It’s a perfect portrayal of a mother and son grappling with the seesaws of life’s shifting balance. But even their scenes are outdone by Sunja’s earlier encounters with the effortlessly enigmatic Koh Hansu (Lee Min-ho, a Hollywood idol through and through), the handsome gangster who is harder to banish from her life than Japanese knotweed.

The flame that blazes between these two, even though their encounters are sporadic, lights sparks in a story that, as it moves to 1980s Tokyo, gets a little bogged down in the mechanics of financial corruption. It’s the personal stories that make Pachinko special, not the oriental twist on Wall Street, and when it returns to that, it’s on safer ground.

In fact, I could have spent an entire series following Sunja and her family in the halcyon days of their wartime evacuation to the Japanese countryside. The comic adventures of Sunja’s young son Mosazu and the budding attraction of Sunja’s sister-in-law Kyunghee (Jung Eun-chae) and Koh Hansu’s assassin Mr. Kim (Kim Sung-kyu) bring a welcome touch of light and shade to a story that often touches on the dark side of human nature.

Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than with Solomon (Jin Ha), Sunja’s grandson, who suddenly finds himself swimming with the sharks in Tokyo’s deadly financial waters. Solomon is a good man in bad company, and his integrity is threatened by a thirst for revenge that he cannot resist. He, too, harbors a secret that will burn his soul.

“Don’t forget who you are,” his world-weary grandmother scolds, a soundbite that could easily serve as the slogan of this impressive and moving drama.

Episode one of the second season of Pachinko is now available on Apple TV+, with weekly episodes to follow