Book Review - The Pachinko Parlour
The Pachinko Parlour, the second effort from award-winning French-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin, is a delicate and gentle followup to her first novel Winter in Sokcho. Echoing the sentiments of displacement, dissociation and longing expressed in her debut, The Pachinko Parlour makes for a short, subdued and tender read.
The Pachinko Parlour finds an undirected and unpretentious protagonist in Claire, a Swiss-Korean woman living in Japan with her grandparents. Whilst they run their pachinko parlour, Shiny, Claire wittles away the warm summer days teaching French to a twelve-year-old girl named Mieko, who quickly grows attached to Claire and the companionship their lessons provide. Claire plans to visit Korea with her grandparents - for whom the trip would be their first time back to the country in over fifty years - but the pair are resistant to moving forward with the trip. These strands create the mesh within which the narrative settles itself: in the spaces between events, locations, and identities, to tell a story about belonging and otherness.
Claire’s grandparents are elderly, and evidently losing time, opportunity and general conation as they grow old. They are reluctant to engage with Japanese culture, yet simultaneously are unable or unwilling to return to Korea. In establishing their Pachinko parlour, a Korean cultural establishment that is shunned but nonetheless patronised by Japanese people, they built up their new lives in Japan after having fled war fifty years earlier. They exist between these spaces, having brought Korea to Japan, where it should but does not quite fit.
Claire too is disconnected in a number of ways - linguistically alone, she has forgotten Korean, her native language is French and she was only able to study Japanese during her time at university. She too exists between cultures, her Swiss and Korean heritage, living in neither homeland, speaking and hearing Japanese around her, and teaching in French. Her partner Matthieu isn’t present on the trip to Japan, nor by the sounds of things, within the relationship. There is a constant sense of displacement to her character, sounding from her unspoken histories and inability to identify the parts of herself she is seeking out in Japan and within her grandparents.
Dusapin’s talent is in creating a subdued and soft world that feels remarkably real in its ordinariness. Claire, much like Dusapin’s preceding unnamed protagonist from Winter in Sokcho, takes note of small details and appreciates the particulars of everyday objects, experiences and locations. She takes stock of mundane experiences, and her unadorned description of memories and simple conversations completely transposes to the haze of the warm Japanese summer, spent in quiet dark rooms, whiling the hours away.
The entire book carries a sense of brevity and pith, quite literally with its compact length of 171 pages. Each chapter begins halfway down a fresh page, providing the reflective room to consider the direction and significance of each segment. There is the opportunity and room, much like Claire has within the narrative, to pause and contemplate the texture of the surrounding world, and there is no narrative fat to trim. Every one of Dusapin’s sentences brims with purpose and intention, and her restraint only makes for a read that is all the more transportive. The Pachinko Parlour is one to be read and enjoyed over one stuffy afternoon, in a quiet room, with a cold drink slowly sweating condensation.
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The Pachinko Parlour is available from Scribe Publications now. For more info, click here.