Anna Sawai has just landed in Los Angeles when we speak. Despite the nearly 12-hour flight from Tokyo, the actor is bright-eyed and cheerful. When I ask where home is for her, she grins. “This is a really difficult question for me,” she says. Sawai, 32, moves between Japan, where she was raised, and Hollywood, where work has increasingly brought her since her breakout roles in the shows Pachinko and Shōgun.
This cultural schism in her personal life is reflected on-screen. The Apple TV+ adaptation of Pachinko, the 2017 best-selling novel by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee, tells the story of four generations of a Korean family living in a deeply racist Japan. Sawai plays Naomi, a young businesswoman who faces sexism in the male-dominated workplace. The series includes dialogue in Korean, Japanese, and English. Meanwhile, in Shōgun, FX’s enormously popular TV adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel, Sawai plays a 16th-century translator who helps a lord converse with an English “barbarian.” The show moves back and forth between Japanese and English.
