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
Naomi thinks about her family history. Grandpa Nakane, her paternal grandfather, was a master boatbuilder and sailor, and he brought his widowed cousin (Grandma Nakane) and her son Isamu to America with him. Isamu became Naomi’s “Uncle Sam,” who also worked as a boatbuilder. Obasan has never told Naomi much about herself, but Naomi knows that Obasan was a schoolteacher and that the child she had with Uncle was stillborn.
Naomi thinks about her relatives in terms of their histories, but she doesn’t share her own past with the reader. In this way, Naomi is similar to Obasan, who also considers her past a private affair. The two women’s shared profession as schoolteachers and their lack of children of their own heightens this similarity.
Themes
She thinks of Grandma Nakane, a musician, who was imprisoned in Vancouver during World War II. Grandma Nakane features in a family photograph taken after the birth of Stephen, the first grandchild in both the Kato and Nakane families. In the photograph, Naomi’s mother stands next to her sister Emily, and Naomi wonders if the Katos were ever truly happy, because Grandma Kato frequently took Mother with her to Japan and left behind Emily and Grandpa Kato. The marriage between Naomi’s parents was the first non-arranged marriage in their community, and the Kato and Nakane families became inseparable.
Just like Naomi wondered if her family members experienced love, she also wonders if they experienced happiness. This displays Naomi’s natural empathy, which she feels especially for her family, but it also highlights her tendency as a narrator to focus on her family members rather than herself.
Themes
Naomi remembers another photograph of Uncle and her Father as young men with a boat they built. They labored over the boat, and the finished product was a “work of art,” but it was confiscated by the Canadian police in 1941. The policeman who drove it away exclaimed that it was “a beauty.” That was the last time Uncle saw the boat, and shortly after, he and the other Japanese fishermen were imprisoned. Naomi remembers that Uncle always spoke about “someday” going back to his boats, but he never did.
Uncle and Father’s love for their craft indicates the importance of boats as more than just a vessel for fishing. The labor that Uncle and Father put into their boat produced a beautiful work of art, which was stolen from them with no respect for the significance it held or the effort it took to build. Uncle’s lifelong yearning to return to the sea demonstrates how the imprisonment and displacement of Japanese Canadians tore people away from the passions and simple beauties that gave their lives meaning.
Themes
