Daniel Shindler's Reviews > Pachinko Parlor

This richly textured novel explores abandonment,isolation,identity and barriers. The novel is suffused with an atmosphere that often vacillates between discomfort and despair as the characters seek to find moorings for their inner cores. In “ The Pachinko Parlor” Elisa Shia Dusapin continues to develop and deepen the themes she introduced in her earlier novel,” Winter in Sokcho.”

The protagonist, Claire, is a Korean-Swiss graduate student who lives in Switzerland and is spending the summer visiting her grandparents in Tokyo. Her grandparents, owners of a pachinko parlor in the Zanichi Korean suburb, have lived in Tokyo for all fifty years after their flight from Korea during the Civil War. Claire intends to take these nonagenarian relatives back for their first visit to Korea since their relocation. However, Claire’s plans are derailed by her grandparents’ reluctance to make the journey. Their antipathy is rooted in more than inertia, instead fueled by the trauma of their forced diaspora in 1952. Remembering a time when speaking Korean was punishable by death, Claire’s grandmother refuses to speak Japanese, resulting in frustratingly halting exchanges with Claire, who is not fluent in Korean.

The linguistic barrier in Claire’s relationship presents a major theme permeating the novel. The author implies that language and communication create an emotional border in a displaced immigrant’s quest for identity and belonging. This same dynamic also appears in a second relationship Claire forms during her summer visit. Claire forms a connection with Meiko, a Japanese schoolgirl that Claire tutors in French. Meiko is being raised by a single mother and is anticipating attending school in Switzerland. She harbors a sense of both abandonment and anxiety fueled by the uncertain circumstances surrounding her fractured family and upcoming relocation to a foreign country.

Claire’s connections with both her grandparents and Meiko portray the liminal space inhabited by multi generational individuals who have been buffeted between cultures resulting in a fragmented sense of identity. Dusapin writes in spare yet vivid prose that imparts an aura of tension and uncertainty throughout the novel.The grandparents’ ownership of a pachinko parlor is a fitting metaphor for the tenuous connection these generations must feel as they sit in front of a machine with bouncing balls. Their control of the machine’s outcome is virtually nonexistent, limited to a hopeful sway or nudge that may result in success or failure.

In a similar way, we can intuit the sways and nudges as the characters in the novel haltingly retreat and edge forward in their attempts to form attachments and overcome their sense of displacement and isolation. The communication struggles in these relationships reinforce the image of unspoken linguistic barriers becoming defined emotional and physical borders that erode people’s ability to connect. As the novel concludes, Claire hears ..” A clamor of languages merging gradually to become one.” We are left to wonder if this clamor is a beacon of future hope or a fleeting mirage.