Yet still there is a denseness vibrating through themes of endless war, alienation and cultural identity that come alive in a dark dance of body-image issues, family dynamics, ghosts of colonialism and more. It’s as if it subsists on atmosphere and tone alone, pulling you through its sparseness of narrative landscape and bleakness of winter off-season living like a frenetic fever dream. There is a deep undercurrent of ideas accruing inside this novel that exists like the dust on butterfly wings. Like the town in winter, the whole novel reads like a breath held and waiting, with Aneesa Abbas Higgins translation lovingly rendering Dusapin’s prose in all it’s compulsive and eerie beauty.

For tourists, boats, men, Spring.’ When a mysterious Frenchman shows up to stay during the winter, our narrator’s life is slowly thrown asunder by their slow-burn growing friendship as he asks her to show him the ‘authentic’ Sokcho. ‘ Oozing Winter and fish, Sokcho waited,’ the unnamed narrator of Elisa Shua Dusapin’s haunting debut, Winter in Sokcho, tells us, ‘ That was Sokcho. Crisp and enigmatic, Shua Dusapin’s writing glows with intelligence.*WINNER of the 2021 National Book Awards for Translated Literature!* The Pachinko Parlour is a nuanced and beguiling exploration of identity and otherness, unspoken histories, and the loneliness you can feel amongst family. And as Mieko and Claire gradually bond, a tender relationship growing, Mieko’s determination to visit the pachinko parlour builds. Shiny is still open, drawing people in with its bright, flashing lights and promises of good fortune. When they first arrived in Japan, they opened Shiny, a pachinko parlour.

They fled the civil war there over fifty years ago, along with thousands of others, and haven’t been back since.

The plan is for Claire to visit Korea with her grandparents. Claire finds herself dividing her time between tutoring twelve-year-old Mieko, in an apartment in an abandoned hotel, and lying on the floor at her grandparents: daydreaming, playing Tetris and listening to the sounds from the street above. Women’s calves, men’s shoes, heels trodden down by the weight of bodies borne for too long. I lie on the floor and gaze out of the window.

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