Min Lee - Pachinko

“You’re not yakuza.”

“I am not yakuza. But everyone thinks Koreans are gangsters.”

“None of that matters to me. It’s my family.”

Mozasu looked out the window, and when he spotted his son, Mozasu waved at him.

The car stopped, and Solomon got in the front passenger seat. The glass partition opened, and he stuck his head through to say hi. Etsuko reached over to straighten the rumpled collar of his white dress shirt.

“ Arigato very much,” he said. They often mixed up words in different languages as a joke. He dropped back into his seat and closed the glass partition so he could talk with the driver, Yamamoto-san, about the previous night’s Tigers game. The Tigers had an American manager this year, and Solomon was hopeful for the season. Yamamoto was not so optimistic.

Mozasu picked up her left wrist gently and clasped the watch on it.

“You’re a funny woman. I bought you a gift. Just say thanks. I never meant that you were a—”

The bridge of her nose hurt, and she thought she would start crying again.

“Hana called. She’s coming to Yokohama. Today.”

“Is she okay?” He looked surprised.

Etsuko went to Hokkaido twice yearly to see her children. Mozasu had never met them.

“Maybe she can go to Solomon’s party. See the famous singer,” Mozasu said.

“I don’t know if she likes Hiromi-san,” she replied. Etsuko had no idea if Hana liked pop music. As a child, she hadn’t been the kind who sang or danced. Etsuko stared at the back of the driver’s gray-streaked head. The driver nodded thoughtfully while Solomon talked to him, and their quiet gestures appeared intimate. She wished she had something like baseball that she could talk about with her daughter — a safe subject they could visit without subtext or aggression.

Etsuko told Mozasu that Hana had an appointment with a doctor in Yokohama. When he asked if she was sick, she shook her head no.

This was how life had turned out. Her oldest, Tatsuo, was twenty-five years old, and it was taking him eight years to graduate from a fourth-rate college. Her second son, Tari, a withdrawn nineteen-year-old, had failed his college entrance exams and was working as a ticket collector at a movie theater. She had no right to expect her children to hold the aspirations of other middle-class people — to graduate from Tokyo University, to get a desk job at the Industrial Bank of Japan, to marry into a nice family. She had made them into village outcasts, and there was no way for them to be acceptable anymore.

Etsuko unclasped the watch and put it back in the velvet case. She laid it down in the space between them on the white, starched doily covering the black leather seats. He handed it back to her.

“It’s not a ring. Save me a trip to the jeweler.”

Etsuko held the watch case in her hands and wondered how they’d stayed together with him not giving up and her not giving in.

The Yokohama ward office was a giant gray box with an obscure sign. The first clerk they saw was a tall man with a narrow face and a shock of black hair buzzed off at the sides. He stared at Etsuko shamelessly, his eyes darting across her breasts, hips, and jeweled fingers. She was overdressed compared to Mozasu and Solomon, who wore white dress shirts, dark slacks, and black dress shoes. They looked like the gentle Mormon missionaries who used to glide through her village on their bicycles when she was a girl.

“Your name—” The clerk squinted his eyes at the form Solomon was filling out. “So-ro-mo-n. What kind of name is that?”

“It’s from the Bible. He was a king. The son of King David. A man of great wisdom. My great-uncle named me.” The boy smiled at the clerk as if he was sharing a secret. He was a polite boy, but because he had gone to school with Americans and other kinds of foreigners at his international schools, he sometimes said things that a Japanese person would never have said.

“So-ro-mo-n, a king. Great wisdom.” The clerk smirked. “Koreans don’t have kings anymore.”

“What did you say?” Etsuko asked.

Quickly, Mozasu pulled her back.

She glanced at Mozasu. His temper was far worse than hers. Once, when a restaurant guest had tried to make her sit with him, Mozasu, who happened to be there that night, walked over, picked him up bodily, and threw him outside the restaurant, breaking the man’s ribs. She was expecting no less of a reaction now, but Mozasu averted his eyes from the clerk and stared at Solomon’s right hand.

Mozasu smiled.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said with no trace of irritation or anger. “We’re in a hurry to return home, because it’s the boy’s birthday. Is there anything else we should do?” Mozasu folded his hands behind him. “Thank you very much for understanding.”

Confused, Solomon turned to Etsuko, and she flashed him a warning look.

The clerk pointed to the back of the room and told Mozasu and Etsuko to sit. Solomon remained standing opposite the clerk. In the long, rectangular room, shaped like a train car, with bank teller windows running parallel along opposite walls, half a dozen people sat on benches, reading their newspapers or manga. Etsuko wondered if they were Korean. From their seats, Etsuko and Mozasu could see Solomon talking to the clerk, but they couldn’t hear anything.

Mozasu sat down, then got up again. He asked if she wanted a can of tea from the vending machine, and she nodded yes. She felt like slapping the clerk’s face. In middle school, she had once slapped a bossy girl, and it had been satisfying.

When Mozasu returned with their tea, she thanked him.

“You must have known—” She paused. “You must have warned him. I mean, you told him that today would not be so easy?” She didn’t mean to be critical, but after the words came from her mouth, they sounded harsh, and she was sorry.

“No. I didn’t say anything to him.” He opened and closed his fists rhythmically. “I came here with my mother and brother, Noa, for my first registration papers. The clerk was normal. Nice even. So I asked you to come. I thought maybe having a woman by him might help.” He exhaled through his nostrils. “It was stupid to wish for kindness.”

“No. No. You couldn’t have warned him. I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

“It is hopeless. I cannot change his fate. He is Korean. He has to get those papers, and he has to follow all the steps of the law perfectly. Once, at a ward office, a clerk told me that I was a guest in his country.”

“You and Solomon were born here.”

“Yes, my brother, Noa, was born here, too. And now he is dead.” Mozasu covered his face with his hands.

Etsuko sighed.

“Anyway, the clerk was not wrong. And this is something Solomon must understand. We can be deported. We have no motherland. Life is full of things he cannot control so he must adapt. My boy has to survive.”

Solomon returned to them. Next he had his photograph taken, and afterward, he had to go to another room to get fingerprinted. Then they could go home. The last clerk was a plump woman; her light green uniform flattened her large breasts and round shoulders. She took Solomon’s left index finger and gently dipped it into the pot filled with thick black ink. Solomon depressed his finger onto a white card as if he were a child painting. Mozasu looked away and sighed audibly. The clerk smiled at the boy and told him to pick up the registration card in the next room.

“Let’s get your dog tags,” Mozasu said.

Solomon faced his father. “Hmm?”

“It’s what we dogs must have.”

The clerk looked furious suddenly.

“The fingerprints and registration cards are vitally important for government records. There’s no need to feel insulted by this. It is an immigration regulation required for foreign—”