ELISA SHUA DUSAPIN The Pachinko Parlour. Reviewed by Ann Skea
The new novel from the award-winning author of Winter in Sokcho explores the lives of Koreans living in Japan.
At first, the language of this novel seems spare and abrupt, but gradually it draws you into the strange, disconnected life of the narrator. We learn her name only once, when she tells 10-year-old Mieko how to pronounce it:
She calls me sensei, teacher in Japanese. I tell her to call me by my name, Claire, but it is hard for her to say: she pronounces it Calairo, so I ask her to use the Korean for big sister, onni.
‘Onni,’ she murmurs as if she is trying to commit it to memory.
From then on, she remains nameless, and we gradually learn of her complicated background. As a young couple, her grandparents had fled from Korea in 1952 to escape the war. They had started a new life in Japan, where they still live. Her parents had left Japan to live in Switzerland, where her father, who is an organist, travels round the country with his family giving organ recitals. She has grown up in Switzerland, so she speaks fluent French, and has now taken a part-time job in Tokyo, coaching Mieko while living with her grandparents in preparation for taking them back to Korea for a brief visit.
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 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 Japanese.
Every conversation with Mieko and her mother, Madam Ogawa, however, is in Japanese, so she is ‘speechless’ when Madam, having explained that she wants her daughter to study in France, comments, ‘Perhaps she’ll never be able to fit in. Like you, here. You’ll never really be able to speak Japanese, will you?’
Throughout the book, Claire never seems to belong anywhere. We know this only from the glimpses we have into her world as she records fragments of her day. Yet we see, too, her vivid awareness of the strangeness and beauty around her. On the roof of the abandoned hotel in which Mieko and her mother are temporarily living, she is briefly alone:
I walk over to the edge. Cawing of crows. Ambulance sirens. Muffled sounds. A spider spins its web on the railing; it looks as big as the rooftop baseball pitches in the distance, their safety nets.
A player, his hand frozen in mid-air, waiting to catch a ball. He hurls his body forward in slow motion, surely it will take him years to return to his original position.
Her observations are plain and direct. Her grandmother’s sometimes strange behaviour, too, is related without comment:
I arrive at my grandparents’ to find my grandmother seated on the floor in the living room surrounded by her Playmobile figures. She’d removed all their hair. They smile vacantly.
Her grandmother, it seems, is choosing hairstyles because she has to go to the hairdresser. On another occasion her grandmother goes missing:
My grandfather assumed I was with her. I called the police as soon as I got home. You need to wait for a while, they said, old people are unpredictable, they often act on a whim. In the end, a Japanese railway employee brought her home. He’d found her in one of the seats reserved for elderly people, asleep.
Fragments of the history and the lives of the Zainichi (the Koreans living in Japan) are revealed through Claire’s words and through her interactions with Meiko and her mother. ‘I didn’t know your parents ran a pachinko parlour,’ Madam Ogawa says one day. Claire explains that it is her grandparents who do that, then has to explain why they couldn’t find work in Korea, where gambling is illegal:
I choose my words carefully. Gambling is illegal in Japan, too. Pachinko isn’t seen as gambling because the balls are exchanged for sweets, toilet paper, bottles of water, toothpaste. Or dominoes. People swap them for money once they leave the parlour. Anonymously, through a hole in the wall, somewhere near the pachinko parlour.
There are light moments with Mieko as they get to know each other, but she is an awkward child, affected by the disappearance of her father, who ‘got on a train one day and never came home’. Visits to Disneyland and to the zoo seem to please her but what she really wants, she tells Claire, is to visit the pachinko parlour. This never happens, but Claire gets to know her grandfather’s parlour well: the paid, professional player, Yuki, ‘scrawny and round-shouldered’ who sits near the window every day to make the parlour look popular; the sandwich-board woman who walks up and down with a loudspeaker attached to her hat chanting an invitation to the parlour; and the retired policeman who is the security guard there because the Japanese government doesn’t provide pensions for its employees.
By the end of the book, Claire has made all the arrangements for the trip to Korea and she and her grandparents set off. It is a long journey by trains, ferry, and bus to get to the ship that will take them to Korea, so they spend a night in a guest house on the way:
It smells of bamboo. From the balcony you can see the ferry and the tori, the great red gate standing in the water. It looks more orange than red in this late afternoon light. The photos of it used in the tourist brochures have probably been retouched.
Nerves, panic, decisions, and a final moment, ending the book, when the ship’s loudspeakers fall silent:
All that lingers is an echo. A clamour of languages merging gradually to become one.
This ending is also a beginning – full of the hope, feelings and uncertainty that have been felt throughout this unusual and satisfying book.
Elisa Shua Dusapin The Pachinko Parlour translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins Scribe 2022 PB 176pp $24.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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