Min Lee - Pachinko

The spring before her thirty-sixth birthday, when she was still married and living in Hokkaido, Etsuko had seduced another one of her high school boyfriends. She had been having a series of affairs for almost three years with various men from her adolescence. What amazed her was how difficult it was the first time but how effortless it was to have all the others that followed. Married men wanted invitations from married women. It was no trouble to phone a man she had slept with twenty years ago and invite him to her house for lunch when her children were at school.

That spring, she began sleeping with a boyfriend from her freshman year in high school. He’d grown into a handsome, married playboy who still had the tendency to talk too much. One afternoon, in her tiny Hokkaido living room, as the playboy was getting dressed to return to his office, he bemoaned the fact that she wouldn’t leave her husband, who preferred the company of his work colleagues to hers. He laid his head between her small breasts and said, “But I can leave my wife. Tell me to do it.” To this, she said nothing. Etsuko had no intention of leaving Nori and the children. Her complaint about her husband was not that he was boring or that he wasn’t home enough. Nori was not a bad person. It was just that she felt like she had no clear sense of him after nineteen years of marriage, and she doubted that she ever would. He didn’t seem to need her except to be a wife in name and a mother to his children. For Nori, this was enough.

There was no good excuse for her behavior. She knew that. But at night, when Nori sat at the kitchen table to eat the dinner that had gotten cold because he’d come home late once again from another company gathering, she waited for something to come, some insight, some feeling. As she watched him with his eyes locked to his rice bowl, she wanted to shake him, because in all her life she had never expected this kind of loneliness. Around that time, someone had handed her a cult pamphlet as she came out of the grocery store. On the flimsy cover, a middle-aged housewife was pictured as half skeleton and half flesh. On the bottom of the page it said, “Every day you are closer to your death. You are half-dead already. Where does your identity come from?” She tossed the pamphlet away almost as soon as she got it, but the picture stayed with her for a long while.

The last time she saw the playboy, he gave her a sheaf of poems that he had written for her. As he left through the kitchen door, he confessed that he loved only her. His eyes pooled with tears as he told her that she was his heart. For the rest of the day, she ignored the housework and read and reread the maudlin and erotic poems. She couldn’t say if they were good or not, but she was pleased by them. Etsuko privately marveled at the effort they must have taken, and she reasoned that in his showy way, he did love her. Finally, this one affair had given her what she had wanted from all the others — an assurance that whatever she had handed out so freely in her youth had neither died nor disappeared.

That night, when her family was sleeping, Etsuko soaked in the wooden tub and glowed in what felt to her like a victory. After her bath, she dressed in her blue-and-white yukata and headed toward her bedroom, where her innocent husband was snoring gently. One sad thing seemed clear to her: If she needed all the men who had ever loved her to continue loving her, she would always be divided. She would always cheat, and she’d never be a good person. It dawned on her then that being a good person was something she had not given up on completely after all. Would she die living this way? In the morning, she told the playboy not to call her anymore, and he didn’t. He just moved on to the next pretty housewife in town.

But a few months later, Nori found the poems that she should have destroyed, and he beat her for the first time in their marriage. Her sons tried to stop him, and Hana, just nine years old then, screamed and screamed. That evening, Nori threw her out, and she made her way to her sister’s house. Later, the lawyer said it would be pointless for her to try to get custody of the children since she had no job and no skills. He coughed in what seemed like politeness or discomfort and said it would also be pointless because of what she had done. Etsuko nodded and decided to give up her children, thinking that she would not trouble them anymore. Then, following a want ad for a restaurant hostess, Etsuko moved to Yokohama, where she knew no one.

Etsuko wanted to believe that being with Mozasu was changing her. That she was sexually faithful to him, she took as proof. She had once tried to explain this to her sister, and Mari had replied, “A snake that sheds its skin is still a snake.” And her mother, on hearing that Mozasu wanted to marry her, said, “ Honto ? To a pachinko Korean? Haven’t you done enough to your poor children? Why not just kill them?”

The penalties incurred for the mistakes you made had to be paid out in full to the members of your family. But she didn’t believe that she could ever discharge these sums.

At noon, Mozasu came to get her. They were going to pick up Solomon at his school to take him to get his alien registration card. Koreans born in Japan after 1952 had to report to their local ward office on their fourteenth birthday to request permission to stay in Japan. Every three years, Solomon would have to do this again unless he left Japan for good.

As soon as she got in the car, Mozasu reminded her to put on her seat belt. Etsuko was still thinking about Hana. Before she’d left, she had phoned the doctor, and the procedure was scheduled for the end of the week.

Mozasu took her hand. Etsuko thought his face had strength to it; there was power in his straight neck. She hadn’t known many Koreans before him, but she imagined that his squared-off facial features were traditionally Korean — his wide jawbone, straight white teeth, thick black hair, and the shallow-set, narrow, smiling eyes. He had a lean, slack body that reminded her of metal. When he made love to her, he was serious, almost as if he was angry, and she found that this gave her intense pleasure. His physical movements were deliberate and forceful, and she wanted to surrender to them. Whenever she read about something or someone Korean, she wondered what Korea was like. Mozasu’s deceased father, a Christian minister, was from the North, and his mother, who’d had a confection business, had come from the South. His plainspoken mother was so humble in her manner and dress that she could be mistaken for a modest housekeeper rather than the mother of a millionaire pachinko parlor owner.

Mozasu was holding a wrapped present, the size of a block of tofu. She recognized the silver foil paper from his favorite jewelry store.

“Is that for Solomon?”

“No. It’s for you.”

“ Ehh ? Why?”

It was a gold-and-diamond watch nestled in a dark red velvet box.

“It’s a mistress watch. I bought it last week, and I showed it to Kuboda-san, the new night floor manager, and he said that these fancy watches are what you give to your mistress because they cost the same as a diamond ring but you can’t give a ring to your mistress since you’re already married.”

He raised his eyebrows with amusement.

Etsuko checked to see if the glass partition separating them from the driver was closed all the way; it was. Her skin flushed with heat.

“Make him stop the car.”

“What’s the matter?”

Etsuko pulled her hand away. She wanted to say that she wasn’t his mistress, but instead, she burst into tears.

“Why? Why are you crying? Every year for the past three years, I bring you a diamond ring — each one bigger than the one before it — and you say no to me. I go back to the jeweler, and he and I have to get drunk. Nothing has changed for me.” He sighed. “You are the one who says no. Refuses the pachinko yakuza.”