Pachinko book vs show: one character who dies on Apple TV is still alive at the end of the novel
Min Jin Lee's novel ends with someone waiting for Sunja at home, and on Apple TV that person is gone by the third episode.
Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family from 1910s Busan to 1980s Japan. Lee's 2017 novel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Apple TV adapted it under creator Soo Hugh, with season 1 in 2022 and season 2 in 2024. Kim Min-ha plays the young Sunja, who grows up in a boardinghouse in a Busan fishing village and leaves for Osaka, and Oscar winner Youn Yuh-jung plays her in 1989.
The character is Kyunghee
Kyunghee is Sunja's sister-in-law, the wife of Yoseb, the older brother of Sunja's husband Isak. When Sunja and Isak arrive in Osaka, it's Yoseb and Kyunghee who make room for them in their tiny house. In the book, the two women end up working side by side for decades and become closer than most sisters.
How she dies on Apple TV
The show doesn't wait to get there. In episode 3, released on premiere day in March 2022, the 1989 storyline loses Kyunghee: she dies in the night. The family has her cremated and her ashes placed on the mantel.
Two episodes later, Sunja takes the ashes back to Korea and, with her son Mozasu, travels to Busan, the city she last saw when she was pregnant with her first child. She empties the ashes into the sea. She also goes looking for her father's grave and finds it has been moved.
Why the show did it
The novel is chronological: Book I in Korea, Books II and III in Japan, with 1989 waiting at the very end. Hugh built the show differently, cutting between the young Sunja and the old one from the first episode.
If the show didn't meet "Solomon's generation until the end of the series," Hugh told NPR, "we would miss out on a huge opportunity."
Starting in 1989 meant the older Sunja needed a story of her own from day one. Kyunghee's death gives her one: a reason to go home after more than half a century.
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What it means for the rest of the show
Season 2's past storyline only reaches the early 1950s, so most of Kyunghee's book years haven't been filmed yet. In the novel, she nurses Yoseb through the injuries he brought home from Nagasaki. Kim Changho loves her, and Yoseb even gives them his blessing to marry once he's gone. She refuses, and in 1959 Changho leaves for North Korea. After Yoseb's death, she nurses Sunja's mother, Yangjin, through stomach cancer.
Any future season would show those years already knowing how they end. Whether there will be one is open. Hugh pitched Apple the whole story and has called the decision "out of our hands." Apple's head of development, Matt Cherniss, said in July 2025: "I don't think we have anything to announce about future seasons at this time."
How the novel ends for her
In the book, Kyunghee outlives Yoseb, outlives Yangjin, and is still there in 1989. The novel's last pages belong to Sunja, now an old woman, visiting Isak's grave and burying a photo of her son Noa beside it. Then she heads home, where "Kyunghee would be waiting for her at home."
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