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
Rough Lock brings Naomi to a Slocan hospital, where she groggily recovers from her near-death experience. Her narration becomes confused and meandering. Naomi thinks of Father, who is in a hospital with Grandpa Nakane in New Denver. When Stephen comes to see her, he reassures her that their father won’t die, but he doesn’t answer when Naomi asks about Father and Mother. Obasan brings Naomi a picture book to read, and the yellow art prompts Naomi to recall a board game called Yellow Peril that Stephen once had. It is a war game featuring “brave defenders” fighting their cowardly enemies, and the cover art depicts white soldiers and the map of Japan.
Though Stephen and Obasan are there for Naomi as she recovers, her family is still splintered and dying, and no one is willing to talk about it with her. Meanwhile, the game Yellow Peril that Naomi recalls is an insidious form of propaganda that teaches children to identify with and respect whiteness over Asian (and specifically Japanese) identities. The game depicts the Japanese enemies as cowardly, but also as invaders whom the white soldiers must defend against. These two qualities seem to contradict, but racism doesn’t need to make sense––it instead operates by appealing to fear and anger.
Themes
Naomi regards hospitals as “places where Death visits,” and she notes that Death often appears unexpectedly. She flashes back to the previous week, when she and Stephen encounter a group of boys torturing a chicken, relishing in its suffering. Finally, the boys slit the chicken’s throat, then continue on to school, where all the children sing the Canadian national anthem.
The Japanese Canadian schoolchildren are being raised to respect and honor Canada, even though the country has disrespected them and their families. The segue from the torture of the chicken to the Canadian national anthem creates a connection between wanton violence and Canadian nationalism.
Themes
The other “death place” on Naomi’s way to school is an outhouse where she once saw a kitten drowning. In a flashback to the incident, a white girl with white hair accuses Naomi of throwing the kitten into the toilet and demands that she retrieve it. Naomi insists that she didn’t hurt the kitten, and she runs away. The kitten and the chicken haunt her, and in the hospital she dreams of them in eternal torment alongside a sick baby. They are watched over by an angry British doctor.
This second instance of disturbing, unprovoked violence is racialized, as the little white girl leaves a kitten to die in order to bully Naomi. The interaction between these two girls is a microcosm of the racist abuse white Canadians levy against Japanese Canadians, and it demonstrates how a culture of racism affects children. Naomi recognizes the injustice of the situation and, uncharacteristically, speaks up to insist that she is not to blame. In her dreams, she attributes the injustice and violence to a British doctor—a symbol of imperialist, colonialist racism.
Themes
