Claire’s lacking direction. In fact, she’s suffering from almost total inertia. Trying to achieve anything during a stifling Tokyo summer is difficult, but Claire’s apathy seemslike more than just a reaction to the humidity. She’s visiting her Korean grandparents in Japan while her absent mother tours Europe with her musician father, and her long-term boyfriend Mathieu finishes his thesis back home in Switzerland. Aside from taking her grandmother to get her hair done or find the good noodles, the only time Claire leaves her grandparents’ airless apartment is to tutor 12-year-old Mieko in French.

This economical little novella examines the different reasons people get stuck. Sometimes trauma prevents us from moving forward, and sometimes it’s just the paralysing decision-making of adulthood. Mieko and her mother are trapped in limbo, living in a decommissioned hotel just in case Mieko’s runaway father happens to return. Claire’s grandparents occupy a liminal space between a ‘country that no longer exists’ (pre-separation Korea) and a country where they’ll never feel at home (Japan). Claire’s only ambition seems to be taking her grandparents back to Korea for the first time since fleeing the Korean civil war. But do they actually want to go? Or is Claire just trying to unpack and reconcile the Swiss, Korean and Japanese facets of her personal and cultural identity?

All of the characters bounce around their confines seemingly without agency, like the silver balls inside the machines at Claire’s grandfather’s pachinko parlour. Perhaps it’s too late for her grandparents, but by starting at the beginning – Korea – Claire might just be able to find a middle ground between her mother’s abandonment of her roots and her grandparents’ self-imprisonment in the past.

At less than 200 pages, Elisa Shua Dusapin’s powerful follow-up to the award- winning Winter in Sokcho is a book you’ll be thinking about for much longer than it’ll take you to read.