers to a video game gambling machine shop that Koreans arriving in Japan were known for. Although these places were and still are very popular, their owners are despised as owners of a business that seeks to avoid taxes by offering addictive and unhealthy entertainment. This metaphor serves to explain the difficulty of surviving with dignity in a society marked by social class and nationality.

The creator of this series is Soo Hugh, who only had in her career a minor series, The Invisibles, a very unmemorable Sci-Fi fiction about a kind of children possessed by an evil spirit. In Pachinko he has chosen an excellent screenwriter and director for the first four episodes. Kogonada is a South Korean-born American filmmaker well known for his audiovisual film essays and a terrific debut feature(Columbus, 2017), currently available on the Filmin platform.

From the credit titles of the series it is clear that we are before a synthesis of the non-American and Oriental cinematography, in the line of films such as The Farewell (2017) or Minari. Historia de mi familia (2020), far surpassing these two internationally award-winning precedents. It is easy to discover in the series traces of the work of great masters of Japanese cinema such as Ozu or Koreeda, but also of American cinema such as Douglas Sirk. All of them were analyzed by Kogonada in his previous work, and it is clear that he has taken them on with a lot of criteria.

Pachinko has a soap opera plot told with the sensitivity of great artists, showing the lives of several generations of survivors in which pain and hope, mediocrity and heroism overlap. The family is shown as the only enduring fortress, a source of silent epic, capable of sealing humanity from the temptations of cynicism and the most terminal self-pity. The acting, the detailed shots, the locations and the music are imbued with a minimalist style that makes the series moving and subtle like very few others.

Apple TV+ confirms a profound conversion in the last year, which has gone from being the forgotten little sister of the platforms to consolidate itself as one of the main generators of audiovisual creativity worldwide thanks to such original titles as Pachinko, Schmigadoon, Slow Horses or Separation.

Signature: Claudio Sánchez