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The National Book Award-winning author and translator of “Winter in Sokcho” return with another quietly powerful tale of dislocation.
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THE PACHINKO PARLOR, by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins
“The Pachinko Parlor,” the French writer Elisa Shua Dusapin’s second novel, begins in a whirl. Its narrator, Claire, a Swiss-Korean woman who’s spending a summer in Tokyo with her grandparents, steps off a train and into a “tide of people rushing by.” Urban detail eddies around her: smoking salarymen, a construction site, “plasma screens flashing toothpaste ads.” Nothing in this brief scene is unusual, yet Claire is plainly overwhelmed. In just a few sentences, using nothing but visual description, Dusapin plunges her readers into both the novel’s setting and Claire’s jangled state.
Dusapin isn’t new to writing about the dislocation of life in a country that is neither strange nor familiar. In “Winter in Sokcho,” for which she and the translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins won a 2021 National Book Award, a French Korean woman finds herself on a dreamy, slow-moving adventure at the border between North and South Korea. In “The Pachinko Parlor,” which Higgins also translated, Dusapin explores the blurrier borders of language. Despite its tumultuous opening, the novel is a slow, meditative portrait of one woman finding herself, as well as a moving reflection on language’s capacity to divide us from others — and ourselves.
Claire’s primary language is French; but she’s also proficient if not fluent in Japanese. While in Tokyo, she tutors 10-year-old Mieko in French; they bond quickly, and Mieko begs to visit the pachinko parlor owned and run by Claire’s Korean immigrant grandparents. But when Mieko’s mother learns about the parlor — which to her symbolizes the Korean heritage from which Claire feels relatively disconnected — she turns nasty. “You’ll never really be able to speak Japanese, will you?” she sneers to Claire, who is rendered “speechless” by the comment.
Such prejudice has, in a nearly literal sense, made her grandparents speechless too. Although they’ve lived in Japan for over 50 years, since the Korean War, they have no community there. Neither one will utter a word of Japanese at home, as if doing so would ruin the sanctuary of their apartment. This refusal lies at the novel’s emotional core. Claire speaks very little Korean; she and her grandparents rely on “simple English, with a few basic words in Korean and an array of gestures and exaggerated facial expressions.” In the novel’s first half, she often avoids her grandparents, hiding from the challenge of communication and from her guilt over losing the language they hold dear. But she slowly starts trying harder to connect with them, and with her Korean identity. These efforts can be heart-rending, suffused with frustration and a tenderness that shines through the book like faint sunlight.
“The Pachinko Parlor” gets its power from emotion, not events. Its plot is minimal: Claire takes Mieko on outings, roams Tokyo and arranges to take her grandparents to Korea. Meanwhile, while Dusapin’s prose is spare, it is not minimal at all. Her descriptions are lovely and moody, often bouncing obliquely off Claire’s inner state. As summer ends, Dusapin writes that “the days are beginning to draw in” — a quietly surprising phrase that runs counter to Claire’s expanding awareness of her Korean heritage. Of course, much of the pleasure of reading “The Pachinko Parlor” in English comes from Higgins’s delicate translation. It’s a formidable challenge to translate a novel that deals so centrally with language, and Higgins manages to call the reader’s attention to both the beauty of Dusapin’s writing and the linguistic and cultural switching that demands so much of Claire’s energy.
But at the novel’s end, Claire stops switching. She admits her guilt about speaking Japanese but not Korean to her grandfather, who — in Japanese — offers her the understanding she needs. His forgiveness seems to break down a border within Claire. It certainly gives her a new way of hearing. As she boards the ferry from Japan to Korea, she lets the loudspeaker’s multilingual announcements blur, a “clamor of languages merging gradually to become one.” In this final moment, there is hope that Claire might merge her own disparate identities, too.
Lily Meyer is a writer, critic and translator.
THE PACHINKO PARLOR | By Elisa Shua Dusapin | Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins | 167 pp. | Open Letter | Paperback, $16.95
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