In February 2020, an understated debut of disquieting power slid into British bookshops: Winter in Sokcho, by a young Franco-Korean author. Sensitively translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins, it won the US National Book award for translated literature. In Elisa Shua Dusapin’s second novel, The Pachinko Parlour, Claire, a Korean-Swiss graduate student just shy of 30, spends an insomniac summer treading water in Tokyo while visiting her grandparents, Korean immigrants who own a pachinko parlour. Japan’s 20,000-plus parlours are exclusively run by Koreans, who are exempt from the steep taxes levied on the pinball-type arcade game, the country’s only legal form of gambling.
Like Min Jin Lee’s novel Pachinko, Dusapin’s book illuminates the legacy of 20th-century Korean migration to Japan, the homeland of their colonisers. Claire is planning to accompany her grandparents on their first trip back to Korea since they fled the civil war in 1952. Gradually, she realises the roots of their reluctance to organise the journey lie deeper than mere inertia.
As the setting for stories from Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata to Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow and All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami, Tokyo has become a byword for urban alienation – and so it proves here. Claire struggles to bridge the gap between herself and her grandparents, who grew up in a Japanese-occupied Korea where speaking their own language was punishable by death, and now resist speaking Japanese. Because Claire lives in Switzerland, where Korean is not taught, she is studying Japanese, but must communicate with her grandparents in basic English. To add another linguistic layer, Claire is tutoring a local child, Mieko, in French. Mieko lives with her mother, and her memories of a vanished father, in a deserted hotel.
So Dusapin assembles her themes: absence and abandonment, cultural history and identity, belonging and otherness, language and connection. Claire passes as Japanese, but she’s “never felt more foreign” – and her grandparents seem scarcely more integrated. As she drifts through a heatwave, a sense of foreboding builds, spun from small grotesqueries (“a jar of pickles, greenish, floating like embryos”), off-kilter interactions and startling glimpses of darkness, such as Claire’s grandmother’s volatility and occasional cruelty.
Dusapin, 29, is developing a distinctive style with signature motifs that interconnect her work. Fragmentation, recurring imagery and a flair for evoking atmosphere so effective that lassitude seems to seep through the pages recalls Deborah Levy’s writing. Fish populated Winter in Sokcho, and are here again – in a cityscape where “everything seems to float”; in the bullet trains that “look like fish”; in Mieko’s opening and closing mouth. Another Dusapin trope is food as a conduit to the emotions; foodstuffs are cast as comforting, painfully nostalgic or queasily alien. She captures place with assurance, from the gently comic surrealism of the “Heidi’s Village” theme park to the melancholy of the pachinko parlour The Shiny, whose name gathers irony with every passing day. This pathos infuses the novel, as Claire feels worlds apart from her grandparents, witnessing the insularity and disorientation of old age.
As in Winter in Sokcho, the narrator seeks refuge from her fraught family relationships in an unexpected new friendship. In that book, a sexual frisson sucked the reader in, while in this one the tensions derive from unspoken family histories; if you’ve read Dusapin’s debut, the shape and mood will feel a little too familiar. Nonetheless, this is a masterclass in narrative control and subtlety, exemplified by the currents eddying beneath the surface of relationships and Claire’s dawning understanding of the scars left by her grandparents’ pasts. Dusapin is clearly an exceptional writer – sharply focused, delicate – but she could shake things up next time.
• The Pachinko Parlour by Elisa Shua Dusapin is translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins and published by Daunt (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
