Pachinko family tree

The novel opens on Yeongdo, where an aging fisherman and his wife take in lodgers. Hoonie is their only son to reach adulthood, born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot.^11,8 He marries Yangjin, the daughter of a poor fisherman, in an arranged match, and the marriage is happy.^3,8

Yangjin loses three children before Sunja is born around 1916, and Sunja is the only one who lives.^8,2 Hoonie dies of tuberculosis when she is about thirteen, and Yangjin takes over the boarding house, which LitCharts places in Book I, Chapter 2.^3,4 The Pachinko family tree begins with them, since every later branch runs through Sunja.

Koh Hansu is a fish broker from Jeju who lives in Osaka and has ties to the yakuza.⁵ He meets Sunja when she is sixteen, and she becomes pregnant by him. He cannot marry her because he has a wife and children in Japan, and Sunja refuses to become his mistress.^3,5

Baek Isak, a sick Presbyterian pastor, arrives at the boarding house in the winter of 1932 on his way to Osaka.² Yangjin and Sunja nurse him back to health, and he offers to marry Sunja so that her child will carry his name.³ They marry and go to Osaka in 1933, and Noa is born there before the end of Book I.^2,11

The Pachinko family tree draws Hansu and Sunja as a couple whose relationship ended. Hansu keeps watch over her for decades, pays for Noa at Waseda and helps the family through the war.^5,7

Isak is the youngest son of a father and mother who founded a church in Pyongyang.² His eldest brother, Samoel, took part in the March First Movement of 1919 and died of a police beating.^2,10 Yoseb had lived in Osaka with his wife Kyunghee for about ten years when Isak and Sunja joined them in the Korean quarter of Ikaino.^2,3

Kyunghee cannot have children, and she and Sunja become partners in work, first with a food cart and then cooking kimchi for a restaurant.^3,11 In Book II Isak is jailed over his faith for about three years and released only to die.^11,9,10

Yoseb is badly burned at Nagasaki in Book II, Chapter 8, and never works again. LitCharts places his death between Book II, Chapter 14, set in 1959, and Book III, Chapter 12, so the chart marks him dead from Book III.⁶

Noa is the son of Sunja and Hansu and was raised by Isak. Hansu pays for his place at Waseda University in Tokyo.⁷ When his girlfriend there notices his likeness to Hansu, Sunja confirms who his father is, and Noa leaves the university and cuts himself off from the family.^3,11

In Nagano Noa passes as Japanese under the name Nobuo Ban and works in the office of a pachinko parlor. He marries Risa Iwamura, and they have four children.⁷ After sixteen years Hansu tracks him down in 1978, Sunja visits him, and Noa takes his own life soon after.^7,3

Mozasu is about six years younger and is the only surviving child of Sunja and Isak.² At sixteen he goes to work in Goro’s pachinko parlor and rises until he owns parlors of his own.^2,11 The half brothers stand side by side on the Pachinko family tree, and the line from Yoseb to Noa marks the uncle who distrusted Hansu’s money.⁶

Mozasu marries Yumi, a seamstress, and they have a son, Solomon. Yumi is killed by a car while Solomon is small, all in Book II by the Wikipedia summary.^11,2 The guides differ on the driver, whom GradeSaver calls a taxi driver and LitCharts a drunk driver.^9,3

Sunja closes her stall and moves in with Mozasu to help raise Solomon.³ In Book III Mozasu dates Etsuko Nagatomi, a divorced woman from Hokkaido with a restaurant in Yokohama, who refuses to marry him.^11,10,2

Her teenage daughter Hana becomes close to Solomon and later runs away to Tokyo.^11,2 Solomon studies at Columbia, where he dates Phoebe, a Korean American, and takes her to Tokyo when he joins a British investment bank. He is fired after a real estate deal, Phoebe leaves him, and he goes into his father’s business.^3,11 Hana dies of AIDS in a Tokyo hospital and asks Solomon to take up that trade.^9,10

Yangjin dies of stomach cancer in 1979, nursed by Kyunghee, and is buried in Book III, Chapter 13.⁴ The novel ends with Sunja at Isak’s grave, where the groundskeeper tells her that Noa came there for years.^9,3

Apple TV+ released two seasons of eight episodes, on 25 March 2022 and 23 August 2024, written for television by Soo Hugh, and by July 2025 had announced no third.^14,13

The novel runs in order of time. The series cuts between Sunja’s early life and Solomon in 1989, with Sunja played by three actresses at three ages.¹² Its first season runs from 1915 to the 1930s and its second from 1945 to 1951, both beside 1989, and one episode tells of Hansu’s youth in Yokohama and the earthquake of 1923.¹⁴

Phoebe does not appear in the series, and a colleague of Solomon’s named Naomi takes much of her place as a friend. Kyunghee dies in the series, while in the novel she remains Sunja’s friend to the end. Bokhee, a servant at the boarding house, survives in the series and meets Sunja again.^12,2 Noa appears in the first season only as a child.¹² A Pachinko family tree drawn from the series would therefore lose Phoebe and gain Naomi on the fourth row.

A square is a man and a circle is a woman, and a cross marks a death. The double stroke on the couple line of Sunja and Hansu marks an affair that ended, and the dashed line of Mozasu and Etsuko a couple who never married. Noa hangs from Sunja and Isak, with a dotted line from Isak, who raised him, and a solid line from Hansu, his father by birth.

The blue ring holds the Yeongdo household and the red ring Koh Hansu and his wife. A green B marks the Baeks, the family Sunja joins by marriage. Noa loses his B in Book III, when he lives under a Japanese name.

To build a Pachinko family tree of your own, open the chart in the editor or start from the story charts. The symbols are set out in the genogram symbols.