“Pachinko,” a beautifully wrought historical melodrama, is back for its necessary second season, to fill in some holes, fiddle with loose ends and extend the story even farther beyond the borders of Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel. It is a transitional season, which ends with little resolved and gaps still to fill, and while it offers all the sensual pleasures of the first season’s performances and production, its portion of love and death, it is very much the middle of a book.
Unlike the novel, which proceeds chronologically, the series, returning Friday on Apple TV+, alternates between the “present day” — 1989 Osaka — and the evolving story that gets us there. Season 1 began in 1915 before the birth of main character Sunja (Minha Kim) in Japanese-occupied Korea, then followed her through her country-girl youth into a romance with handsome, dangerous Hansu (Lee Minho). An unexpected pregnancy led to a marriage of convenience, later affection, with Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), a Christian preacher; together they moved to Osaka to join his brother Yoseb (Junwoo Han) and wife, Kyunghee (Eunchae Jung), where they become Zainichi, the term for Koreans living in Japan — a population much discriminated against. (Incidents of prejudice dot the current season, almost as a reminder of what the first season firmly established.)
That storyline got us to 1938. The new season picks up in early 1945 (skipping much of the novel), and times are difficult as Japan fearfully braces for an American attack; Sunja and Kyunghee eke out a living selling kimchi, and the cabbage has almost run out. Sunja’s children, Noa (Kang Hoon Kim), her son with Hansu, and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon), her son with Isak, have grown accordingly. Noa, who is unaware of his birth father and takes after his adoptive father, is shy and studious, Mozasu brash and unsuited to study. Isak is in prison, having been arrested last season for rabble-rousing; Yoseb is working in a munitions factory in Nagasaki, which should raise an eyebrow. But a friendly new character, Mr. Kim (Kim Sungkyu), is hanging around helpfully, and Hansu, keeping an eye on them from near and far, will be back and involved.
(The Nagasaki sequence, which opens the fifth episode, is shot in black and white in standard aspect ratio, before returning to color and widescreen when the bomb drops. The title credit that follows omits the usual cheerful shots of the cast dancing to the Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live for Today” as inappropriate. Understandably.)