Despite its tumultuous opening, the novel is a slow, meditative portrait of one woman finding herself, as well as a moving reflection on language’s capacity to divide us from others - and ourselves.Ĭlaire’s primary language is French but she’s also proficient if not fluent in Japanese. In “The Pachinko Parlor,” which Higgins also translated, Dusapin explores the blurrier borders of language. In “Winter in Sokcho,” for which she and the translator Aneesa Abbas Higgins won a 2021 National Book Award, a French Korean woman finds herself on a dreamy, slow-moving adventure at the border between North and South Korea. In just a few sentences, using nothing but visual description, Dusapin plunges her readers into both the novel’s setting and Claire’s jangled state.ĭusapin isn’t new to writing about the dislocation of life in a country that is neither strange nor familiar. Its narrator, Claire, a Swiss-Korean woman who’s spending a summer in Tokyo with her grandparents, steps off a train and into a “tide of people rushing by.” Urban detail eddies around her: smoking salarymen, a construction site, “plasma screens flashing toothpaste ads.” Nothing in this brief scene is unusual, yet Claire is plainly overwhelmed.

“The Pachinko Parlor,” the French writer Elisa Shua Dusapin’s second novel, begins in a whirl. THE PACHINKO PARLOR, by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Pachinko the book