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.
