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
Grandma Kato’s letter describes the events that befell the Kato family in Japan in 1945. Grandma Kato’s ailing mother makes an unexpected recovery, and Grandma Kato goes with Mother to Nagasaki, to help Mother’s cousin Setsuko with her new baby, Chieko. In 1945, most of the family is wiped out by the atomic bomb dropped on the city. Grandma Kato regrets burdening Grandpa Kato (the addressed recipient of the letter) with this news, but she and Mother never discuss the tragedy and the silence has become unbearable.
In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in a decisive end to World War II. These bombs devastated the civilian populations of these cities, including Naomi’s family. Grandma Kato and Mother chose silence to cope with the tragedy, but it’s a choice that prevents them from processing their emotions. Grandma Kato eventually breaks under this pressure and writes to her husband, even though she (like many other members of Naomi’s family) views the sharing of sorrow as selfish.
Themes
The atomic bomb obliterates Nagasaki. Grandma Kato emerges from the rubble with Chieko to find the landscape flattened and burning as voices across the city scream for help and for their loved ones. Grandma Kato finds Setsuko horribly burned with her eyes blown out of their sockets. The other survivors are similarly burned, though Setsuko’s older child Tomio is in better shape. The next morning, Tomio is missing and Grandma Kato still has not found Mother. Tomio is never found, but Grandma Kato discovers Mother burned and disfigured beyond recognition. Grandma Kato writes of these events in 1949. Mother has survived but covers her face with a mask, while Chieko is dying of leukemia.
The graphic descriptions of the bomb’s immediate fallout highlight the atrocity of the bombing. The fates of the various Kato family members also demonstrate different ways the bomb affected people’s lives: Setsuko dies, Mother is disfigured, Tomio disappears, and Chieko develops cancer from the lingering radiation.
Themes
Nakayama-sensei finishes reading the letter. He is deeply rattled, but he tries to bring comfort to Stephen and Naomi by preaching love and forgiveness. Naomi is not interested in forgiveness. She thinks only of Mother, and begs Mother to help Naomi hear her.
Nakayama-sensei tries to continue to act as a spiritual leader, but Naomi is uninterested in his abstract ideals, and for once she doesn’t prioritize Nakayama-sensei over herself. She doesn’t deny that forgiveness could be a productive way to process her past, but it is not a way that she wants to pursue in the immediate wake of discovering the truth. She wants what she has always wanted––to connect to Mother.
Themes
