Pachinko

by Min Jin Lee

  Solomon refused to look at her face.

  The back door of the church opened slowly. Etsuko waved to them from the threshold.

  “It’s cold. Why don’t you come inside? Solomon, you should be with your dad to greet the guests, right?”

  Solomon could hear the anxiety in Etsuko’s voice. Hana tossed her cigarette and followed him inside.

  At the reception, Hana continued to trail after Solomon. She asked him to guess her bra size. Solomon had no idea, but he was now thinking of her breasts.

  The guests, mostly old people, left them alone, so the two milled around the reception.

  “Let’s get beer at the 7-Eleven. We can go to my house to drink it. Or we can go to the park.”

  “I don’t feel like beer.”

  “Maybe you feel like having some pussy.”

  “Hana!”

  “Oh, shut up. You like me. I know you do.”

  “Why do you have to talk like that?”

  “Because I’m not a nice girl, and you don’t want to fuck a nice girl. Especially for your first time. Nobody does. I don’t want to marry you, Solomon. I don’t need your money.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Fuck you,” Hana said, and walked away from him.

  Solomon caught up with her and grabbed her arm.

  Hana gave him a chilly smile. It was as if she’d become someone else. She was wearing a dark blue wool dress with a white Peter Pan collar that made her look younger than him.

  His grandmother Sunja appeared.

  “Halmoni,” Solomon said, relieved to see her. He felt excited around Hana, but she also made him nervous and afraid. In her presence, it felt safer to have an adult around. Just yesterday, he caught her stealing a packet of chocolate wafers at the conbini. When she left the shop, Solomon had lingered to give the clerk the money for the wafers, worried that the clerk might get in trouble. In his dad’s business, if items were missing, clerks were fired immediately.

  Sunja smiled at them. She touched Solomon’s upper arm as if to calm him. He looked flustered.

  “You look very handsome in your suit.”

  “This is Hana,” Solomon said, and Hana bowed to her formally.

  Sunja nodded. The girl was very beautiful, but she had a defiant chin.

  Sunja was on her way to talk with Mozasu but felt funny leaving Solomon with the beautiful girl.

  “I’ll see you at home afterwards?” she asked.

  Solomon nodded.

  As soon as Sunja turned in the other direction, the girl led him outside the building.

  Koh Hansu was walking with a cane. When he spotted Sunja walking diagonally across the reception room, he called out to her.

  Sunja heard his voice; this was too much.

  “Your mother was a tough woman. I always thought she was tougher than you.”

  Sunja stared at him. In the moments before her death, her mother had said that this man had ruined her life, but had he? He had given her Noa; unless she had been pregnant, she wouldn’t have married Isak, and without Isak, she wouldn’t have had Mozasu and now her grandson Solomon. She didn’t want to hate him anymore. What did Joseph say to his brothers who had sold him into slavery when he saw them again? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” This was something Isak had taught her when she’d asked him about the evil of this world.

  “I came by to see if you were okay. If you needed anything.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My wife died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I could never divorce her because her father was my boss. He had adopted me.”

  A while back, Mozasu had explained to her that after Hansu’s father-in-law retired, Hansu became the top man in the second most powerful yakuza family in all of Kansai.

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me. We don’t have anything to talk about, you and I. Thank you for coming today.”

  “Why do you have to be so cold? I thought you’d marry me now.”

  “What? This is my mother’s funeral. Why are you still alive and my Noa gone? I couldn’t even go to my own child’s—”

  “He was my only—”

  “No, no, no. He was my son. Mine.”

  Sunja marched to the kitchen, leaving him leaning on his cane. She could not stop sobbing, and when the women in the kitchen saw her, they embraced her. A woman she did not know rubbed her back gently. They thought she was grieving for her mother.

  14

  Yokohama, 1980

  It was too exciting, and Solomon had never been with anyone. Hana knew a lot, so she taught him to think about other things, to close his eyes if he got too excited, because it was important for him to wait until she was done. Girls would not want to fuck again if he came in a minute, she said. Solomon did everything Hana told him to do, not just because he was in awe of her, but because he wanted to make her happy. He would have done almost anything to make her laugh, because even though she was smart, too lovely to bear almost, and thrilling, she was also sad and restless. She could not be still; she could not bear not to drink every day. It was also important for her to have sex, so for six months she made him her ideal lover, even though he was not yet fifteen. She was almost seventeen.

  It started after Yangjin’s funeral. Hana bought beer, and they went to Etsuko’s apartment. She removed her dress and blouse, then she took off his clothes. She pulled him to her bed, put a rubber on his cock, and showed him what to do. He was amazed at her body, and she was amused by his happiness. Hana was not angry that he came right away—she had expected this—but after he did, she started her lessons.

  Almost every day, they met at Etsuko’s place and made love several times. Etsuko was never home, and Solomon told his grandmother that he was with friends. He went home for dinner, because his father expected him at the table, and usually she went to Etsuko’s restaurant for her meal.

  After being with her, Solomon felt different; he felt older and more serious about life. He was still a boy; he knew that, but he started to think about how he could be with her all the time, not just after school and during breaks. When he was at school, he did as much work as possible so he could see her without thinking about schoolwork. His father expected good grades, and Solomon was a strong student. When he wasn’t with her, he wondered what she did when she went out. Often, he worried about losing her to an older boy, but she said there was nothing to worry about.

  Etsuko and Mozasu did not know they were having sex, and Hana told Solomon that they must never know. She told him, “I’m your secret girl, and you are my secret boy, nee?”

  One afternoon, about four months in, Solomon came over to the apartment and found Hana waiting for him wearing flesh-colored lingerie and high heels. She looked like a petite-sized centerfold in Playboy.

  “Do you have any money, Solomon?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure. Why?”

  “I want some. I have to buy things to turn you on. Like this. Pretty, nee?”

  Solomon tried to embrace her, but she pushed her left hand out gently.

  “Money, please.”

  Solomon pulled out his billfold and took out a thousand-yen note.

  “What do you need it for?” he asked.

  “I just do. Do you have any more?”

  “Uh, sure.” Solomon pulled out the emergency five-thousand-yen note that he kept folded in a square behind the wallet-sized photograph of his mother. His father told him he always had to have some money just in case something important came up.

  “Give it to Hana-chan, please.”

  Solomon handed it to her, and Hana put it on the table with the thousand-yen note.

  Hana walked slowly to the shelf where Etsuko kept a radio and fiddled with the channels until she found a pop song she liked. She bent over and started swaying her hips in time to the music, making sure that he was watching her. Solomon went to her, and she tu
rned around and unbuttoned his jeans. Without saying a word, she pushed him into the armchair near her and got on her knees. Solomon never knew what she was going to do.

  Hana slid the straps of her lace-trimmed brassiere over her shoulders and pulled out her breasts over the small cups so he could see her nipples. He tried to touch them, but she swatted him away. With her hands cradling his bottom, she started to suck him.

  When he was done, he saw that she was crying.

  “Hana-chan, what’s the matter?”

  “Go home, Solomon.”

  “What?”

  “You’re finished.”

  “I came to see you. What’s this all about?”

  “Go home, Solomon! You’re just this little boy who wants to fuck. I need money, and this isn’t enough. What am I going to do?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Go home and do your homework. Go have dinner with your daddy and granny! You’re all the same. I’m just a kid with divorced parents. You think I’m nothing. You think I’m a loser because my mother was the town whore.”

  “What are you talking about? Why are you mad at me? I don’t think that, Hana. I could never think that. You can come over, too. I thought you were going to your mother’s restaurant after I left.”

  Hana covered her breasts and went to the bathroom to get her robe. She returned, wearing a red yukata. She got really quiet, then told him to get more money and come back the next day.

  “Hana, we are friends, nee? I love you. All the money I have, you can have. I have cash at home from my birthday presents, but my grandmother keeps it for me in her bureau. I can’t take it out all at once. What do you need it for?”

  “I have to go, Solomon. I can’t stay here anymore. I have to be independent.”

  “Why? No. You can’t go.”

  Every day and night, he had been thinking of what he could do for work so they could live together. They were too young to marry, but he thought that after he graduated from high school, he could get a job and he could take care of her. He would marry her. Once, she had said that if she married, she would never divorce, because she could never do that to her children. Her brothers and she had been treated worse than lepers after her mother left, she’d said. But Solomon’s father wanted him to go to college in America. How could he leave her behind? He wondered if she would come with him. They could marry after he finished college.

  “Solomon, I’m going to go to Tokyo and get a real life. I’m not going to stay in this apartment and wait for a fifteen-year-old to come and fuck me.”

  “What?”

  “I have to do something with my life. Yokohama is stupid, and I’d rather be dead than return to Hokkaido.”

  “How about that school your mom found?”

  “I can’t go to school. I’m not smart like you. I want to be on television, like those girls in the dramas, but I don’t know how to act. I can’t sing, either. I have a terrible voice.”

  “Maybe you can learn how to act and sing. Aren’t there schools for that? Can’t we ask your mom to find you a school?”

  Hana brightened for a moment, then looked disappointed again.

  “She’d just think it’s foolish. She wouldn’t help me. Not for that. Besides, I can’t read well, and you have to be able to read your lines and memorize them. I saw this really good actress interviewed on TV, and she said that she works really hard at reading and memorizing. I’m not good at anything—except sex. But what do I do when I’m not pretty anymore?”

  “You’ll always be beautiful, Hana.”

  She laughed.

  “No, dummy. Women lose their looks fast. My mother is looking old. She better keep your dad. She’s not going to do any better.”

  “Can you work for your mom?”

  “No, I’d rather die. I hate the smell of shoyu and oil in my hair. It’s disgusting. I can’t imagine bowing all day to lazy, fat customers who complain about nothing. She hates the customers, too. She’s a hypocrite.”

  “Etsuko is not like that.”

  “That’s because you don’t know her.”

  Solomon stroked her hair, and Hana opened her robe and slipped off her panties.

  “Can you do it now? Again?” she asked. “I need that thing inside me, you know? It’s always better the second time, because it lasts longer.”

  Solomon touched her, and he could.

  Every day, she asked for money, and every day he gave her some of his birthday money from the bureau until there was no more left. Whenever he came over, she wanted to try things, even when it hurt her a lot, because she told him that she needed to master this. Even if he didn’t like a certain method, she made him practice it and play certain roles. She learned how to make sounds and to talk the way girls talked in sex movies. A week after the money ran out, Solomon found a note she had hidden in his pencil case: “One day, you will find a really good girl, not someone like me. I promise. But it was fun, nee? I am your dirty flower, Soro-chan.” That afternoon, Solomon ran to Etsuko’s apartment, and he learned that she was gone. He didn’t see her again until three years later when she met him at a famous unagiya in Tokyo to give him a sweater before he went to college in New York.

  15

  New York, 1985

  Where are you?” Solomon asked in Japanese. “Your mom doesn’t know where you are. Everyone’s worried.”

  “I don’t want to talk about her,” Hana replied. “So you have a girlfriend-o now?”

  “Yes,” Solomon answered without thinking. “Hana, are you okay?” No matter how many drinks she’d had, she tended to sound sober.

  “Tell me about her. Is she Japanese?”

  “No.” Solomon wanted to keep her on the line. About five years before, after she moved out of Etsuko’s apartment, she took a long string of hostessing jobs in Tokyo, refusing to tell anyone where she lived. Etsuko didn’t know what to do anymore; she’d hired an investigator but had little luck tracking her down. “Hana, tell me where you are, and please call your mother—”

  “Shut up, college boy. Or else I’ll hang up.”

  “Oh, Hana. Why?” He had to smile, having missed even her petulance. “Why are you so difficult, Hana-chan?”

  “And why are you so far away?”

  Hana poured herself a smaller glass of wine, and Solomon heard the glug of the liquid hitting the glass. It was morning in Tokyo, and she was sitting on the bare floor of her tiny apartment in Roppongi, which she shared with three other hostesses. Two were sleeping off the whiskey tea from the night before, and the third hadn’t returned home from a date.

  “I miss you, Solomon. I miss my old friend. You were my only friend. You know that?”

  “You’re drinking. Are you okay?”

  “I like to drink. Drinking makes me happy. I’m very good at drinking.” She laughed and swallowed a thimbleful of wine. She wanted to make the bottle last. “I’m good at drinking and fucking. Soo desu nee.”

  “Can you please tell me where you are?”

  “I’m in Tokyo.”

  “Still working in a club in Roppongi?”

  “Yes, but at another club. You don’t know which one.” She had been fired two nights ago, but she knew she could get another job. “I am an excellent hostess.”

  “I’m sure you would be excellent at whatever you decide to do.”

  “You do not approve of my work, but I do not care. I am not a prostitute. I pour drinks and make conversation with incredibly boring men and make them feel fascinating.”

  “I didn’t say that I didn’t approve.”

  “You lie.”

  “Hana-chan, why don’t you go to school? I think you would like college. You’re smarter than most of the kids here. Maybe you can study in America; learn English first, then apply to a college here. Your mom and my dad would pay for it. You know that.”

  “Why don’t I finish high school first?” Hana replied tartly. “Hang on, is your girlfriend with you now?”

  “No, but I have to
meet her soon.”

  “No, you will not meet her, Solomon. You will talk to me. Because you are my old friend, and I want to talk to my old friend tonight. Can you cancel? And I will call you back.”

  “I’ll call you. Yes, I’ll cancel, then I’ll call you back.”

  “I am not giving you my number. You cancel with girlfriend-o, and I will call you in five minutes.”

  “Are you okay, Hana?”

  “Why don’t you say you miss me, too, Solomon? You used to miss me desperately. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, I remember everything.”

  When they met for lunch after being apart for three years, she gave him a crimson-colored cashmere sweater from Burberry as a graduation present. “It’s cold in Manhattan, nee? The sweater is bloodred and hot like our burning love.” During the meal, however, she would not come close to him. She wouldn’t even touch his arm. She had smelled wonderful, like jasmine and sandalwood.

  “How could I forget you?” Solomon said quietly. Phoebe would be coming by in a few minutes. She had the key to his room.

  “Ah, there. There is my Solomon. I can tell when you are hungry for me.”

  Solomon closed his eyes. She was right; this felt like hunger. It had been nothing short of physical pain when she had left him, and he’d had no words to describe her departure. He loved Phoebe, but it wasn’t what he’d felt for Hana.

  “Hana-chan. I have to go now, but may I please phone you later? May I please have your number?”

  “No, Solomon. You may not have my number. I call you when I want to speak to you. You do not call me. Nobody calls me.”

  “And you get to leave when you want to leave,” he said.

  “Yes, I do get to leave, but Solomon, you will never tire of me, because I will never ask anything of you. Except for today. I want you to talk to me so I can go to sleep. I cannot sleep anymore, Solomon. I do not know why, but I cannot sleep anymore. Hana-chan is so tired.”