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
The photo depicts a young Naomi with Mother, and Naomi recalls her own youthful discomfort with being perceived. She identifies her distrust of watchful eyes as a Japanese sentiment shared by her relatives born in Japan, in contrast to Naomi and her Canadian-born relatives, who became “visually bilingual.” She reflects on Japanese culture’s comfort with nudity within the home, and flashes back to taking a hot bath with Grandma Kato as a child.
As a child, Naomi identifies with the Japanese culture of her relatives. However, as she grows up in Canada, she becomes “visually bilingual”––in other words, able to move between Canadian and Japanese norms around perception and privacy.
Themes
Naomi’s memory moves to the house in Vancouver that her family once resided in, and when Naomi tries to dismiss this memory as unimportant, she imagines Aunt Emily impressing upon her the importance of every memory and every facet of one’s history. Naomi thinks of the house, recalling each room in specific detail, and she envisions her family enjoying each other’s company in the house’s music room. The memories fill Naomi with longing, and she gives the photo back to Obasan. She feels that only “fragments” of the girl she once was remain.
Naomi’s traumatic upbringing fractured her personality. The girl she once was has been broken into “fragments” that linger in the woman she is now, and she can’t come to terms with those fragments without confronting her past. Aunt Emily recognizes this and pushes Naomi to embrace the specificity of her history in order to acknowledge the multifaceted ways it has shaped her.
Themes
