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
Five years later, Hana, drunk, calls Solomon in New York, where he’s attending Columbia University. She works as a hostess and prostitute, and Etsuko hasn’t been able to track her down. Solomon loves his current girlfriend, Phoebe, but it’s nothing like what he’d felt for Hana. Hana gives him a phone number to call him back, and Solomon gives the number to his father, worried that Hana is very sick. But the number turns out to be for a Chinese restaurant.
Hana continues to avoid her family and go down self-destructive paths, and Solomon still loves her years after they were together.
Themes
Eventually, Etsuko’s investigator tracks down Hana working at a toruko, a place where women bathe men for money. Etsuko can’t believe how much Hana has aged. She begs Hana’s forgiveness, “believing that if she could just listen and suffer, then maybe her daughter could be saved.” Finally Hana, weeping, lets Etsuko embrace her.
Like other mothers in the novel, Etsuko hopes that somehow her own suffering can redeem her daughter. At the end of her rope, Hana finally allows herself to be helped.
Themes
