Word: pachinko
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bats an eye. “You see, our hard-earned savings are always going to be taken from us by someone—whether we have any or not.” In other stories, the apathy is even more marked. Decapitation by piano strings and asphyxiations by pachinko balls are details thrown into stories that go without special notice by the author—who just glides over them—or by any of the characters, who all fail to notice the strange occurrences. The wife of “Bad Heart” brushes...
...suffocate. Occasional outings with her blunt-spoken high school friend Tomomi, who enjoys a Sex and the City lifestyle as a single woman working in central Tokyo, living alone and puffing cigs at noisy cafés, heighten Noriko's sense of entrapment. Her life is like a pachinko game: she's the silver ball, pinging between her once happy but now cultish family and her better instincts...
...young Japanese couple were arrested after their one-year-old baby was found wrapped in a plastic bag and dumped in a gutter. Four months before, the boy had allegedly been stuffed into the luggage compartment of a motorcycle while the parents gambled at a pachinko parlor, and may have suffocated to death while they played...
...outdoor grills, and the children riding in circles on a miniature electric train. Chen, 56, a veteran activist and former political prisoner, is running for mayor of Taiwan's second-largest city, Kaohsiung - and tonight she appears intent on shaking the hand of every hotpot eater, bra seller and pachinko player in this small outdoor market...
...Gold and death: Yu links Kazuki's personal meltdown to the decay of a Japanese society in which money is all that matters. Tellingly, Kazuki's dad owes his fortune to pachinko, an utterly mindless form of low-stakes gambling that annually rakes in some $250 billion, is linked to organized crime and sometimes inspires zombie-like trances that have caused Japanese mothers to leave their babies to suffocate in overheated cars. As in real life, the cops in the novel enjoy a cozy relationship with the gaming industry, routinely looking the other way in exchange for high-paying post...