In a stifling Tokyo summer, Claire goes to stay with her grandparents. The trio are preparing for a trip to Korea, with Claire as chaperone for the two old people. While she waits for their departure, Claire mooches around her grandparents' apartment, plays Tetris on her phone and occasionally tutors Meiko, a 10-year-old Japanese girl.

But this trip is no ordinary holiday. Claire's grandparents are Zainichi, Korean migrants who fled the Korean civil war and never returned.

This is the second novel by Dusapin to be translated from French into English. Her first, Winter in Sokcho, earnt high praise for its brooding sensuality and clarity of voice. From the title of this work onwards, Dusapin establishes her terrain: ambiguous and fluid national and cultural landscapes, and the characters who navigate them.

Pachinko parlours are game ball salons, owned by Zainichi but considered shady or morally suspect. Zainichi themselves are tolerated by their adoptive country but never truly considered Japanese.

Claire has left her boyfriend and parents behind in Switzerland to travel to Japan. But she cannot get her grandparents to commit to the trip to Korea, and she descends into a funk of ennui. Herein lies the novel's disappointments - while the writing itself is flawless, the book's pacing seems similarly marooned.

The one strangely satisfying relationship in it is the friendship between Claire and Meiko. Claire is hired to tutor Meiko in French. Claire and Meiko hang out, go to Disneyland and then to a Swiss theme park outside Tokyo, which is modelled on Heidi, the classic Swiss children's story. Visiting these theme parks reinforces the sense of unreal world existing in pockets of modern Japan. Here too is an echo of the Korea which survives in the memories of Zainichi like Claire's grandparents. Her grandfather tells her that they are people of a country which no longer exists: for his generation, there was no north or south Korea. They knew only Choson, their name for a unified Korea. But Choson was obliterated by a Cold War which they had no understanding of at the time.

At the novel's close, only Claire boards the ferry to make the crossing to Korea. Her grandparents are unable to walk up the gangplank. It's a reversal of the situation her grandparents must have themselves faced, when they left their families behind in Korea.

In spite of Dusapin's skill and the rich historical texture in the novel, The Pachinko Parlour fails to take off, perhaps because Claire is never allowed the agency or inner life which might have driven a more complete story.