The Pachinko Parlour E-Book

Elisa Shua Dusapin

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

It is summer in Tokyo. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring ten-year-old Mieko in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents' home: daydreaming, playing Tetris and listening to the sounds from the street above. The heat rises; the days slip by.When her grandparents first arrived in Tokyo, fleeing the civil war in Korea, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour. 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 Parlour builds and with it, Claire's own desire to visit Korea with her grandparents.The Pachinko Parlour is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel amongst family. Crisp and enigmatic, Dusapin's writing glows with intelligence.

Leseprobe

‘An exquisite, cinematic novel not afraid of subtlety.’ Amina Cain

‘In beautifully sparse prose, The Pachinko Parlour is a contemplation on language, history and trauma and how, in spite of the ineffable past, we eventually come to console one another.’ Yan Ge

‘A melancholic exploration of identity and belonging, The Pachinko Parlour is a beautifully told story of one woman trying to tether herself to something.’ Kasim Ali

‘In prose as softly elegiac as it is laser-sighted, Elisa Shua Dusapin conjures up a Tokyo that is less mighty metropolis than boundless night sky, twinkling and pulsing with interlocking constellations of longing.’ Polly Barton

‘A prismatic and calm guide of a book … rich with vitality and versions of togetherness.’ Tice Cin

‘A book full of delicacy and melancholy … sprinkled with meticulous touches.’ Le Monde

ii

Also by Elisa Shua Dusapin

Winter in Sokcho

Vladivostok Circus

iii

Contents

Title Page The Pachinko ParlourAbout the AuthorsCopyright

1

THE PACHINKO PARLOUR

2

3

The Pachinko Parlour

I STEP OUT of the train and plunge into the narrow passageways of Shinagawa Station. Limescale on the walls, plasma screens flashing toothpaste ads, a woman with a gleaming smile. A tide of people rushing by. Outside, workmen are dismantling a building site. A platform overhangs a garden, cherry trees, enclosures where salarymen gather to smoke, puffing jerkily on their cigarettes, stubbing them out on rocks that look like the stones that horses lick for salt.

I follow Madame Ogawa’s directions. Take the walkway that leads to the residential complex, building number 4488, buzz the answerphone to let her know I’ve arrived, take the lift up to the top floor. 4

The door opens directly into the apartment.

Madame Ogawa is dressed in a tailored jacket, sweatpants and socks. The heat is stifling. She looks older than I’d expected. Perhaps it’s because she’s so thin. She’s sent her daughter, Mieko, on an errand to the shops. She’ll show me round while we wait.

A long corridor with rooms on either side, perfectly symmetrical. She shows me the bathroom first. Fleshtoned plastic. So tiny I can barely stand. The bedroom opposite is just as small: built-in wardrobe, brown carpet. A bed with an immaculately ironed bedspread, a second one thrown across it, unironed, piled with a jumble of skirts and T-shirts. A stale tobacco smell hangs in the air.

‘This used to be a hotel,’ Madame Ogawa says apologetically. ‘We’re on the smoking floor here. We moved in when the hotel went bankrupt. My husband’s a bullet train engineer. He was working on the expansion of Shinagawa Station for the Shinkansen trains. The whole area’s being redeveloped. This’ll be a hotel again soon, they’re supposed to start work later this month. We’re the only ones living here.’

She’s standing in the doorway, looking at me, her hand on the doorknob. I turn away, feeling uncomfortable in the intimacy of this cramped room with its bare light bulb. I can’t see any windows. 5

At the far end of the corridor, an open-plan living room with kitchen-diner. The stove takes up most of the room, along with the bookshelves. Beyond the picture window, a haze of pollution blurs the contours of the metropolis below.

I follow Madame Ogawa back towards the entrance.

‘Mieko’s room is downstairs,’ she says, indicating a door half-hidden by a coat rack. The door opens onto a concrete staircase. ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘The light switch is at the bottom of the stairs.’

Her voice echoes slightly, as if in a cave. I feel my way down until the concrete gives way to a springier surface underfoot. The humidity rises. A neon light flickers on to reveal an open pit surrounded by a walkway with a waist-high glass barrier. The floor of the pit slopes gently down to a drainage hole. In one corner sits a single bed.

Madame Ogawa places her hands on the guard rail.

‘The swimming pool. It’s never been used, even when the hotel was open. Mould. It’s clean now, since we had it drained. Mieko sleeps here, for the time being.’

I lean over the barrier to get a better look. Arranged around the bed, a desk and a chest of drawers, a yoga mat and a hoop reflected to infinity in mirrors on either side of the pool. Plastic blocks are arranged at the foot of the 6steps leading down into the pool. I can’t help thinking of the arcade game Tetris, with the geometrical shapes that drop down and have to be arranged in space.

‘Do you like yoga?’ Madame Ogawa asks.

I tell her I don’t know, I’ve never tried it. She nods her head slowly.

We go back upstairs. A little girl is waiting for us in the kitchen. Bobbed hair, shorts and a yellow T-shirt. She’s sweating, her fringe sticks to her forehead as she bows to greet me.

‘I bought salmon,’ she says to her mother, holding up a package of ready-made lasagne.

It’s only ten in the morning, but Mieko starts setting the table while her mother shucks oysters and puts the lasagne in the microwave. It comes out steaming and she serves large portions to Mieko and me, a smaller one for herself.

She’s taken off her jacket. Her T-shirt clings to her ribs, the points of her nipples. A vein bulges along her arm from shoulder to wrist. Desiccated, I think to myself, like everything else about her. The lasagne sheets slither off her chopsticks into the pink béchamel sauce. She 7fishes them out again deftly. From time to time I bite into something that feels solid, the salmon probably. Mieko finishes eating and leans back in her chair, her mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Madame Ogawa dabs at her lips with her napkin, folds it back up.

‘If you could take her out once in a while too …’

‘Of course.’

‘I was thinking … Perhaps you could go and play first?’

‘Okay.’

I’m not sure I’ve understood what she means by ‘play’. In Japanese, ‘play’ can be used for all sorts of things, from children’s games to evenings out with work colleagues. In Korean too. I’ve no idea what children like to do. I’m in my late twenties, I’m not used to being around ten-year-olds. I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t answered that ad. ‘Native French speaker wanted in Tokyo to tutor ten-year-old during summer holidays.’ I’d seen the ad in Geneva, on Tokyo’s Sophia University website. Madame Ogawa was a French teacher herself, she’d be busy preparing for the next school year. She didn’t want her daughter spending too much time on her own. I’d been planning to spend the month of August in Tokyo with 8my grandparents, before travelling to Korea with them at the beginning of September. I was concerned I might have too much time on my hands. I accepted Madame Ogawa’s offer and we agreed that I’d meet up with Mieko now and then during my stay.

Madame Ogawa cleans her plate and glances over at mine.

‘You don’t like it. Have some oysters.’

‘No, no, it’s good,’ I say, forcing down a mouthful of lasagne.

She clears away the lasagne plates and Mieko places an oyster in front of me. The flesh retracts, a small, viscous lump. I take a deep breath and gulp it down.

Madame Ogawa seems satisfied. She asks me where I’m staying.

‘Not far from here,’ I reply, ‘ten stations further north on the Yamanote line, at my grandparents’ place.’

I pause. I feel awkward talking about my grandparents in Japanese. It makes them seem foreign somehow. I carry on talking, to compensate:

‘They’re Korean,’ I say, ‘they live in Nippori. They run a pachinko parlour there. It’s only a small parlour, they’ve been running it for fifty years, ever since they arrived here.’ 9

Mieko leans in towards the table, her lips closed. Madame Ogawa nods, a look of concern on her face, just as when I said I didn’t do yoga. I can understand her reservations. Here in Japan, pachinko machines are seen as no different from casino slot machines. Everyone plays pachinko, but it’s still disapproved of. Pachinko parlours have their own banking system, with a reputation for funding the main political parties under the counter. They advertise all over the media, feeding a whole parallel economy. But that’s only the big chains like Diamond or Merrytale. Not small businesses like my grandfather’s.

When we’ve finished eating, Madame Ogawa goes down to the pool, and Mieko sets her things out on the table.

‘Aren’t we going down to your room?’ I ask.

‘No, my mother’s there.’

She calls me sensei, teacher in Japanese. I tell her to call me by my name, Claire, but it’s hard for her to say; she pronounces it Calairo, so I ask her to use the Korean for big sister, onni.

‘Onni,’ she murmurs as if she’s trying to commit it to memory.

Her homework is clearly set out in a notebook. Today’s topic is agreement of French adjectives. I’m not 10sure of her level, so I read the examples aloud for her, thinking what a dull textbook this is, colourless, with no pictures. Mieko knows it all perfectly, giving the answers before I can ask the questions.

‘What’s the point of me being here?’ I ask her.

‘We’ve practised it,’ she says.

‘Practised?’

‘Yes, because you were coming.’

I think back to the meal we’ve just had, how everything she and her mother did was perfectly synchronised.

I watch her working through the exercises for a few moments and then leave her to get on with it. I walk over to the picture window, look down at the station; a central spine, four walkways fanning out like limbs. A lizard lying in wait. Buildings everywhere, overhead wires stretching into the distance, all the way to Mount Fuji, barely visible through the smog.

I scan the bookshelves. Rousseau, Chateaubriand. Essays on literature, Swiss Romantics. History books. The French Revolution. I have the feeling these books don’t contain the history I learnt at school; these volumes tell of another parallel history, one that played out simultaneously on another planet. 11

Around one o’clock, Madame Ogawa comes back up with some royal milk tea and kkwabaegi, Korean doughnuts, from the Family Mart for us. The bodysuit she’s wearing reveals every fold and pleat of her body.

After she’s gone back down, I ask Mieko why her mother wears shoes inside the apartment. Japanese people usually take them off indoors.

‘She says she needs to hear her own footsteps. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.’

We sit side by side munching our snacks. The label on the bottle of tea has a picture of Donald Duck and Daisy in their swimsuits, at the beach. A special summer offer. Of course, Disneyland Tokyo. I could take Mieko there. I’m not sure she’d like it, maybe amusement parks aren’t her thing.

‘Is there anywhere in particular you’d like me to take you while I’m here?’