The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin (tr. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

Review by Jessie Jones

‘Korean restaurants, Chinese noodles, sumo stables, the vast Yanaka cemetery up on the hill. And the Pachinko parlours.’ These clipped snapshots of a city, and an existence, lived liminally, act as backdrop to Elisa Shua Dusapin’s latest novel. The Pachinko Parlour follows Claire, existing in a complex diaspora in Japan by way of Switzerland. She splits her time between her Korean grandparents, who fled to Japan during the civil war of 1952, and Mieko, a Japanese child she tutors in French.

This linguistic layering, between French with Mieko, English with her Grandparents, and the yearning that exists to communicate and exist in Korean, contribute a subtle melancholia and contextualises the overlap of culture and character.

Mieko is nervous and strange, living with her mother in a ghostly building that used to be a hotel, having been abandoned by her father. Claire is torn between Switzerland (where her partner Mathieu lives), Japan where her inert Grandparents remain stubbornly in stasis, and Korea: that intangible but tantalising opportunity for rootedness. This is the crux of what makes the novel so quietly heartbreaking. It’s understated in the way it illustrates alienation but does so in a way that haunts you as equally as its inhabitants.

In the translation, the clipped, quiet beauty of Japanese poetics exist alongside the florid romance of French, with frequent oscillation and imbrication between the two. We go from a simple, devastating bathroom scene, ‘only soap and a shampoo base. I wash my hands, I feel tainted’, to existential poetry: ‘The earth expelling poison through the humans it wears on its surface like a coat of hairs’. Aneesa Abbas Higgings masterfully mirrors the restlessness of the characters as they attempt to translate one another.

Madame Ogawa, Mieko’s mother, is described as ‘dessicated’, emptied out like the ex-hotel she lives in and this could be said of the majority of the characters. Everybody is out of place, out of time, and chasing something, somewhere, or someone with a painful stab of cultural nostalgia.

The Pachinko Parlour is published by Daunt Books Publishing, August 2022