Paul Fulcher

Pachinko parlour operators have even been declared officially exempt from the normal business taxes paid by Japanese owners of comparable businesses, meaning that Koreans are effectively tied to an industry that is both hugely popular and, because of its links to murky practices, widely looked down on, a double standard that is a source of great pain for Korean people in Japan. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Japan and as a woman of mixed French and Korean heritage myself I was very much affected by this. Pachinko seemed to me to be symbolic of a hypocritical system that perpetuates notions of Korean and Japanese identities as rivals. I saw the thousands of pachinko balls slamming into each other as an image of the people who’d fled Korea for a new country in the hopes of landing on their feet. Players believe they can influence the force at which the balls are ejected; in reality, there is virtually no room for manoeuvre. Shame plays a part in my novel too: the grandfather knows he is contributing to propping up a system he’s not proud of, but he didn’t really have any choice. His granddaughter, Claire, makes no moral judgement of the situation, but the burden of shame is so heavy that communication becomes almost impossible, even between members of the same family.

Elisa Shua Dusapin’s language is spare, elegant, and richly evocative. The novel is full of the sights, sounds, and smells of this windswept seaside town. Food is a constant presence and fish are everywhere. Her voice is cool and distant, her words deftly chosen to convey intimacy, violence, sensuality, and alienation. The challenge, and the pleasure, of bringing her voice into English lies in retaining that spare elegance without allowing the text to seem flat. The language has to create striking visual imagery but the words themselves must remain unobtrusive. It’s easy to be tempted into using too many words when translating since it’s usually impossible to find an exact equivalent for a key word. Connotations, poetic resonances, cultural associations, all of these can be stubbornly resistant to translation. Dusapin’s prose requires a combination of flexibility and discipline on the part of the translator. All the excess must be trimmed and only the essence allowed to appear on the page