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Mother
Grandma Kato is Naomi’s maternal grandmother, the mother of Aunt Emily and Mother. She brings Mother to Japan with her before the war, leaving behind her other daughter and her husband Grandpa Kato. Grandma Kato’s letter to her husband breaks the silence about the devastation felt by the Katos in Nagasaki, and reading this letter decades later allows Naomi to find some closure regarding the loss of her mother.
Grandma Kato Quotes in Obasan
The Obasan quotes below are all either spoken by Grandma Kato or refer to Grandma Kato. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 37 Quotes
She and my mother, [Grandma Kato] writes, were unable to talk of all the things that happened. The horror would surely die sooner, they felt, if they refused to speak. But the silence and the constancy of the nightmare had become unbearable for Grandma and she hoped that by sharing them with her husband, she could be helped to extricate herself from the grip of the past.
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Explanation and Analysis:
In Grandma Kato’s letter explaining the devastation of the bombing of Hiroshima, she apologizes to her husband for burdening him with the information. Like the other members of Naomi’s family, Grandma Kato believes that sharing suffering is selfish. However, the family’s traditional method of suffering in silence has become unbearable, and this displays the negative impacts of silence. Over the course of the story, Naomi learns to accept her mother’s silence as the way she chose to communicate, but silence can also exist in its more predictable form as an absence of communication. In this form, silence is stifling and Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum
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Grandma Kato Character Timeline in Obasan
The timeline below shows where the character Grandma Kato appears in Obasan. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 4
...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...
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Chapter 9
...comfort with nudity within the home, and flashes back to taking a hot bath with Grandma Kato as a child.
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Chapter 12
The story moves to September 1941, when Naomi is five years old. Grandma Kato and Mother leave for Japan to visit Naomi’s ill great-grandmother, and Naomi wonders why her...
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Chapter 14
...entries, framed as letters to Mother, who in the 1940s is still in Japan with Grandma Kato . In the first entry on December 25, 1941, Emily writes about the aftermath of...
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Chapter 27
...Uncle Dan, who has remained “fiercely loyal” to Canada; the unknown fates of Mother and Grandma Kato ; and Nakayama-sensei, who tried in vain to foster a sense of community among displaced...
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Chapter 32
Looking at the photographs makes Naomi think of Mother and Grandma Kato . Nakayama-sensei searched for them when he visited Japan after the war, but he found...
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Chapter 36
...her sister (Mother). The letters, Emily and Nakayama-sensei reveal, were written many years ago by Grandma Kato .
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Chapter 37
Grandma Kato ’s letter describes the events that befell the Kato family in Japan in 1945. Grandma...
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The atomic bomb obliterates Nagasaki. Grandma Kato emerges from the rubble with Chieko to find the landscape flattened and burning as voices...
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