The Pachinko Parlour | Book Review | Elisa Shua Dusapin | 2018

The Pachinko Parlour Book Review: A Quiet Resonance That Lingers

There’s a special kind of reading pleasure in a book that doesn’t rush. As a book, The Pachinko Parlour is exactly that kind of literary companion — unostentatious, emotionally resonant, and gently persistent. From the first page, you feel the weight of absence, the pull of memory, and the ache of in‑between spaces. This is not a spectacle; it’s a soft echo of inner lives.

In this review, I won’t recite every plot beat (I believe the power lies in how it feels, not just what happens). Instead, I will explore the mood, emotional currents, and why this novel deserves a place among the best literary fiction books you’ll encounter.

A Novel That Moves Like a Breath

If someone asked me to describe The Pachinko Parlour in one phrase, I would say: a meditation on distance. Claire, the protagonist, drifts through Tokyo, visiting her grandparents, tutoring a young girl, and trying (with limited success) to bridge the emotional gaps in her life. She is not heroic. She is fragmented, cautious, and always watching.

That’s why this fits so beautifully among character-driven novels — so much of the tension is interior. Nothing shouts; everything whispers.

Its pacing is minimal — even slow — but that gives space for you, the reader, to draw your own contours. For those who prefer short literary novels to sprawling epics, this one feels deliberately compact. In those pages, silence becomes meaningful, and small moments magnify.

Atmosphere Over Action — A Tokyo That Hums

One of the unexpected strengths of this novel is how Tokyo is treated. In many novels set in Japan, the city is rendered in vivid colors: the neon, the subways, the food stalls. Here, Tokyo is under heat, in flat light, in the hum of air conditioners and vending machines. It doesn’t dazzle. Instead, it becomes a quiet container for emotional tension.

Claire moves through tourist districts, outdated hotels, and narrow streets, but the geography is less about place and more about loneliness, dislocation, and half-remembered belonging. There is no showiness in this Japan — just a persistent feeling of “being in someone else’s home.”

That subtle discomfort is what makes The Pachinko Parlour such a poignant read — it captures the emotional awkwardness of being physically close to something, or someone, but feeling like you don’t quite belong.

The Tension Between Roots and Distance

Claire is both insider and outsider. Though Korean by heritage and French by upbringing, Japan is where she lingers — but never quite fits. That ambivalence is at the heart of translated literary fiction: voices that straddle language, exile, memory. Claire’s internal turmoil — between wanting to belong, wanting to leave, wanting to be understood — is quietly universal.

What the novel doesn’t give you is neat resolution. It doesn’t ask you to forgive or reconcile; rather, it lets you sit in those unresolved spaces. That’s one reason The Pachinko Parlour is not a book for readers seeking catharsis. But it is for those who want emotional truth over plot fireworks.

The novel also gestures toward the larger history of the Korean diaspora, evoking the displacement of those who left a divided homeland only to find themselves on the fringes elsewhere. Dusapin doesn’t frame this as political commentary; instead, she allows that generational wound to linger quietly in Claire’s interactions — a kind of inherited longing that shapes her without ever defining her.

Loneliness Wears Many Faces

If I were to name one emotional spine of this novel, it is loneliness in its many guises: familial, cultural, temporal. Silence in conversation. Gaps in memory. Distance in language.

Several lines from the text encapsulate this well:

I like it when it’s foggy. When you can’t see into the distance. When there’s no horizon. It gives me a feeling of having time. That it’s all right not to see, not to be aware of what’s in my path.

When Korea was divided, we were still nationals of a unified Korea. It was called Choson. At separation, the Japanese government gave us permission to keep our Korean identity, but we had to choose between North and South. Many people chose the North, because of their family or because they considered the North more in line with our country’s traditions. There was no way of knowing how things would turn out. Your grandmother and I chose the South because we were from Seoul. That was the only reason. We knew nothing about any of the rest of it. Political questions meant nothing to us, the Cold War, Russia, the United States. Koreans who live in Japan have never known North and South Korea. We are all people of Choson. People from a country that no longer exists.

I look out of the window. Mount Fuji is shrouded in darkness now. The city has become no more than a leaden mass, lifeless. Lines are starting to blur inside the apartment too. I feel as though I can hardly move. Without the view from the window, it would be unbearable. You’d suffocate.

Each of these fragments carries solitude. There is longing in the fog, historical names evoked, interior blurring. These aren’t just quotes — they’re whispering clues to Claire’s inner life. And they remind us how books about loneliness can feel less like confessions and more like shared sighs.

Language, Disconnection, and the Role of Translation

Dusapin’s original French prose is known for its sparseness, and that minimalism survives beautifully in Aneesa Abbas Higgins’s translation. As far as literary fiction by women goes, Dusapin’s voice is unusually cool — not cold, but emotionally held in check.

There’s power in the way Higgins renders the text: without over‑explaining cultural references, without smoothing the jagged pauses. The language allows disconnection to remain intact — between generations, between languages, between emotional impulses.

This is what great translated literary fiction does: it preserves not just the words, but the spaces between them.

Memory Without Narrative: A Story About What’s Missing

One of the more quietly ambitious choices Dusapin makes is to withhold backstory. We never quite understand the full family history. We’re told just enough — about the grandparents, about Korea, about a country that no longer exists — to feel the presence of memory without seeing its form.

And that’s the point. This isn’t a story about remembering. It’s about not remembering. Or not being able to.

Claire’s attempts to reach her grandparents are passive, tentative. Her lessons with Mieko, the young girl preparing to move to Switzerland, feel equally abstract. The emotional center is intentionally blurred.

This places The Pachinko Parlour among the best literary fiction books that treat memory not as a plot device, but as emotional fog — shifting, partial, and unsatisfying. Just like in real life.

Who This Book Is For — And Who It Isn’t

Let’s be honest: not everyone will connect with this novel. It’s not a book that holds your hand. There’s no tidy moral, no plot twist to tweet about. But if you’re someone who values fiction that feels emotionally honest, this book will resonate long after the final page.

Readers of short literary novels like Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor or Jenny Offill’s Weather will likely appreciate Dusapin’s stillness. If you enjoy character-driven novels that feel more like emotional weather reports than dramas, this is for you. If you gravitate toward translated literary fiction that speaks in muted tones, it will feel like coming home to a language you didn’t know you missed.

But if you need pacing, tension, or big reveals, this may frustrate you.

Dusapin’s Growing Voice in Modern Fiction

It’s tempting to view The Pachinko Parlour as a follow-up to Winter in Sokcho — another quiet novel by Dusapin featuring a young woman navigating in-betweenness. But where her debut had a cool coastal breath, this one is suffocating with summer heat. It’s stickier, heavier, more claustrophobic.

Together, the two novels suggest a writer not interested in performance, but in emotional undercurrents. And in that sense, as a book, The Pachinko Parlour quietly affirms Dusapin’s place among the most distinctive voices in contemporary fiction.

She writes not for effect, but for accumulation. Her characters don’t learn lessons. They endure.

Final Reflection & Rating

As a book, The Pachinko Parlour doesn’t show off, but it remains with you. The subtlety is its strength; the ambiguity its voice. It may feel too slow or too opaque for some, but that very restraint is often where lasting impact lies.

It’s a book to revisit, not rush. You might find that what you missed in the first reading surfaces later — in a quiet moment of your own life.