Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Obasan, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Identity, and Citizenship
History and Memory
Speech vs. Silence
Selflessness and Decorum
Summary
Analysis
In 1962, Aunt Emily brings Uncle, Obasan, and Naomi to visit the ghost towns, which were populated and abandoned first by prospectors and then by Japanese Canadians. Naomi is struck to see that the prospectors left a mark on the towns, but there are no remnants of the buildings or communities constructed by the Japanese Canadians. She thinks of her family’s two-room log cabin in Slocan, and the story flashes back to the Nakanes’ arrival there in 1942.
Though Naomi dislikes reminders of her experiences during the war, she is disturbed by the way Japanese Canadians’ history has been erased. To some extent, she recognizes the importance of maintaining her people’s place in history, but her trauma prevents her from applying that mindset to her own life.
Themes
The family is greeted at the train station by Nakayama-sensei, the minister from their Anglican church in Vancouver. As Nakayama-sensei helps them carry their luggage, Naomi realizes she has lost her doll. Nakayama-sensei sends a man to look for it, and they continue on to the house. It is small, colorless, and rundown, with low ceilings made of grass and manure. Nakayama-sensei promises that the community will help each other.
When Naomi loses the doll her mother gave her, she loses her last tangible connection to her mother––and, by extension, to her happy childhood prior to the war. Elsewhere in the story, Emily’s box of documents signifies the importance of physical reminders of the past, and Naomi’s distress at losing the doll speaks to her understanding of that importance.
Themes
Naomi goes outside with Stephen, who walks with crutches. They see a swarm of beautiful golden butterflies, and Stephen begins killing them with his crutch. He tells Naomi that the butterflies will eat holes in their clothes.
The golden butterflies flying amid the squalor of the ghost town represent the beauty and hope that remain even in the direst conditions. However, the increasingly bitter and resentful Stephen refuses to acknowledge this beauty, and when he kills the butterflies he takes beauty and hope away from Naomi as well.
Themes
