Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Pachinko, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Survival and Family
Imperialism, Resistance, and Compromise
Identity, Blood, and Contamination
Love, Motherhood, and Women’s Choices
Summary
Analysis
The narrative skips forward two years. It is 1942, and Noa is eight years old. Every day he carefully dresses and grooms himself before school to look like a middle-class Japanese child, not like “the unwashed ghetto children” of Ikaino. At school, he’s a model student and speaks better Japanese than most of the native children. Privately, he no longer believes in God, and he dreams of becoming Japanese.
Even though Noa is only eight, it’s clear that under the pressures of wartime imperialism, he’s internalized the mockery and disdain he hears aimed at Korean children at his Japanese school. His family, focused on survival themselves, don’t realize this. His father’s plight has taken a toll on Noa’s faith, and he wants to escape his ethnic identity altogether.
Themes
One spring day, Noa comes home from school and finds “a gaunt and filthy man” collapsed on the floor of his house. The man is too weak to stand, and he looks ill. Noa screams, assuming he’s a thief or a burglar, then feels bad when he sees that the man is weeping. Noa offers him a coin from his pocket. He’s shocked when the man—Isak—tells him he’s his father. Noa brings Isak some water and covers him with a blanket, then runs to the restaurant.
Noa’s father unexpectedly appears, obviously suffering from severe abuse and deprivation. Noa can’t make sense of this terrifying apparition, which is a reminder of just how long Isak has been imprisoned.
Themes
Noa fetches Sunja from the restaurant, and she feels sorry when she realizes she’s done nothing to prepare Noa for the possibility of his father’s return or his death. When they get home, she sees Isak’s shockingly aged, tortured appearance. She sends Noa to get Yoseb at the factory. When Isak wakes up, he tells Sunja how long he’s imagined this homecoming; “how hard it must have been for you,” he adds. Pastor Yoo and Hu both died yesterday.
Despite the terrible hardships he’s obviously endured, Isak thinks first of what Sunja has been through in his absence, showing his deep commitment to her and his selflessness. The other men from the church have fared just as badly, emphasizing the shockingly poor—and even fatal—conditions at the prison.
Themes
At the biscuit factory Noa finds Yoseb and tells him the news. Yoseb knows he’ll be fired if he leaves work early, so he sends Noa back with the promise that he’ll hurry home as soon as he can. Noa doesn’t understand why his uncle is crying.
Yoseb’s boss would show him no leniency for this situation, and it could even be dangerous for Yoseb, already discriminated against for being Korean, to draw more attention to the fact that his brother was arrested for disrespecting the Emperor.
Themes
Get the entire Pachinko LitChart as a printable PDF.
