Min Lee - Pachinko

“ Tadaima ,” she said quietly.

“Where were you, A-chan?” Daisuke asked, his face folded with worry. He had the lopsided face of a pale, gaunt man with the extraordinary eyes of a very young child — unguarded and capable of expressing joy. He wore the yellow pajamas that she had ironed for him that morning.

Haruki nodded and smiled at her. He had never before found his brother alone. Daisuke had been crying on his bed mat, asking for his mother. He didn’t want to tell Ayame this for fear of making her feel bad about being late.

“I was at the bath, Dai-chan. I’m very sorry I’m late. I thought you were sleeping, and it was cold so I went to have another bath.”

“I was afraid. I was afraid,” Daisuke said, his eyes beginning to well up again. “I want Mama.”

She felt unable to look at Haruki’s face. He had not yet removed his suit jacket.

Daisuke went to her, leaving Haruki by the kitchen counter to put away the box of senbei .

“A-chan is clean. She had a bath. A-chan is clean. She had a bath.” He sang the line that he liked to repeat after she came home from the sento .

“Are you tired now?” she asked him.

“No.”

“Would you like me to read to you?”

“ Hai .”

Haruki left them in the living room with her reading a picture book about old trains, and she nodded to him when he said good night before going to bed.

Yokohama, March 1976

A retiring detective had failed to complete a report of a suicide, and eventually it landed on Haruki’s desk. A twelve-year-old Korean boy had jumped off the roof of his apartment building. The mother was too hysterical to finish the interview at the time, but the parents were willing to meet Haruki tonight after they finished work.

The boy’s parents lived not far from Chinatown. The father was a plumber’s assistant, and the mother worked in a glove factory. Tetsuo Kimura, the jumper, was the oldest of three and had two sisters.

Even before the apartment door opened, the familiar smells of garlic, shoyu, and the stronger miso that Koreans favored greeted him in the damp hallway. All the tenants of the six-story building owned by a Korean were also Koreans. The boy’s mother, her face downcast and meek, let him into the three-room apartment. Haruki slipped off his street shoes to put on the slippers she gave him. In the main room, the father, wearing a workman’s clean overalls, was already seated cross-legged on a blue floor cushion. The mother set out a discount-store tray brimming with teacups and wrapped biscuits from the conbini . The father held a bound book in his lap.

After handing the father his business card with two hands, Haruki sat down on a floor cushion. The mother poured him a cup of tea and sat with her knees folded.

“You didn’t get a chance to see this.” The father handed the book to Haruki. “You should know what happened. Those children should be punished.”

The father, a long-waisted man with an olive complexion and a square jaw, didn’t make eye contact when speaking.

The book was a middle school graduation album. Haruki opened the thick volume to the page marked with a slip of blank notepaper. There were rows and columns of black-and-white photographs of students, all of them wearing uniforms — a few smiling, some showing teeth, with little variation overall. Right away he spotted Tetsuo, who had his mother’s long face and his father’s small mouth — a mild-looking boy with thin shoulders. There were a few handwritten messages over the faces of the photographs.

“Tetsuo — good luck in high school. Hiroshi Noda.”

“You draw well. Kayako Mitsuya.”

Haruki must have looked confused, because he didn’t notice anything unusual. Then the father prompted him to check the flyleaf.

“Die, you ugly Korean.”

“Stop collecting welfare. Koreans are ruining this country.”

“Poor people smell like farts.”

“If you kill yourself, our high school next year will have one less filthy Korean.”

“Nobody likes you.”

“Koreans are troublemakers and pigs. Get the hell out. Why are you here anyway?”

“You smell like garlic and garbage!!!”

“If I could, I’d cut your head off myself, but I don’t want to get my knife dirty!”

The handwriting was varied and inauthentic. Some letters slanted right or left; multiple authors had tried purposefully to shield their identities.

Haruki closed the book and laid it beside him on the clean floor. He took a sip of tea.

“Your son, he never mentioned that others were bothering him?”

“No,” the mother answered quickly. “He never complained. Never. He said he was never discriminated against.”

Haruki nodded.

“It was not because he was Korean. That sort of thing was from long ago. Things are better now. We know many kindhearted Japanese,” the mother said.

Even with the cover closed, Haruki could see the words in his mind. The electric fan on the floor circulated a constant flow of warm air.

“Did you speak with his teachers?” the mother asked.

The retired detective had. The teachers had said that the boy was a strong student but too quiet.

“He had top marks. The children were jealous of him because he was smarter than they were. My son learned to read when he was three,” the mother said.

The father sighed and laid his hand gently on his wife’s forearm, and she said no more.

The boy’s father said, “Last winter, Tetsuo asked if he could stop going to school and instead work in the vegetable store that his uncle owns. It’s a small shop near the little park down the street. My brother-in-law was looking for a boy to break down boxes and work as a cashier. Tetsuo said he wanted to work for him, but we said no. Neither of us finished high school, and we didn’t want him to quit. It didn’t make any sense for him to work in a job like that and to give up school when he’s such a good student. My brother-in-law is barely getting by himself, so my son would not have made much of a salary. My wife wanted him to get a good job in an electronics factory. If he had finished high school, then—”

The father covered his head with his large, rough hands, pressing down on his coarse hair. “Working in the basement of a grocery store. Counting inventory. That’s not an easy life for anyone, you know,” he said. “He was talented. He could remember any face and draw it perfectly. He could do many things we didn’t know how to do.”

The mother said calmly, “My son was hardworking and honest. He never hurt anyone. He helped his sisters do their homework—”

Her voice broke off.

Suddenly, the father turned to face Haruki.

“The boys who wrote that should be punished. I don’t mean go to jail, but they shouldn’t be allowed to write such things.” He shook his head.

“He should’ve quit school. It would’ve been better if he’d worked in a basement of a grocery store or peeling bags of onions in a yakiniku restaurant. I’d rather have my son than no son. My wife and I are treated badly here, but it’s because we’re poor. There are rich Koreans who are better off. We thought it could be different for our children.”

“You were born here?” Haruki asked. Their accent was no different than that of native Japanese speakers from Yokohama.

“Yes, of course. Our parents came from Ulsan.”

Ulsan was in what was now South Korea, but Haruki guessed that the family was affiliated with the North Korean government, as were many of the ethnic Koreans. Mindan was much less popular. The Kimuras probably lacked the tuition for the North Korean schools and sent them to the local Japanese school.