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
A couple of years later, Haruki has to deal with the case of a 12-year-old Korean boy who committed suicide. The boy’s parents show him a yearbook with derogatory comments about Koreans written inside. The boy’s mother claims that things are better for Koreans now, but the boy’s father wishes the boys who wrote those comments could be identified and punished. Haruki tells them there is nothing he can do.
Even though it’s some 40 years after many Koreans settled in Japan, the same kinds of hateful comments are directed at them by some Japanese. Haruki feels helpless to bring solace or closure to the victim’s devastated parents.
Themes
Haruki goes to Mozasu’s pachinko parlor. He doesn’t gamble recklessly, but he has an ample inheritance and can afford to indulge a bit. He finds the game comforting. He thinks about the boy who died; he had suicidal thoughts as a boy and still thinks about it sometimes, but couldn’t do such a thing to Ayame.
Haruki’s job gets to him, and he still deals with internalized self-hatred from his boyhood, even though his life has improved in many ways since then and he’s now considered successful. Pachinko’s continual promise of a lucky payout distracts and soothes him, as it does for so many customers.
Themes
Mozasu shows up, and when Haruki tells him about the boy, Haruki starts to cry. Mozasu tells him that he got the same kind of harassment as a kid and that things are never going to change—Koreans are called “Japanese bastards” in Korea, and in Japan, he’ll always be a “dirty Korean” no matter how much money he makes. He reflects that Noa “got tired of being a good Korean and quit. I was never a good Korean.” He reassures Haruki that he’s doing okay now.
Mozasu appears to take his outcast status in stride—it doesn’t matter where he goes, no nation will welcome someone like him, so he should just continue doing his best rather than trying to play a rigged game and fighting for acceptance that will never come. Although Haruki is Japanese, he, too, feels perpetually unable to meet society’s standards.
Themes
