Les billes du Pachinko

by Elisa Shua Dusapin

«J’aime le brouillard. Il empêche de voir loin. Il bouche l’horizon. Il donne l’impression qu’on a le temps, qu’on a le droit de ne rien voir. De ne rien voir venir.»

À vingt-neuf ans, Claire passe l’été auprès de ses grandsparents, dans leur établissement de Pachinko, à Tokyo. Elle espère les emmener revoir leur Corée natale, qu’ils ont fuie cinquante ans plus tôt. Mais tandis qu’elle enseigne le français à la petite Mieko, la jeune femme peine à se souvenir de la langue de ses aïeux. Dès lors, comment pourra-t-elle les convaincre d’entreprendre ce voyage ? Confrontée au silence et à l’oubli, Claire tente de renouer des liens si longtemps abîmés par l’histoire.
Dans ce troublant roman de filiation, Élisa Shua Dusapin excelle à décrire l’ambiguïté des relations familiales, les cruels malentendus qui vont de pair avec un attachement profond.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Japan, Literary Fiction, France, Asian Literature, Translated Fiction

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published August 1, 2018

About the author

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul and Switzerland. Winter in Sokcho (Hiver à Sokcho) is her first novel. Published in 2016 to wide acclaim, it was awarded the Prix Robert Walser and the Prix Régine Desforges and has been translated into six languages.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

i caved to cool girl peer pressure again.

works every time.

in truth and in fairness, i'm not sure how you make a book truly clever and emotional and then also make it 100 pages long, but it doesn't matter what i know because clearly this author has that wizardry locked in. she did it with winter in sokcho and she did it again here.

like her debut, this has clear and lovely writing, with wonderful themes of lineage and nationality that feel fully accomplished despite the page count.

i'm the president of the short book fan club and even i'm impressed with dusapin's mastery of concision.

bottom line: tiny + smart + impactful = perfect.

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘ I’ve never felt more foreign than I have this summer, with this child at my side.’

How does one express the ineffable? This has been a question that the vast variety of art forms have grappled with, shaping and reshaping attempts to capture elusive existence in their artistic nets. Elisa Shua Dusapin, author of the 2021 National Book Award Winning novella Winter in Sokcho , is perfecting a technique that manages to wrangle emotional resonance with the slightest of touches that truly comes alive in Pachinko Parlour. In jazz you often hear how the notes not played, or the space between notes, are just as key to the song as those you hear and Dusapin has managed to capture that through her array of repeated imagery and motifs of identity, language, and abandonment. Her images are juxtaposed in the sky of narrative as if like constellations, and the imaginary lines our mind draws to connect them into a form are what Dusapin weaves into her net to scoop up the emotions and tone that we can’t quite touch otherwise as she uses atmosphere and tone to define its shape. This is rendered beautifully into English through Aneesa Abbas Higgins’s translation, partnering again with Dusapin’s prose after having won the translation prize last year. Deceptively simple, Pachinko Parlour follows narrator Claire during her summer stay with her Korean grandparents in Tokyo as she juggles tutoring a young girl named Mieko and attempting to overcome her elder’s inertia to plan a trip to Korea together. It is a highly nuanced story that blossoms almost exclusively on vibes and a kaleidoscope of images that probe into a deeply moving interrogation of cultural identity—and feeling extrinsic to one’s own heritage—trauma and authenticity in a world that seems to be replacing itself with imitation, and it is another major success for this sharp and exciting young author.

There is an ethereal quality of Dusapin’s writing that allows it to seep under your skin so effortlessly, leaving the reader caught in the grips of unease and melancholia that permeate the atmosphere of this slim novella. There is a similar meandering pace and general sense of ennui that seems like shrapnel still flying from the blast of the Korean War into the current day lives of characters as there was in her marvelous first book, Winter in Sokcho , though the emotional resonance in Pachinko Parlour stems from a different sense of unease. Whereas the former was a sense of cold, damp alienation, Pachinko Parlour exists under oppressive heat with a sense of life grating up against the narrator, altogether too loud in the sense of dislocation. Food and weather are once again a major motif, with Claire finding an inability to enjoy any food while in Japan and fish being a central symbolism in the novel. Dusapin is playing with variations on a theme, giving the two books a complimentary sense while managing to still feel unique.

‘We do still have our language.’

There is a brooding estrangement dangling on the precipice of a rupture at the heart of Pachinko Parlour, most markedly with Claire’s internalized struggle with cultural identity. Like Dusapin, Claire has been brought up in France (now living in Switzerland). Her grandparents her only link to her Korean heritage but they have been living in Tokyo for 50 years amongst
‘Japan’s Korean community: exiles, people who came, as my grandparents did, to escape the Korean war, and others, who were deported during the Japanese occupation of Korea.’ Language is central to how Dusapin navigates cultural identity in the book, and there is a growing sadness at the language disconnect between Claire and her Grandparents.

‘I used to be able to speak Korean, but I lost it when French became my main language. My grandfather used to correct my mistakes, but not any more. We communicate in simple English, with a few basic words in Korean and an array of gestures and exaggerated facial expressions. We never speak in Japanese.’

This divide is also felt by her grandparents who fear Claire is drifting away from them both emotionally and culturally (the fear of growing distant from loved ones is juxtaposed with Mieko and her mother who have quite literally lost all contact with Mieko's father). Retaining language is a mark of pride, especially for the grandmother who’s mother cut off part of her tongue rather than speak Japanese under the occupation and the grandmother avoids any situation where she would have to speak it in Tokyo. ‘We were still nationals of a unified Korea…called Choson,’ the Grandfather explains late in the novel, ‘people from a country that no longer exists,’ and there inaction on planning the trip may be connected to the inability to truly visit the Korea of their past.

‘On every face the same tightly stretched grin, the same vacant, happy look.’

This idea of the replacement of the ‘original’ is repeated throughout the novel with various uses of clever symbolism, with various instances of stuffed animals instead of live ones (the parallels of the taxidermied animals at an exhibit Claire visited as a child with the live animals kept in cages she visits with Mieko and the wild deer later on is a pretty powerful metaphor), artificial food, kokeshi dolls that ‘people used to make them to remember the babies they killed because they couldn’t feed them’, and the Heidi theme park. The latter, with windows that are ‘only a façade, made of plaster, supported by a metal frame,’ is one of the many ways Dusapin takes something as a pale imitation of an idea or thing and mines the imagery for strong emotion and thematic purpose. Mieko’s bedroom which is actually an empty pool in an abandoned hotel is another foreboding use of imagery, and only Dusapin could craft a depiction of Disney Land that feels as hollow and melancholy as she does here. In fact, most of all the scenery is described in claustrophobic or disquieting ways:

‘I look out of the window. Mount Fuji is shrouded in darkness now. The city has become no more than a leaden mass, lifeless. Lines are starting to blur inside the apartment too. I feel as though I can hardly move. Without the view from the window, it would be unbearable. You’d suffocate.’

Best is when Claire, who is frequently criticized for poor Japanese speech, is told by a cast member at the Heidi village that her Japanese is very good, a compliment that can only be received as considering herself also a facade of her own cultural heritage and self that only in the land of artifice does she fit in. While she grows close with Mieko, which make for some very tender if not awkward scenes in the book, she is reminded ‘you’re her teacher, not her mother,’ and she can only be a false stand-in just as much as the recordings of Claire’s father playing organ are a stand-in for a live performance. This adds to the feelings of alienation and an outsider, and even her link to her cultural identity is something she is made to feel ashamed of as her grandparents who’s ‘lives begin and end with the pachinko parlour’ that they run as pachinko is looked down upon as immodest.

The scenes with Mieko are some of the most enjoyable moments in the novel, though the sweetness is so cloaked in darkness. Mieko’s father has run off, she rarely presents herself as enjoying the activities they do and spends a lot of time worrying about the world headed towards destruction. ‘There aren’t nearly as many as there used to be in the city,’ she tells Claire, ‘one day they’ll all be dead, and then we’ll all die too. Though the fish symbolism, used earlier as an image for the trains her father build that took him away, return as the ideal for a more environmentally friendly world with the image of a pleco fish that eats the grime from the tank. Though it is noted that one must care and feed those who fight against the grime, and ideas about caring for the innocent such as children (or grandparents) and the unhoused are subtly injected into the story such as when Claire finds a copy of Ernest and Celestine amongst Mieko’s mother’s picture books. This is interesting in a book where brand names are frequently mentioned, particularly in conjunction with ideas of artificiality and the harsh glow of neon lights, and hint towards a rejection of capitalism as a method to uphold society and returning to a more pure and humane solution. The removal of artifice and leaving as transparent and vulnerable is Mieko’s idea for a better world:

‘We ought to shed our skins, like animals. The older we got, the more transparent our skin would become. In the end you’d be able to see all our insides through it. Veins, bones, feelings, everything. Our skin would be a mirror too, people would be able to see themselves in it. Eventually we’d become completely transparent, and when that happened, we’d give our last breath to our child.’

This becomes even more impactful when later Mieko calls attention to the closeness of Claire’s name with the word for clear: ‘“Calearo,” she repeats. “Like your name. Calairo.”’

Pachinko Parlour excels through its quiet beauty, juxtaposes scenes in ways that speak volumes about human connectivity without ever overtly drawing the connection. Dusapin carefully pairs ideas to maximum potential, with an unsettling tension slowly creeping as the pieces all fall into place not unlike the tetris game Claire is always playing on her phone. The world is passing by and the characters feel such little control over it, but the small ways they exert themselves seems best exemplified in the description of playing pachinko: ‘The only control a player has over the machine is to adjust the force at which the balls are ejected by slowly turning a knob that fits into the palm of the hand. The knob turns both ways.’ How one exerts their force, through action or inaction, speaks volumes here. This book is so elegantly written and gorgeously translated that it fully engulfed me with its potent atmosphere and tone. A short read, but one that takes up a lot of space in your heart and mind. Elisa Shua Dusapin is a brilliant writer and I cannot wait to read everything she comes up with.

4.5/5

‘People say the name pachinko comes from the noise the balls make in the machine, pinging against the glass, swooshing through the plastic tubes, clanking against the bumpers, the shriek of metal, the final clang as they fall into the tray.
The door slides shut. Silence.’

[Alwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderfully-atmospheric, haunting piece by Franco-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin won the 2019 Swiss Literature Award. It’s a deceptively simple, slice-of-life novel revolving around the experiences of its narrator Claire. Claire grew up in Switzerland, where she now lives, but spent countless, childhood holidays visiting her Korean grandparents who’ve settled in Japan. Now she’s returned intent on taking them to visit Korea. Her grandparents are in their nineties, and her grandmother seems to be fading fast, so this may be Claire’s last chance. But when she arrives her grandparents are oddly resistant to her plans, and she finds herself spending most of the long, hot summer holed up in their small, stifling apartment. She leaves only to teach French to a Japanese schoolgirl, Mieko. Mieko’s home in a dilapidated, former hotel is equally claustrophobic. Mieko’s father disappeared long ago, and her status as the child of a single mother has left her isolated but she quickly develops an intimate, if fragile, bond with Claire.

Dusapin returns to themes around identity and belonging first explored in Winter in Sokcho. But here she grounds her work in a deft, but oblique, exploration of Japan’s Zainichi-Korean community, setting part of her story in Nippori, the once working-class suburb of Tokyo that became home to a multitude of displaced Koreans. Claire’s grandparents’ past, their flight from Korea during the civil war, her grandmother’s refusal to speak Japanese, gradually expose a particularly painful chapter of Japanese and Korean history. These are people who exist in a liminal space, neither Korean nor Japanese, unable or unwilling to return to Korea, yet never fully accepted by Japanese society. Claire's grandparents manage one of the many Korean, Pachinko "gambling" parlours frowned upon but still frequented by Japanese locals, this occupation solidifies their role as stand-ins for their generation of Zainichi Koreans. Claire too has been shaped by the distant forces of history, like Dusapin, she feels neither Korean nor Swiss. Instead, Claire appears to be in a state of radical uncertainty, fragmented and fractured, suspended between cultures and caught between languages.

This really worked for me, it’s just so acutely observed, sparse and subtle. One of those satisfying books where each word counts, no waste, no filler. Despite her slender plot, Dusapin also manages to convey a growing sense of tension, as she carefully extends her gaze beyond her individual characters. There are numerous disquieting jolts, brief references to ominous, background events: dying bees, dwindling species, the sudden suicide of one of Mieko’s classmates. Displacement, grief, hostile environments, these are conditions, Dusapin seems to be suggesting, that may rapidly become the norm for all of us as we strive to exist on an increasingly-fragile, decaying planet.

Translated here from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.

Thanks to Edelweiss and publisher Open Letter for an ARC

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

Claire is in Tokyo for the summer to be with her aging Korean grandparents who run a pachinko parlour. But, thinking she’ll have too much time on her hands, she accepts a part-time gig tutoring Mieko, a lonely 10 year old, in French language. And that’s both the premise and the “story”... Hmm.

I didn’t totally dislike Elisa Shua Dusapin’s second novel The Pachinko Parlour because there is a good flow to her prose - it’s an easy read and you get a good idea of everyday Japanese life, particularly from a gaijin’s perspective - but I also didn’t like it much either. Very little happens and, despite not providing a story, Dusapin hasn’t offered up anything else in its place, ie. thought-provoking messages/commentary or anything resembling cogent ideas on Claire’s/any other character’s situation.

I get the impression that the novel is, rather loftily, about “identity”. Claire is a twentysomething French/Korean living in Switzerland (hey, just like the author - what an imaginative stretch!) and visiting Japan - displacement, not fitting into any one culture for reasons… ok. And…? Similarly, her grandparents are Korean, displaced by the Korean War, and don’t feel like they’ve been fully accepted by Japanese society despite having lived in the country for decades.

So what is Dusapin trying to say here? I really don’t know. I’d also be making things up if I said the pachinko parlour itself is a metaphor for something - that is, life is a game of chance or something trite - and I don’t think it’s meant to be anything more than a realistic profession for her grandpa to have. I didn’t know this but a number of pachinko parlours are run by Koreans as they’re tax exempt in Japan.

I’m equally lost at sea when it comes to the other half of the novel. Mieko is a lonely kid with a distant mother who’s clearly still deeply hurt by her husband abandoning his family. I really don’t get what we’re meant to take away from these two besides the weird feature of the novel which is filled with female characters, none of whom seem to like each other very much and have the darndest time being close to one another… for reasons?

Personally speaking, I can relate to some of what Dusapin’s driving at - I’m half-English and half-Japanese and I’ve felt that strangeness that comes with being an outsider in as homogenous a culture as Japan’s, exacerbated by the language barrier between relatives - but beyond simply expressing that feeling, I don’t know what else this novel is trying to do. It’s certainly not about telling a compelling narrative or presenting remarkable characters!

It’s fairly well-written and a quick read but nothing much about The Pachinko Parlour is especially memorable or impressive - a very weak and empty novel I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winter in Sokcho was one of my favorite books last year - this is one of my favorite books this year. I will read everything Dusapin writes from here on in. There's no one quite like her.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in one day, and having finished it felt a little empty inside and concerned my reading experience was not complete. So I read it one more time immediately after, and I'm so glad I did.

The novel's subtlety may be lost easily in the search for meaning or 'plot' but Dusapin is deft at crafting rich characters with a hidden inner world that slowly reveals itself and takes time and consideration.

We follow Claire, a nearly 30 year old Korean-Swiss woman visiting her grandparents in Japan where they have lived for the last 50 years since fleeing Korean during the war. She's determined to take them back to Korea to visit for the first time in half a century, while also tutoring a 10 year old Japanese girl in French.

So much of this novel is about language, the connections it paves but also the barriers it creates. There's a lot about nature, particularly water and sea creatures, as well as deer. Trains and sweltering summer heat permeate the novel and drag Claire and her ward, Mieko, around from tourist attraction to tourist attraction. In ways, Claire is a visitor to her own family and struggling to connect with their 'new' home in Japan and them as people.

But there's so much unsaid that really brings this novel to life and gets to the heart of the reader, at least this one. I loved reading this twice in a row to discover more and spend extra time in their world. I'm impressed by Dusapin's ability to say so much with her sparse language. If you do read this, savor it. Sit with it and enjoy the beauty and melancholy she's created.

[Daniel Shindler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This richly textured novel explores abandonment,isolation,identity and barriers. The novel is suffused with an atmosphere that often vacillates between discomfort and despair as the characters seek to find moorings for their inner cores. In “ The Pachinko Parlor” Elisa Shia Dusapin continues to develop and deepen the themes she introduced in her earlier novel,” Winter in Sokcho.”

The protagonist, Claire, is a Korean-Swiss graduate student who lives in Switzerland and is spending the summer visiting her grandparents in Tokyo. Her grandparents, owners of a pachinko parlor in the Zanichi Korean suburb, have lived in Tokyo for all fifty years after their flight from Korea during the Civil War. Claire intends to take these nonagenarian relatives back for their first visit to Korea since their relocation. However, Claire’s plans are derailed by her grandparents’ reluctance to make the journey. Their antipathy is rooted in more than inertia, instead fueled by the trauma of their forced diaspora in 1952. Remembering a time when speaking Korean was punishable by death, Claire’s grandmother refuses to speak Japanese, resulting in frustratingly halting exchanges with Claire, who is not fluent in Korean.

The linguistic barrier in Claire’s relationship presents a major theme permeating the novel. The author implies that language and communication create an emotional border in a displaced immigrant’s quest for identity and belonging. This same dynamic also appears in a second relationship Claire forms during her summer visit. Claire forms a connection with Meiko, a Japanese schoolgirl that Claire tutors in French. Meiko is being raised by a single mother and is anticipating attending school in Switzerland. She harbors a sense of both abandonment and anxiety fueled by the uncertain circumstances surrounding her fractured family and upcoming relocation to a foreign country.

Claire’s connections with both her grandparents and Meiko portray the liminal space inhabited by multi generational individuals who have been buffeted between cultures resulting in a fragmented sense of identity. Dusapin writes in spare yet vivid prose that imparts an aura of tension and uncertainty throughout the novel.The grandparents’ ownership of a pachinko parlor is a fitting metaphor for the tenuous connection these generations must feel as they sit in front of a machine with bouncing balls. Their control of the machine’s outcome is virtually nonexistent, limited to a hopeful sway or nudge that may result in success or failure.

In a similar way, we can intuit the sways and nudges as the characters in the novel haltingly retreat and edge forward in their attempts to form attachments and overcome their sense of displacement and isolation. The communication struggles in these relationships reinforce the image of unspoken linguistic barriers becoming defined emotional and physical borders that erode people’s ability to connect. As the novel concludes, Claire hears ..” A clamor of languages merging gradually to become one.” We are left to wonder if this clamor is a beacon of future hope or a fleeting mirage.

[Meike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second novel by National Book Award-winning French-Korean author Dusapin, and the atmospheric text is a stellar example for subtle, gripping writing about identity, belonging, and liminal spaces. Much like Min Jin Lee's rather epic Pachinko, Dusapin's concise novella illuminates the destiny of the so-called Zainichi, Koreans who have fled their country due to the war and moved to Japan. Marginalized, discriminated against and short of opportunities to join the mainstream labor market, many became entrepreneurs in the stigmatized Pachinko gambling business - like the grandparents of 29-year-old Claire, who is the protagonist of “The Pachinko Parlor”.

The grandparents run a Pachinko in the former working-class quarter of Tokyo, a place where many Zainichi took up residence. Living on the margins of society, alienated both from the Korean community and Japanese society, the elderly couple still works hard. Their daughter, Claire’s mother, has long left Japan, and Claire, whose primary language is French, lives in Switzerland where she has learnt Japanese, but not Korean. Now Claire visits her grandparents, and she plans to travel to Korea with them, so they might see their home again, after 50 years. But the planning goes slowly, and Claire spends many weeks in the basement of their house close to the Pachinko, ruminating in the oppressive heat, playing Tetris and tutoring Mieko, a timid 10-year-old who lives with her single mother in an abandoned hotel. Mieko is supposed to improve her French, so she can go to school in Switzerland, but the insecure child suffers because her father has left the family, and she does not know where he is...

Lost roots in the form of countries, languages and ancestors permeate the quiet, but deep text that becomes more and more evocative, leading to dreamscapes populated by mystical deer, non-places like sad amusement parks and alternate, displaced mock realities like “Heidi’s Village” in Yamanashi (which does actually exist: Johanna Spyri’s book about the nature-loving girl in the Alps was famously turned into an anime and is well-known in Japan). Claire and Mieko connect over their experiences of otherness, Mieko as the lonely, fatherless girl with the sad mother, Claire as a young European woman who passes as Japanese and doesn’t know her ancestral country and family history, which is greatly covered by taboo and hardly discussed. The grandmother is becoming frailer and frailer, and time is running out. The moody scenes in the Pachinko, the ghost-like minor characters, and the food- and games-related gatherings where those partaking struggle for connection underline the vastness and darkness of liminal spaces for those trying to navigate them.

I really enjoyed the gripping, intelligent, haunting writing, and I’m very curious what Dusapin will publish next.

[Emmeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depressed Studio Ghibli, but builds to an affecting conclusion. Another reread.

Original review

Another delightfully minimalist offering from Elisa Shua Dusapin, whose Winter in Sokcho has really stayed with me from a couple of years ago.

This one is a quietly aching story of being culturally out of place. Claire is visiting her grandparents in Japan. They are not Japanese, but Korean, having fled the war some fifty years earlier. Though both old and doddering (the grandmother regularly refers to herself as a “doddery old fool”) they continue to run a “Pachinko Parlour,” a low-level gambling space. Claire is half Korean then, and half Swiss. Her native language is French, but she has forgotten Korean, and could only study Japanese at her university.

I really identified with this quiet book of attempting to be family despite the great divides of language, culture and history. Not always with Claire, it must be said. She is infected with a social paralysis so strong that she’s barely able to communicate, with her grandparents, with her parents back in Switzerland, with the little girl Mieko she teaches French to, or with her partner Matthieu who isn’t along on this trip but who seems to understand everyone much better than she does. Yes, Claire was a little frustrating at times.

But there’s so much subtlety in the writing. I liked the Dusapin's writing in Winter in Sokcho but occasionally found it a little overly poetic/portentous – she’s ironed those problems out now. She creates a world of silence and noise that feels very mundane in all the right ways but which is actually not particularly realist… things are carefully orchestrated, nobody’s life is really like this, all the beats are hit. It’s curiously satisfying. And it makes you want to go back and reread and decide exactly what such and such a character or scene represented. Then, there’s quiet confidence in the short chapters and all the white space left for the reader to inhabit. And the conclusion is surprising and obvious in all the right ways. Dusapin is good at conclusions.

Another winner.

Thanks to Edelweiss and Open Letter for the Arc.

[Henk · Rating 3 out of 5]

History far from being over, and influencing generations across boundaries. The narrative is rendered in an impressionistic manner, with Japan being a backdrop that doesn’t come fully into focus

An almost 30 something Korean French language teacher arrives in Tokyo from Switzerland. Her hosts are in a decrepit hotel but she also has family, an old grandmother (with early signs of dementia?) and grandfather who exploits a pachinko parlour in the city. We get some glances into the Korean community in Japan, Zainichi’s, of which I would have liked to learn more. People cutting of part of their tongue to not speak Japanese is poetic but doesn’t really bring to life the hardship and struggle this demographic faced in Japanese society.

There is also a distant father who plays an organ and a boyfriend who writes a thesis in an esoteric chalet in the Alps. Nothing is fully fleshed out and the limbo wherein the main character is dropped is hardly disturbed over the weeks she stays in Japan. I had wanted more after the strong debut (where this book shares a lot of characteristics with in terms of feeling of loneliness and being unmoored) by the author, even though I recognise the reflective, subtle writing and the important questions on identity.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the Inaugural Longlist of Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle

They haven’t mentioned our trip to Korea once since I arrived. We need to make plans, start buying tickets. I don’t know how to raise the subject. I used to be able to speak Korean but I lost it when French became my main language. My grandfather used to correct my mistakes, but not any more. We communicate in simple English, with a few basic words in Korean and an array of gestures and exaggerated facial expressions. We never speak in Japanese.

Le Pachinko est un jeu collectif et solitaire. Les machines sont rangées en longues files ; chacun debout devant son tableau joue pour soi, sans regarder son voisin, que pourtant il coudoie.
Barthes, L’Empire des signes

The Pachinko Parlour (2022) is Aneesa Abbas Higgins's translation of Elisa Shua Dusapin's Les Billes du Pachinko (2020).

Winter in Sokcho by the same translator/writer was one of my favourite novels of 2020 (my review) and a very worthy winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US.

The Pachinko Parlour is also highly worthwhile. The novel is narrated by a young woman, Claire, about to turn 30, who lives in Switzerland with her Korean mother and (I think) French Swiss father. Claire is visiting her maternal grandparents who emigrated from Korea to Japan in 1952, and like many 'Zainichi' run a Pachinko Parlour (see interview with the author below). They are now elderly and Claire is planning to take them on a trip to Korea - to which they've never returned in 1952 - although they seem reluctant to even discuss the subject

Language and communication is key to the novel. As per the quote that opens my review, Claire's own Korean is weak after she moved to Switzerland, and, hoping to study the language at University, found only Japanese was available. She'd hoped that would facilitate communication, but her grandparents aren't keen to use the language with her, although they were happier to do so with her Swiss boyfriend when he came with her on a previous visit, so much of the family history she knows through him rather than directly, including that her great-grandmother in Korea literally cut off her tongue rather than speak the Japanese occupiers' language.

Claire also is hired as a tutor to a 10 year old Japanese girl, Meiko, to teach her French (although Meiko's mother speaks it fluently) and forms a stronger bond with her than with her grandparents.

A word on the book cover - its not normally a key feature of books for me, but as with Winter in Sokcho this really enhances the book - here the prominent featuring of both the Japanese and Korean for Pachinko complementing the way that language is key to the novel.

The novel is very effective on identity and belonging, and the author/translator's spare and enigmatic prose is again striking (there's a striking part where Claire suspects her grandparents will let her 30th birthday, per Western conventions, slide due to the Korean way of measuring age).

Although for me the novel didn't quite attain the air of things left unsaid and off the page that made Winter in Sokcho so memorable. That said as with the earlier novel, the book uses food as a key motif - here from the oysters and crabs that Meiko's mother serves (which seem to speak to her abandonment by Meiko's father) to the 꽈배기 doughnuts that Claire buys from the supermarket and her grandmother used to make:

‘I could always make doughnuts,' my grandmother declares. 'My mother made them in Seoul. That's what we lived offduring the war. I'll go and sell them in Shin-Okubo.'

‘Kkwabaegi? Like the ones you get in the Family Mart? I eat those with Mieko.'

‘Aigou!’ she spits. 'Much too sugary, those things, the Japanese put sugar in everything!'

Recommended and I suspect had I not read Winter in Sokcho before this may have been a 5 star read (I'm seeing similar reactions to that book from those who read this first) but still a strong International Booker contender. 4.5 stars rounded down to 4.

An interview with the author: https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2022/05...

Pachinko parlour operators have even been declared officially exempt from the normal business taxes paid by Japanese owners of comparable businesses, meaning that Koreans are effectively tied to an industry that is both hugely popular and, because of its links to murky practices, widely looked down on, a double standard that is a source of great pain for Korean people in Japan. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Japan and as a woman of mixed French and Korean heritage myself I was very much affected by this. Pachinko seemed to me to be symbolic of a hypocritical system that perpetuates notions of Korean and Japanese identities as rivals. I saw the thousands of pachinko balls slamming into each other as an image of the people who’d fled Korea for a new country in the hopes of landing on their feet. Players believe they can influence the force at which the balls are ejected; in reality, there is virtually no room for manoeuvre. Shame plays a part in my novel too: the grandfather knows he is contributing to propping up a system he’s not proud of, but he didn’t really have any choice. His granddaughter, Claire, makes no moral judgement of the situation, but the burden of shame is so heavy that communication becomes almost impossible, even between members of the same family.

[Maria Clara · Rating 4 out of 5]

VALE, ME VOY A CONFESAR...!😱

🌸A ver, quiero decir que voy a hablar sin tapujos. O lo que viene siendo más coloquial, que voy a cantar hasta por soleares...🤭

PREPÁRATE, PORQUE ME ARRANCO!

🌸Me gustan los K-Drama! Sí, esta es mi gran confesión🤫

🌸Así que cuando vi este libro en MASA CRÍTICA de Babelio, ni me lo pensé!

🌸AHORA, te estarás preguntando qué tienen que ver los k-drama con este libro, ¿verdad?

🌸Pues bien, en un principio nada!🤭

🌸Pero me llamó muchísimo la atención que la protagonista, Claire, pasara un verano con sus abuelos en Tokio y que planeara acompañarlos en su viaje a Corea del sur. Es más, si los abuelos habían tenido que abandonar su país natal por la guerra civil, ¿por qué nunca regresaron a Corea?

🌸Es un libro muy cortito, de apenas 149 páginas, con una edición elegante y muy cuidada, que nos invita a degustar muchos de los platillos del Japón actual, así como nos descubre lugares mágicos, como el parque temático de Heidi. Además, nos adentra en las calles más concurridas de según que barrio y nos descubre un mundo nuevo a través del pachinko....

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another one from the Mookse group's best of 2022 list, and the first of my Christmas books. Like her previous book Winter in Sokcho, this is a pleasant and enjoyable read, but I struggled a little to see what makes others find it so special. It tells the story of Claire, a Swiss woman spending a summer in Tokyo with her Korean grandparents, planning to take them back to see Korea while working part time as an English tutor to Mieko, a 12 year old girl. The title comes from the grandfather's job, which he has never retired from. It is a delicate and nuanced story exploring the complexity of identity in the modern world.

[luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

❀ blog ❀ thestorygraph ❀ letterboxd ❀ tumblr ❀ ko-fi ❀

3 ¼ stars

“I felt almost affectionate towards those machines, a kind of pity tinged with fear. As soon as they were fed, their contents would be regurgitated, undigested.”

I am happy to report that I found Shua Dusapin’s second novel much more to my liking than her first one (which i actually tried revisiting hoping that it would be one of those ‘right book, wrong time’ kind of cases but nope). Cool yet incisive The Pachinko Parlour is an accomplished work that is able to simultaneously convey some of the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts with piercing clarity and to lend a certain ambivalence, opacity even, to her narration. Much of what Claire, our main character, experiences and observes is in fact permeated by an almost a hazy dreamlike quality, that really conveys that sense of being stuck in-between two different phases of your life. Claire is spending her summer in Tokyo with her grandparents who own a pachinko parlor called Shiny . She tutors 12-year-old Mieko, a clever yet sheltered child who takes an interest in Shiny.
At times the prose is unflattering in its descriptions of Claire’s environments and the people who populate them. Yet this adds authenticity to her narration, as her reality is rendered to us no matter how mundane. Some of the descriptions did bring me pause however, such as ‘Her teeth look discoloured, like shrivelled olives’ or ‘I take a good look at her. Long nose, rounded belly, like a baby seal’, as they seemed a wee bit contrived.
During her stay in Tokyo, Claire begins to reflect on her grandparents’ experiences from fleeing a civil war to finding themselves in a country where they are labeled ‘Zainichis’ and even after 50 years they do not seem to feel at ‘home’ in. They lead a fairly isolated life, even keeping themselves apart from other ‘Zainichis’.

“Looking at them, I feet overwhelmed. Their lives begin and end with the pachinko parlour.”

As Claire considers her family’s history she finds herself thinking about their relationship to her mother, the physical and emotional distance between all of them. The author at times articulate Claire’s sense of directionless and ennui in a way that is at struck me as crystal clear, and at other times instead she plays into the ambiguous and dreamlike ambience of her story, obfuscating and confusing our perception of Claire and the people around her.
The Pachinko Parlour is characterized by a coolly hypnotic tone, one that makes Claire’s interactions and introspections all the more captivating. I can see this type of unsentimental yet affecting writing appalling to readers who were fond of Jessica Au's Cold Enough for Snow and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Whereabouts as well as the work of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Katie Kitamura, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, and Mieko Kawakami (despite thematic differences their works tend to be focus on solitary and/or lonely women prone to prolonged acts of introspection).

[Vesna · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this short novel in the form of vignettes, Elisa Shua Dusapin touches on many sides of the complicated issues of identity, which run quietly underneath her deceptively simple prose. Like the author, the narrator Claire has Korean heritage and lives in her native Switzerland. She visits her Korean grandparents who have lived for 50 years in Japan as exiles from the civil war in Korea. In Tokyo, she spends time between her grandparents house in a Korean neighborhood and a worn out house in the Japanese quarter where a Japanese girl lives with her mother and whom she teaches French. Her grandfather runs a pachinko parlor, the game in which,

[t]he only control a player has over the machine is to adjust the force at which the balls are ejected by slowly turning a knob that fits into the palm of the hand. The knob turns both ways. There’s not much else for players to do.

Like the pachinko players, the lives of her grandparents and her own as their descendant have been at the mercy of events outside their control. The war displaced her grandparents away from their ancestral home and into the new country in which they are not fully integrated but rather live in the Japan’s Korean community, Zainichi. Their food, habits, and even the parlor game, are all Korean and yet as her grandfather poignantly says at one point:

When Korea was divided, we were still national of a unified Korea. It was called Choson. […] People who live in Japan have never known North and South Korea. We are all people of Choson. People from a country that no longer exists.

Their sense of belonging is forever taken away, it is neither in their exiled home in Japan (her grandmother refuses to speak the new language) nor in Seoul, their birthplace, that is now the capital of a new country, not of their beloved Choson. Claire herself was born in Switzerland, where her mother moved away from the Zainichi working-class neighborhood for a better future, with yet another language, French, as her native tongue. Caught between her Korean heritage and Swiss nationality, she is multilingual (though she learned Japanese instead of Korean which was not available at the college she attended), she searches for her own identity among the multitude of languages that she and her family speak. At one point, while on a boat with visitors from various countries, she hears their voices in different tongues:

All that lingers is an echo. A clamour of languages gradually to become one.

It’s a poignant multigenerational story of the exiled life and a touching story of an unexpected friendship with a young Japanese girl. Marvelously written and ably translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.

I want to thank Alwynne who drew my attention to this wonderful novel and whose excellent review can be read here.

My thanks to Open Letter and Edelweiss for an ARC.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A melancholy book filled with ennui and Claire's sense of a lack of direction. Relationships feel brittle and tentative, easily broken, whether with her parents left behind in Switzerland, her Korean grandparents in Japan, or the woman she works for. Only Claire's relationship with the child who she is tutoring has any vibrancy and momentum.

The style feels deceptively simple with lots of observational description which contributes to that sense of Claire being circumscribed by her sense of circumstance, caught in time, between cultures. There's real anxiety about her aging grandparents: her grandfather still going to the eponymous pachinko parlour every day; her grandmother with her taxing episodes of memory failure.

Dusapin wisely keeps this short, allowing the reader to fill in the gaps - not least at the end when the trip to Korea which has been driving the narrative comes to an abrupt ending.

I found myself increasingly caught up in this story where little happens on the surface but there's a sense of fraught emotions that only occasionally break the surface - but which doesn't make them any less powerful. By the end I appreciated how cleverly this withholds anything too obvious.

A short and yet moving book which worked excellently for me on audio.

[fatma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I just have overly rosy memories of Winter in Sokcho, but this was really...underwhelming. Lots of interesting themes and moments here (I especially loved the ending), but the story was missing those important interstitial bits that make a narrative feel cohesive. I understand that Elisa Shua Dusapin's writing is like this: that what distinguishes it is precisely that stop-and-start quality that makes every sentence or sentence fragment feel very punctuated and striking. I get that, and at times that quality does work; I don't need every novel I read to have flowery, lyrical prose. At the same time, though, I feel like where Dusapin's writing worked for me in Winter in Sokcho, it didn't quite work for me here. I wanted more from the story, but the writing style seemed to constantly hold me at arm's length.

Thanks to Restless Books for providing me with an eARC of this via Edelweiss!

[el · Rating 4 out of 5]

give me adult woman forging an intense and semi-codependent relationship with a small lonely child and i am BOUND TO CRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this was brief and atmospheric and so so so chewy. loved!

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Die junge Schweizerin Claire verbringt ihren Sommer bei ihren Großeltern in Tokio. Sie möchte mit ihnen deren letzte große Reise vorbereiten, zurück in die Heimat Korea, wo sie seit dem Krieg nicht mehr waren. Der Großvater betreibt seit Jahren in Tokio eine Pachinko-Spielhalle, die ihm sehr ans Herz gewachsen ist. Um sich die Zeit zu vertreiben kümmert sich Claire um die kleine Mieko - ein japanisches Mädchen, das allein mit seiner Mutter in einem ehemaligen Hotel lebt. Während sie ihr Nachhilfe in Französisch gibt, entwickelt sich langsam eine zarte Freundschaft zwischen den beiden.

"Die Pachinko-Kugeln" von Elisa Shua Duspain, aus dem Französischen übersetzt von Andreas Jandl, ist ein kurzer, dichter Roman über Migration, Herkunft, die Macht von Sprache und Identität. Fast bruchstückartig erzählt sie von Claires heißem, drückendem Sommer in Tokio, in dem sie sich fast ausschließlich auf die bevorstehende Reise nach Südkorea fokussiert. Schnell wird den Lesenden bewusst, dass dieser Aufbruch für Claire wichtiger scheint als für die Großeltern selbst. Deren Fluchtgeschichte wird im Buch immer wieder angeschnitten, jedoch nie vertieft. Durch die Einbeziehung von Mieko in den Roman erhält dieser eine weitere Dimension, er entpuppt sich als Erzählung über verschiedene Generationen, was mir sehr gut gefallen hat.

Trotz der Kürze des Romans lernt man als Leser*in Einiges über die koreanische Minderheit in Japan, über deren Verbindung zu Pachinko-Spielhallen und das Trauma, das eine Flucht vor dem Krieg in Menschen auslöst, das über viele Generationen als fehlendes Zugehörigkeitsgefühl weitergegeben wird. Ich hätte mir an vielen Stellen gewünscht, dass Elisa Shua Duspain noch mehr in die Tiefe geht, die gestreiften Geschichten weitererzählt. So war "Die Pachinko-Kugeln" eine kurzweilige Lektüre, die sich in einem Rutsch lesen ließ und mir neue Perspektiven geboten hat, ob diese aber nachhallen werden, erscheint noch fraglich. Empfehlen möchte ich diesen schmalen Roman aber dennoch gerne!

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Léger au point d’en souffrir un brin, en ce qui me concerne. Plutôt joli. Surprenant à quelques endroits, mais surtout par voie d’anecdote. Autant je m’épargne les grands romans russes de fin de siècle depuis quelques années, autant ici on verse dans l’autre extrême. Intéressant d’aborder des enjeux propres à la diaspora coréenne mais, en même temps, tout est en surface et en symboles dans cette histoire, et ce minuscule roman est à la littérature ce que le haïku est à la poésie. La formule fonctionne mais me laisse sur ma faim.

Au centre de cette narration, Claire, bientôt trente ans, exprime des doutes et des malaises qui m’auraient fait lui donner dix ans de moins, voire la croire adolescente. Bien que le langage soit bien tourné, la vision est vaguement enfantine. D’ailleurs, ça vaut pour tous les personnages. Même les grands-parents, nonagénaires ou à peu près, ont des réflexions et des gestes d’une candeur étonnante, qui ont cependant une valeur d'amusement.

Je ne sais pas. J’ai apprécié ma lecture, j’en conserverai quelques images, mais pour l’essentiel je prédis oublier cette histoire rapidement. Quelque chose qui n’est banal qu’en apparence dans ce bouquin – alors qu'il touche à de grands enjeux identitaires mais s’exprime en tons pastel – rate un peu la cible, pour moi.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 29-year old woman, half Swiss, half Korean, spends the summer with her ageing Korean grandparents in Tokyo, where they have lived (but never really integrated) since the division of Korea. They run a typically Korean pachinko parlour. The woman, from whose perspective the story is told, also takes up a job as private French teacher to a shy Japanese girl, whose mother has great plans for her.

In an interview Elisa Dusapin says that 'the characters in this book are a little bit like pachinko balls: they don't really know where they came from or where there are going'.

And it's very true, everybody is a bit lost in this novella. It is a simple and quiet book, but under the surface a lot of emotions and true feelings are not shared. Both the grandmother and the girl's mother can burst out in anger all of a sudden, but are perfectly polite again the next moment without ever getting to the source of the frustration. Nobody is very happy with their life I believe, but do they have the courage to change?

All in all an interesting and deceivingly simple read, where the Japanese setting adds a lot to the atmosphere.

[spillingthematcha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chociaż sama historia nie była zła, to styl autorki po prostu nie jest czymś, co trafia w mój gust i tylko utwierdziłam się w tym przekonaniu.

[mel · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5★

Claire travels from Switzerland to Japan to visit her Korean grandparents, who run a small pachinko business. Her grandparents left Korea when they were young and never returned, not even for a visit. She plans to go on a trip with her grandparents to their homeland, but they are not interested. She also tutors ten-year-old Mieko while she is visiting her grandparents. Mieko's mother wants her daughter to attend school in Switzerland as she did, so she needs to practice French.

I liked the atmosphere that this novel creates. And although there is tension in the air, this is still a quiet novel. I loved that.

Pachinko Parlor was my first novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, and this wonderful novel was a pleasant surprise. I can’t wait to read something else by this author.

Thanks to Open Letter for the ARC and this opportunity! This is a voluntary review, and all opinions are my own.

[farahxreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pachinko Parlour is a masterclass in nuance and finesse. I’m genuinely impressed with how much subtlety there is in this deceptively simple story. The narrator spends her summer in Japan with her grandparents, Korean immigrants who own a pachinko parlour in Japan. She also tutors a local ten-year-old Mieko, with whom she eventually bonds and connects.

Exploring the themes of exile, trauma, connection and belonging, I found this a fascinating and insightful read. Dusapin’s prose is sparse and distant, which is probably inspired by the narrator’s alienation and her struggle to connect with her grandparents. The narrator’s grandparents’ reluctance to visit their homeland exposes the quiet cycle of trauma and suffering of the Japanese occupation. It reminds me that healing is a long and painful process, and some people would never heal despite the gentle gift of time and the kindness of others. It also pained me to read about the narrator’s fraught relationship with her grandparents. Perhaps it’s true that “the strangest of stranger was family.”

Due to the detached prose, you definitely need to be in the right mood to read this. It’s no plot, just vibes kind of book. There were political and historical elements peppered throughout the story but they remained on the precipice of the story until the end. Nevertheless, I absolutely enjoyed it and the ending pretty much broke my heart into pieces. If you love Winter in Sokcho, you don’t want to miss this.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A 29-year old woman, half Swiss, half Korean, spends the summer with her ageing Korean grandparents in Tokyo, where they have lived (but never really integrated) since the division of Korea, and where they run a typically Korean pachinko parlour. The woman, from whose perspective the story is told, also takes up a job as private French teacher to a shy girl, whose mother has great plans for her.

In an interview Elisa Dusapin says that 'the characters in this book are a little bit like pachinko balls: they don't really know where they came from or where there are going'.

And it's very true, everyone is a bit lost in this novella. It is a simple and quiet book, but under the surface a lot of emotions and true feelings are not shared. Both the grandmother and the girl's mother can burst out in anger all of a sudden, but are perfectly polite again the next moment without ever getting to the source of the frustration. Nobody is very happy with their life I believe, but do they have the courage to change?

All in all an interesting and deceptively simple read, where the Japanese setting adds to the atmosphere.

[Nil Gurun Noyan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elisa Shua Dusapin’in Paçinko Bilyeleri,
modern Asya diasporası, kimlik arayışı ve aile bağlarını etkileyici bir şekilde ele alan bir roman.İsviçre doğumlu bir çevirmen olan Claire,yaz mevsiminde Tokyo’ya giderek, bir paçinko salonu işleten yaşlı büyükanne ve büyükbabasını ziyaret eder.Amacı,elli yıl önce memleketlerinden ayrılmak zorunda kalan bu yaşlı çiftin Kore’ye dönmesini sağlamaktır.Ancak bu ziyaret, Claire’in yalnızca ailesinin geçmişiyle değil,kendisiyle de yüzleşmesine neden olur.

Roman, göçmenlik deneyiminin yarattığı kültürel boşluk ve yalnızlık hissini incelikle işliyor.Paçinko makineleri, karakterlerin hayatlarındaki sıkışmışlığı ve döngüselliği simgelerken,hikâyeye güçlü bir metafor katıyor.Claire, Tokyo’da kaldığı süre boyunca küçük bir Japon kıza Fransızca dersi verirken hem kendi kökleriyle hem de kimlik arayışıyla yüzleşiyor.Yazarın sade ama etkileyici anlatımı,Tokyo’nun melankolik atmosferiyle birleşerek okuru Claire’in içsel yolculuğuna ortak ediyor.

Dusapin’in okuru zorlamadan,ancak kalbinden yakalayarak anlattığı bu kısa ama hüzünlü hikâye,durağanlıktan sıkılmayan ve insan ruhunun kırılgan yönlerini keşfetmek isteyenler için ideal.

[tuğçe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bu yazarı çokkkk seviyorum ya Sokço’da Kış’a da bayılmıştım. Anlatmak istediğini benzetmelerle o kadar güzel anlatıyor ki. Bu yazarın örtük anlatımını çok seviyorum.

“Masanın üzerinde duran üç kase bir yüz oluşturuyor. Büyükannem ve büyükbabaminkiler gözleri, benimkiyse ağzı. Yuvarlak bir ağız, şaşırmış gibi.”
.
"Bir keresinde bir geyik görmüştüm. Miyajima'da. İstedikleri gibi dolaşan bir sürü geyik var orada, ama insanlar onları besledikçe aptallaşıp ölmeye başlıyorlar. Kendi başlarına nasıl yiyecek bulacaklarını unutuyorlar.”
.
“Buz küpleri sürahinin içinde eridi. Sütün üstünde bir su tabakası var. Kaşığımla karıştırıyorum. Çayın içinde bir buğu oluşuyor ve opaklaşıyor.”
.
“Ortada suçlayacak kimse yok.” (Paçinko makinesinin bozulduğundan bahsediyorlardı, Paçinko oyunu Japonya’da buraya göç eden Korelilerin işlettiği bir oyun, makinenin bozulması, Korelilerin “davranışları” kimin suçu? Göç edenlerin mi? Göçü kabul edenlerin mi?)
.
“Deprem oluyor sanıp tutunacak bir yer bulmaya çalışıyorum.” (Ana karakterin büyükanne ve babasına paçinko işletmeyi bıraktırmaya çalışması, iki tarafa da iki millete de tutunmaya çalışması)
.
Monopoly oynama sahnesi, “Kurallar sadece Fransızca, Almanca, ingilizce yazılmış.” Koreli büyükannesi kendini savunamaz, kuralları anlayamaz, suçsuz olsa bile anlatamaz çünkü göç ettiği bu ülkenin dilini bilmiyor, binlerce Koreli gibi.
.
Ana karakter küçükken hayvan sergisine gitmek istiyor, hayvanları incelemek istiyor ama gittiğinde dehşete düşüyor. Çünkü gördükleri hayvan değil. Postlar. Kore’ye dönmek de büyükanne ve büyükbabası için böyle bir şey mi?

Favorilerimden birkaçı. Savaş sebebiyle aile büyüklerinin Kore’den Japonya’ya göç etmesini ve bunun üç kuşak için de doğurduklarını benzetmelerle o kadar iyi anlatıyor ki.
Bu yazardan çokkk daha fazlasını okumak istiyorum, migrenim tuttuğu için çok iyi bi review yazamadım, bunlar aklımda kalanlar. Ama ba yıl dım

[jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

We ought to shed our skins, like animals. The older we got, the more transparent our skin would become. In the end you’d be able to see all our insides through it. Veins, bones, feelings, everything.

After reading Winter in Sokcho back in January, and not being able to stop thinking about it every once in a while, I decided to read this book, and it's safe to say I'm completely enamoured with Dusapin's distinctive style. The ambiance she creates is so exquisite and clean, and almost feels safe, but don't get too comfortable, because a violent scene an come up any minute to disrupt the peace. Where I felt Winter in Sokcho was defined by its coolness, I felt a warm to this one; the imagery becomes almost cinematographical, every word carefully curated to serve a purpose.

Also, Claire's birthday is August 20th, so I guess, Happy Birthday!

All that lingers is an echo. A clamour of languages merging gradually to become one.

[fantine · Rating 4 out of 5]

i love you elisa shua dusapin i love you

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France and raised in Paris, Seoul and Switzerland. She writes in French about Asian settings. Her one previous novel, Winter in Sokcho, won the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2021, as well as prizes in her native France.
Sokcho is a tourist town in the north of Korea. In winter it is bleak and frozen and provided a perfect setting for her novel. In a book with few characters, it had a major role to play as both setting and mood. For this her new novel, we shift to Japan but still follow a Korean theme. The narrator’s grandparents fled from Korea fifty years before and settled in Tokyo. Much of Dusapin’s second novel is concerned with the possibility of those grandparents making a return visit to Korea. The looming unease and mixed emotions taint the present.
One of the recurring themes in the novel is about otherness. Claire, our narrator, is teaching French to a Japanese child, while remaining a Korean speaker with her grandparents. In many ways these older characters have remained on the fringes of Japanese society, clinging to the language of home and never integrating fully into Japanese society. Here Claire talks about her grandparents:

Looking at them I feel overwhelmed. Their lives begin and end with the pachinko parlour. The only social interactions they have are to do with exchanging balls for trinkets: one hundred balls, a bottle of water; one thousand balls, a bar of chocolate; ten thousand balls, an electric razor; no balls, a pack of chewing gum, the consolation prize. They don’t socialise at all with other Zainichis, Japan’s Korean community: exiles, people who came, as my grandparents did, to escape the Korean war, and others, who were deported during the Japanese occupation of Korea.

Another theme is loneliness and abandonment – all the characters spend too much time alone or escaping. This feeling is helped by the settings – Claire’s pupil Mieko lives with her mother in an abandoned hotel, where she had taken to sleeping in the bottom of the empty swimming pool. This bizarre location unsettles the reader and adds the sense of isolation. Even a visit that Claire plans for Meiko – to Heidi’s village, a recreation of the children’s story set in Switzerland but transplanted to Japan as a theme park – adds to the bizarre, unsettling nature of the book.
Central to the novel is the Pachinko Parlour run by Claire’s grandparents. It is called Shiny. A type of gaming arcade which was developed to avoid some of Japan’s gambling laws. Players compete to win small metal balls which can then be exchanged for goods rather than money. Such gaudily decorated parlours are mostly run by Korean exiles. Like symbols of their lost homeland. We gradually learn more about the link to the Pachinko Parlour:

I knew almost nothing about my grandparents’ past. They didn’t talk about it with me or my mother. I knew they’d come to Japan by sea in 1952 to escape the civil war in Korea when they were eighteen and nineteen years old, my grandmother pregnant with my mother. They’d heard rumours of a flourishing industry in Japan, run by Zainichis. There was nothing in the way of entertainment in those post-war days: no cinema, no theatre. The black market was everywhere, with cigarettes the most prized commodity. Koreans were locked out of the Japanese labour market by virtue of their nationality. So, they invented a game: vertical tray, metal balls, a lever. And cigarettes in exchange for balls.

I love this description by Claire of what she sees from her window – again we feel the isolation within everything she says:

The days are beginning to draw in. The sky is dark by seven in the evening. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window. Woman’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. Salarymen. I can tell from the rigid gait, the uniform. Footsteps of people in a hurry, people dragging their feet. I turn away, try to block them out, but then I see their shadows file past on my bedroom wall, distorted, magnified in the beam of the streetlight. Sometimes a taxi parks in front of the window, the driver asleep, forehead resting on the steering wheel.

Lots of the elements come together in this quote, as the impending trip back to Korea looms:

I arrive at the Shiny. My grandfather has unplugged the strings of lights, turned off the neon lighting, the spotlights. With the shopfront darkened like this, I realise how badly lit the end of the street is, with its two meagre streetlights either side of the taxi rank. The main source of light here was the Shiny, attracting all the insects at night.
I bring my face close to the window. With no one to play them, the machines seem pathetic. A single bulb glimmers weakly near the desk, the watchman just discernible in his dim glow. Pachinko balls. For Meiko. I could ask him to give me some, I won’t get another chance. Rain starts falling, fine and cold. Autumn rain, with a tang of rust. I realise the summer is over.

Sadly, this book was not as successful for me as Winter in Sokcho where I loved the silent looming city in the winter. Here the characters were a little too remote and their feelings not as immediate.