I was deeply moved by Hiver à Sokcho last year, so I immediately picked up Les Billes du Pachinko. It retains the same fragmented style and highly restrained narrative, but having moved away from the theme of sexual encounters, this book feels more mature than its predecessor. It dares to strip things down further, using lightness to bear heaviness and restraint in place of reconciliation.
In the book, Dusapin quotes Roland Barthes: “The marble game is a game that is both communal and isolated.” For Koreans in Japan, the marble game is a means of survival, but it also serves as a metaphor for the lives of the displaced—they live in communities yet remain isolated, and even blood ties cannot bridge the eternal gaps between individuals. Herds of deer appear repeatedly throughout the story—deer in cartoons, deer in zoos, and the deer of Miyajima—all mirroring humans who live in groups yet are filled with alienation and loneliness. The pachinko parlor and the deer—one mechanical, the other flesh and blood—point to the same predicament.
The pachinko parlor is not merely the setting of the story; it is a metaphor: people meet here, but they do not speak. This sense of dissonance is precisely what the author sought. Her mixed-race identity and experiences living in multiple places led her to write this novel while searching for answers within herself.
Yet Les Billes du Pachinko does not read as a heavy work. It is delicate, warm, and restrained, like a lingering summer embrace. But summer’s end must come sooner or later, and the pinball game eventually becomes a series of linguistic echoes, slowly dissipating into the air.
Dusapin’s greatest strength lies in her ability to effortlessly connect personal experiences with grand narratives like immigrant identity, stirring ripples of empathy in the heart with the gentle impact of a leaf falling on water. She doesn’t need lengthy monologues: the momentary sense of suffocation a character feels when stumbling over a menu in a language that isn’t their own speaks volumes about what it means to “not belong.”
Reading this book feels like a meandering summer; the relationships between people are like invisible threads—you never know how strong or how thin they are, or when they might snap. That sense of loss is like marbles spilling across the floor: after the clatter, only the lingering, rolling sound remains, leaving behind a solitary echo.
Each character sheds their skin—whether through their own or others’ shifts in space, or through familiar or unfamiliar languages. Subtle probing, resistance, and acceptance; vigilance, illusion, and intuition—the process of mutual understanding and connection is fraught with hurt, yet exquisitely moving. Those things that cannot be put into words—those words that could have been made clear but were never spoken—are prone to misunderstanding and eventually dissolve. The tongue labors to turn, pushing through twisted braids and different languages, probing with extreme restraint the flavors of loss and search, of fragmentation and fusion.
The entire book is also filled with a sense of suspension, or perhaps a feeling of “rootlessness.” A homeland torn apart by war, a hometown left behind by the demands of life, generational rifts born of historical trauma, and identity confusion stemming from language—these heavy burdens are carefully wrapped and concealed within various “trivial matters,” making the story seem simple to the point of blandness, yet leaving an unexpectedly profound and bewildering aftertaste. Though I am reluctant to reduce it to a binary framework, this story does indeed gather many shadows: the diaspora in relation to national identity, ethnic minorities in relation to the general public, non-native speakers in relation to native speakers, the working-class neighborhoods in relation to modern Tokyo… These are the cracks, the overflow, the “other”—not mere scraps of the story, but the story itself.
This story demands patient unpacking. Perhaps it also serves as a mirror for all of humanity—after all, each of us is a stranger in a foreign land; aside from language, we possess nothing.
Thus, the most precious aspect of this book is not that it writes of love. It writes of something more restrained, more rare: I do not fully understand your withdrawal, nor do you fully understand my departure, yet I still let go, allowing you to live your own life. The game of marbles has ended. The marbles have scattered across the floor; after the clatter, there is only the distant rumbling of their roll, and then nothing remains but a lonely echo. This is not failure; this is reality.