Claire is visiting her grandparents in Japan and trying to get them ready for a trip to Korea, where they haven't been since they left in 1952 because of the war. She lives in Switzerland and has challenges communicating with them - despite speaking several languages, she does not know Korean, and her grandmother doesn't like to speak Japanese. Meanwhile, Claire gets a job as a French tutor for a young girl during the summer holidays.

A quiet, spare book and character study. Claire's hard to get to know, going through a lot of motions passively (she spends a lot of time in her room, if she's not tutoring), showing her disconnection: from people, and from her family history. This is Dusapin's second novel to be translated into English, and it won the Swiss Literature Award. The author was born in France but lives in Switzerland, is of French-Korean ancestry, and was about the age of her protagonist when she wrote the book, so it was hard not to wonder how much of her own story informed her writing. While I didn't always enjoy every minute of reading, there's a lot to ponder. This is a story that would reward rereading. ( )

It was an 'ok' read. If there hadn't been the grumpy grandmother who was sometimes really hard to take (as a reader) then I would have enjoyed it much more! Especially the chapters with Mieko 🥺 ( )

The Publisher 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. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long.

It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by.

The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven’t been back since. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlor. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, a tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlor builds.

The Pachinko Parlor is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel amongst family. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin’s writing glows with intelligence.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'm aware of two things about this read, two very strong responses that wouldn't be elicited by any other read I've encountered this year: 1) Food looms very, very large in my experience of a story. This book, it's Claire and her inability to enjoy any food she encounters in Japan. 2) Author Shua Dusapin builds very intricate clockworks of interdependent imagery to support her stories of women without pleasure in the worlds they're in. The recurring fish-object images in this book join Winter in Sokcho's cold, echoing spaces. I mean, when a child's desire to act on the world is performed in explicit imitation of a cleaner fish, and a train pulling into a station summons from its immensity and speed the idea of a fish in Claire, our main character, then the author's going about her business with a degree of bravura that demands to be noted. As to whether it worked, I cannot say. I noticed it...I never thought of not noticing it...but derived nothing but the most facile conclusions from its obviousness. Me, or the choice? A case is readily made for either.

Claire's visit to her Korean grandparents, whose lives have taken them to batten on the economic lifeblood of their erstwhile colonizers, is always...off. Claire has little knowledge of Korean to offer in her attempts to connect with them. None of them deign to speak Japanese among themselves. So, to skirt around the grandparental reticence with their native language (a reticence they did not demonstrate with Claire's Swiss boyfriend, she notes) and still manage to communicate, they use English. Another colonial tongue...one associated in Korea with the US...another occupying power, though perhaps more palatable (!) because it's used by the Japanese's modern overlords.

Pachinko earns profits for her Korean grandparents...the only legal way for Japanese to gamble, or Koreans to earn...Japan making an apology for its colonial past? Or simply making it obvious who the vampires sucking the country's vice income into themselves are. Both...either...not for nothing is Japan's food disagreeable to Claire. Its artifice (a description of a raspberry atop a dessert was so revolting I had to put the book down:

I look down at my tart. A single raspberry glistens atop a lump of whipped cream. Compact and rubbery-looking. I pick up my knife, cut the tart into sections and start eating. It tastes fatty. I spit it out into my napkin. The raspberry stares up at me, still intact, coated in a film of jelly.

...it made something lush and luscious sound so unheathily slimy!) is removed from nature, is devoid of dirt or even signs of human hands in its preparation...something very Japanese about that. And Claire's not having it inside her, not willingly anyway.

Mieko serves as Claire's out, her means of contributing something to this life she's temporarily trapped in (it's a visit, not an emigration!) and unhappily isolated within. Mieko is a young Japanese girl whose mother hires Claire to teach French. (Which is odd, given the mother's fluency...permaybehaps seeking a genuinely French accent? from a Swiss Korean?) Mieko's, um, a little odd. Her ordinary-kid desires, eg going to theme parks or eating, are all as not-Japanese as is Claire's role in her life of teaching her a European language. Mieko is for Claire, unsurprisingly, the friend whose strangeness meets one's own in silent weirdo communion.

Claire's main failing as a character is simply that she is so passive. She drifts, she causes nothing to happen...teaching Mieko French and acting as her escort to theme parks aren't things Claire causes or even proposes...and, in the end, her presence changes nothing. The grandparents she's there to visit aren't communicative, make no demands and accept no role in the granddaughter who came around the world to enable a much-mooted visit to Korea for them's life while she's there. The visit itself, a "return" to a country that the grandparents left before there was a North or a South or an American- or Chinese-backed state, is...inconclusive. Did it happen? We aren't vouchsafed that information...Claire's climbing a gangway, thinking her grandparents are behind her...and they aren't.

What makes me not-best-pleased about that ending, that tunnel Claire's climbing to visit a place she's not been to, she's there to allow others to experience before they die...is the fact that it does nothing like an ending to resolve the family's generational hurts. It's a story about a disintegrating family's stop at a roadside attraction on its way somewhere and suddenly the stop's over but not everyone's in the car.

It is, in other words, a bit too much like Winter in Sokcho to be ignored. That tale's very French-feeling plot of plotlessness as families unite around the goal of making everyone feel as miserable as possible worked because it was the author's introduction to the Anglophone reading world. It's no less beautifully wrapped in sentences here, the imagery is lovely, but...it's not my first trip to the well.

I am glad I read this story. I am eager to see what else the author has in mind for me to read in future. I hope it will ring more than a change of scenery on the story next time. Once was enough; twice a bit troublesome; no more now, if you please.

Pachinko parlours in Japan are fascinating. Shiny and loud, they look like fun, promising great prizes. I never did work out how to play pachinko (or win anything), but I did bring home a silver ball as a souvenir. To me, it’s easy to see why the pachinko parlour in this story is so captivating to the characters in The Pachinko Parlour. It promises fun, yet it’s elusive to try to obtain what it promises.

The pachinko parlour in question, Shiny, belongs to Claire’s grandparents in Tokyo. Claire has come over for the summer, with the intent of accompanying her grandparents to Korea. It would be their first visit back after fleeing the country during the Korean war. Her grandparents are relatively dismissive about the whole thing, preferring their daily routines. In the meantime, Claire agrees to tutor Mieko in French. Mieko lives in a former hotel (her bedroom is the hotel pool) and becomes a sort of companion to Claire. They venture out to different places (Disneyland, Heidi’s village) but Mieko would really prefer seeing the pachinko parlour. Her mother wants more for Mieko – European finishing school, fluency in French – but Mieko really isn’t too sure. Like Claire, she is somewhat adrift this summer. Claire is waiting on her grandparents, and trying to communicate with them with difficulty. Not only does she not speak Korean (and her grandmother little Japanese), but she finds it difficult to get into their mindset. Her grandfather is devoted to the pachinko parlour and her grandmother has her own routine of shopping and cooking, although her memory is fading.

The final part of the story, as Claire and her grandparents set off on the trip back to Korea via Miyajima Island (just off the coast of Hiroshima) hit the hardest for me. Claire is determined to do what she thinks her grandparents want, hoping that in Korea they will not be the outsiders they are in Japan. Yet her grandparents have their own thoughts on the matter, which they reveal at a crucial time. It’s a confronting way to consolidate the themes of identity and feeling like an outsider, even a bit lost in places where the characters just don’t quite fit in to the societal norms. Even the game of pachinko sits on the boundaries of what is accepted/legal (you ‘win’ gifts, but you can switch them secretly for money, which is illegal in Japan). Every character presents as they are, no pretense. Claire’s grandmother is starting to get forgetful, Claire herself is frustrated with her grandparents and even the sandwich board lady who promotes Shiny gets on Claire’s nerves with her lack of ambition.

The story is full of emotion, but it is somewhat repressed (in a good way). You can feel the tension and frustration in each of the characters, but it never simmers over. The weather and other settings add greatly to the feeling of oppression and otherness. The translation captures all of this so well, in so few well chosen words. The Pachinko Parlour is a story of character rather than plot movement, and it’s fascinating.

Thank you to Scribe for the copy. My review is honest.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com ( )

In my idle moments, I've been watching Series III of the Danish TV program Borgen. In Series III (2013) the central character, the former PM Birgitte Nyborg who lost office at the end of Series II, forms a new party in response to her old party's drift to the right and its stance on immigration. Alongside this storyline, there is a strand about the relationship between politics and the media, and in this series there is a Bright Young Thing who has been parachuted in to TV1 to lift ratings. Amongst other 'innovations' he directs the Head of News to change the news narrative to something 'positive', offering viewers a glimpse of 'I'd like to be that person in the news' rather than 'I'd hate to be that person in the news'.

I admit it, I felt a faint (but fleeting) moment of connection with this inane directive. It came to mind when, for #WITmonth I was reading a novella newly available in English: The Pachinko Parlour, by the French-Korean author Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. And I thought, why is it, that the novels set in Japan that come my way all feature repressed, alienated characters in melancholy claustrophobic settings? Why have these books never made me feel, I'd like to go to Japan?

The Pachinko Parlour is beautifully written, rendered in English with spare delicacy by the translator. Set in Tokyo in a humid summer, the novella brings the reader to a crowded city of oppressive heat, where clothes cling to the body and all energy seems to be drained away. The pachinko parlour of the title is a symbol of the aimlessness of life and the cynicism of the authorities, who've turned a blind eye to it. Gambling for money is illegal in Japan, but the Koreans who've clustered together (in what amounts to a ghetto in Tokyo) play these one-armed bandits that deliver small balls for a win, which are then exchanged for money outside the pachinko parlour. Like pachinko, the game of life for some in Tokyo is low stakes, low strategy.

The Pachinko Parlour is narrated by a blow-in called Claire, the 29-year-old Swiss granddaughter of a couple who fled the Korean War to Japan. She is visiting from Switzerland where she lives with her mother. From her room, all she can see is the passing feet of the salarymen, a metaphor for the way life is passing her by.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/08/13/the-pachinko-parlour-by-lisa-shua-dusapin-tr... ( )