Min Lee - Pachinko

“I will find the worst deal with the maximum diligence. Just for you, my little friend.” Ono rubbed his hands together.

“He’s taller than you,” Giancarlo said.

“Status trumps size,” Ono replied.

“ Gomen nasai , Ono-san, gomen nasai .” Solomon bowed theatrically.

“Don’t worry about it, Solly,” Kazu said. “Ono’s got a heart of gold.”

“Not true. I’m capable of holding a grudge and taking vengeance at the most opportune moment,” Ono said.

Solomon raised his eyebrows and shivered. “I’m just a boy, sir,” he pleaded. “Have mercy.” He proceeded to make neat stacks of cash in front of him. “A rich boy who deserves some mercy.”

“I heard you were filthy rich,” Giancarlo said. “Your dad’s a pachinko guy, right?”

Solomon nodded, not sure how he knew.

“I used to date a hot Japanese hapa who played a lot of pachinko. She was an expensive habit. Figures you know how to gamble. It must be that clever Korean blood,” Giancarlo said. “Man, that girl used to go on and on about the tricky and smart Koreans who owned all the parlors and made fools out of the Japanese — but, man, she used to do this crazy thing with her tits when—”

“Impossible,” Kazu said. “You never dated a hot girl.”

“Yeah, you got me, sensei . I dated your wife, and she’s not very hot. She’s just a real—”

Kazu laughed. “Hey, how ’bout if we play poker?” He poured soda into his whiskey, lightening the color considerably. “Solly won fair and square.”

“I’m not saying anything bad. It’s a compliment. The Koreans here are smart and rich. Just like our boy Solomon. It wasn’t like I was calling him a yakuza! You’re not going to get me killed, are you, Solly?” Giancarlo asked.

Solomon smiled tentatively. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard these things, but it had been a very long while since anyone had mentioned his father’s business. In America, no one even knew what pachinko was. It was his father who’d been confident that there would be less bigotry at the offices of a Western bank and had encouraged him to take this job. Giancarlo wasn’t saying anything different from what other middle-class Japanese people thought or whispered; it was just strange to hear such a thing coming from a white Italian who had lived in Japan for twenty years.

Louis cut the cards, and Kazu shuffled and dealt the guys a fresh hand.

Solomon had three kings, but he discarded them one by one in three consecutive rounds, then folded, losing about ten thousand yen. At the end of the night, he paid the tab. Kazu said he wanted to talk to him, so they walked out to the street to hail a taxi.

You lost on purpose. The three kings came from you,” Kazu said to Solomon. They were standing outside the izakaya building. Kazu lit a Marlboro Light.

Solomon shrugged.

“That was dumb. Giancarlo is a social retard. He’s one of those white guys who has to live in Asia because the white people back home don’t want him. He’s been in Japan for so long that he thinks when Japanese people suck up to him, it’s because he’s so special. What a fucking fantasy. That said, not a bad guy overall. Effective. Gets shit done. You gotta know this by now, that people here, even the non-Japanese, say the dumbest things about Koreans, but you gotta forget it. When I was in the States, people used to say stupid-ass crap about Asians, like we all spoke Chinese and ate sushi for breakfast. When it came to teaching US history, they’d forget the internment and Hiroshima. Whatever, right?”

“That stuff doesn’t get to me,” Solomon replied, scanning the dark streets for a taxi. The trains had stopped running half an hour before. “I’m good.”

“Okay, tough guy,” Kazu said. “Listen, there is a tax, you know, on success.”

“Huh?”

“If you do well at anything, you gotta pay up to all the people who did worse. On the other hand, if you do badly, life makes you pay a shit tax, too. Everybody pays something.”

Kazu looked at him soberly.

“Of course, the worst one is the tax on the mediocre. Now, that one’s a bitch.” Kazu tossed his cigarette and crossed his arms. “Pay attention: The ones who pay the shit tax are mostly people who were born in the wrong place and the wrong time and are hanging on to the planet by their broken fingernails. They don’t even know the fucking rules of the game. You can’t even get mad at ’em when they lose. Life just fucks and fucks and fucks bastards like that.” Kazu wrinkled his brow in resignation, like he was somewhat concerned about life’s inequities but not very. He took a deep breath. “So, those losers have to climb Mount Everest to get out of hell, and maybe one or two in five hundred thousand break out, but the rest pay the shit tax all their lives, then they die. If God exists and if He’s fair, then it makes sense that in the afterlife, those guys should get the better seats.”

Solomon nodded, not understanding where this was going.

Kazu’s stare remained unbroken. “But all those able-bodied middle-class people who are scared of their shadows, well, they pay the mediocre tax in regular quarterly installments with compounding interest. When you play it safe, that’s what happens, my friend. So if I were you, I wouldn’t throw any games. I’d use every fucking advantage. Beat anyone who fucks with you to a fucking pulp. Show no mercy to chumps, especially if they don’t deserve it. Make the pussies cry.”

“So then the success tax comes from envy, and the shit tax comes from exploitation. Okay.” Solomon nodded like he was starting to get it. “Then what’s the mediocre tax? How can it be wrong to—?”

“Good question, young Jedi. The tax for being mediocre comes from you and everyone else knowing that you are mediocre. It’s a heavier tax than you’d think.”

Solomon had never thought of such a thing before. It wasn’t like he saw himself as terribly special, but he’d never seen himself as mediocre, either. Perhaps it was unspoken, even to himself, but he did want to be good at something.

“Jedi, understand this: There’s nothing fucking worse than knowing that you’re just like everybody else. What a messed-up, lousy existence. And in this great country of Japan — the birthplace of all my fancy ancestors — everyone, everyone wants to be like everyone else. That’s why it is such a safe place to live, but it’s also a dinosaur village. It’s extinct, pal. Carve up your piece and invest your spoils elsewhere. You’re a young man, and someone should tell you the real truth about this country. Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different. The other thing is that the elite Japanese want to be English and white. That’s pathetic, delusional, and merits another discussion entirely.”

Solomon thought some of this made sense. Everyone he knew who was really Japanese did think he was middle-class even when he wasn’t. Rich kids at his high school whose fathers owned several country-club memberships worth millions and millions thought of themselves as middle-class. His uncle Noa, whom he’d never met, had apparently killed himself because he wanted to be Japanese and normal.

An empty taxi approached them, but Solomon didn’t notice, and Kazu smiled.

“So, yeah, idiots are going to get on your case and notice that your dad owns pachinko parlors. And how do people know this?”

“I never talk about it.”

“Everyone knows, Solomon. In Japan, you’re either a rich Korean or a poor Korean, and if you are a rich Korean, there’s a pachinko parlor in your background somewhere.”