Min Lee - Pachinko

The band played another set, then a DJ played popular songs for the kids. As the party wound down, Etsuko felt pleasantly exhausted — the way she did after the restaurant closed. Mozasu was sitting in a booth drinking champagne by himself, and she sat down beside him. Mozasu refilled his glass and handed it to her, and she drank it in two gulps. She laughed. He said she did a good job for Solomon, and Etsuko shook her head. “ Iie .”

Without thinking, she said, “I think she would have been pleased.”

Mozasu looked confused. A moment later, he nodded. “Yes, she would have been so happy for him.”

“What was she like?” Etsuko shifted her body to see his face. Little squares of light danced across his sharp features.

“I’ve told you before. She was a nice lady. Like you.” It was difficult to say any more than that about Yumi.

“No, tell me something specific about her.” Etsuko wanted to know how they were different, not how they were the same. “I want to know more.”

“Why? She is dead.” Mozasu looked hurt after saying this. He noticed that Solomon was now dancing with a tall Chinese girl with short hair. His forehead glistened with sweat as he followed the girl’s elegant moves. Etsuko stared into her empty champagne glass.

“She wanted to name him Sejong,” he said. “But it’s tradition for the husband’s father to name the grandson. My father’s dead so my Uncle Yoseb named him Solomon.” He paused. “Sejong was a king in Korea. He invented the Korean alphabet. Uncle Yoseb gave him the name of a king from the Bible instead. I think he did it because my father was a minister.” He smiled.

“Why are you smiling?”

“Because Yumi”—Mozasu said her name out loud, and it surprised him to hear the sound of the two syllables—“was so proud of him. Her son. She wanted to give him the life of a king. She was like my father and uncle, I think. Proud. She was proud of me and my work. It was nice. But now that I’m older, I wonder why.” Mozasu sounded wistful. “What do we Koreans have to be so proud of?”

“It’s good to be proud of your children.” She smoothed down her skirt. When her children had been born, what she had felt was amazement at their physical perfection. She had marveled at their miniature human form and their good health. But not once did she consider a name taken from history — the name of a king. She had never been proud of her family or her country; if anything, she was ashamed.

“One of those girls came up to me today and said Solomon looked like his mother.” He pointed to a cluster of girls in the corner of the room. They wore bandeau tops and jersey skirts clinging to their thin hips.

“How could she know that?”

“She meant you.”

“Oh.” Etsuko nodded. “I wish I was his mother.”

“No. No, you don’t.” Mozasu said this calmly, and she felt like she deserved that.

“I’m no better than that woman clerk this afternoon, nee ?”

Mozasu shook his head and placed his hand over hers.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes — there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way — she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

Etsuko removed her new watch and put it in his hand. “It’s not that I don’t want a ring—”

Mozasu didn’t look at her, but he put the watch in his pocket.

“It’s late. Almost midnight,” he said gently. “The children have to get home.”

Etsuko rose from the table and went to hand out the party bags.

Not wanting the evening to end, Solomon claimed that he was hungry, so the three of them returned to her restaurant. The place was clean again and looked open for business.

“A little bit of everything,” he said when she asked him what he wanted to eat. He looked so happy, and it pleased her to see him like this. She could count on him to be a happy person. Maybe that was what Solomon was for her and Mozasu.

At the very back of the dining room, Mozasu sat down at a table for four and opened his evening-edition newspaper. He looked like a middle-aged man waiting calmly for his train to arrive. Etsuko headed for the kitchen with Solomon trailing her.

She put down three white plates on the prep counter. From the refrigerator, she pulled out the tray of fried chicken and the bowl of potato salad — dishes that Ichiro had made following an American cookbook.

“Why didn’t Hana come? Is she sick?”

“No.” Etsuko didn’t like to lie to a direct question.

“She’s pretty, you know.”

“Too pretty. That’s her problem.” Her own mother had once said this about her when a family friend had complimented Etsuko.

“Did you have fun tonight?” she asked.

“Yeah. I still can’t believe it. Hiromi-san talked to me.”

“What did he say?” She put two large pieces of chicken on Mozasu’s and Solomon’s plates and a small drumstick on hers. “Was he nice?”

“Very nice and cool. He said his best friends are Korean. He told me to be good to my parents.”

Solomon hadn’t denied her as his mother, and though this should have been a nice thing, it only made her feel more anxious.

“Your father told me tonight that your mother was proud of you. From the moment you were born.”

Solomon said nothing.

She didn’t think that he should need a mother anymore; he was already grown up, and he was doing better than most kids she knew who had mothers who were alive. He was almost a man.

“Come to the sink. Hold out your left hand.”

“A present?”

She laughed and put his left hand over the sink basin and turned on the faucet. “There’s still ink left.”

“Can they make me leave? Really deport me?”

“Everything went well today,” she replied, and softly scrubbed the pads of his fingers and nails with a dishwashing brush. “There’s no need to worry, Solomon-chan.”

He seemed satisfied with her answer.

“Hana told me she came to Yokohama to get rid of her little problem. Is she pregnant? Nigel got his girlfriend pregnant, and she had to get an abortion.”

“Your friend Nigel?” She remembered the blond-haired boy who played Atari with him on the weekends. He was only a year older than Solomon.

He nodded. “Yup. Hana seems great.”

“My children hate me.”

Solomon picked at the ink beneath his fingernails. “Your kids hate you because you’re gone.” His face grew serious. “They can’t help it. They miss you.”

Etsuko bit the inside of her lower lip. She could feel the small muscles inside her mouth, and she stopped herself from drawing blood. She was afraid to look at his face, and though she had tried to restrain herself, she burst into tears.

“Why? Why are you crying?” he asked. “I’m sorry.” Solomon’s eyes welled up.

She inhaled to calm her breathing.

“When Hana was born, the nurses put her footprints on a card. They washed the ink off, but not very well, so when I went home I had to get it off. I don’t think she could see anything really, because she was just born, but I felt like she was looking at me like I was hurting her, and she just cried and cried—”