In Japan and in France 

In Pachinko Parlour I get to go to Tokyo, Japan.

Elisa Shua Dusapin writes the place, the placement as a part of a story and I love the vibe I get reading it.

In The Pachinko Parlour Claire, a Swiss girl, spends her summer in Tokyo. She ends up tutoring a japanese 12-year old girl learning her French. She lives with her grandparents. Grandparents run a pachinko parlour, Shiny. They have done it for the past 50 years, ever since they arrived from Korea. Claire has a plan to visit Korea with her grandparents but all along the book they never get around it.

Claire and Mieko bon, little by little and in this book, everything is growing, moving, little by little.

What I most liked about this book, was the feeling of heat, summer hotness, being outsider, loneliness among people you care about but can not speak their language.

The Old Fire

Now we are in France, in the countryside (around the hoods where I also partly live). There is an old house, after father´s death fulll of stuff, and the two sisters have a mission to empty the house. Agathe, writer, has been living in New York past fifteen years. She has not met her sister Vera during all those years.

Now they have nine days to clear the house and the whole book is filled with sister ´s memoirs on the house, their childhood, unspoken words, feelings rising, getting through the barriers.

I felt this was Elisa Shua Dusapin ´s most personal writing (so far) since all her books I have read previously are like looking through a glass, keeping the reader outside, detached.