The Panama Hotel represents the way in which memory persists and manages to reassert itself, even when it is thought to have been long since buried and forgotten. While the hotel once served as a place for recent immigrants from China and Japan to rent a room while establishing their new lives in America, by the 1940s (when Henry is a child) the hotel has fallen into disrepair. In Henry’s adulthood, the hotel is finally being restored by its new owner, Palmyra Pettison, and the inciting incident of the novel is the discovery of abandoned belongings in the hotel basement. Evacuating Seattle to be forced into internment camps, many Japanese families left treasured items in the Panama Hotel, hoping to someday return and collect them.
The hotel thus has a multilayered quality: many histories have been metaphorically rewritten, erased, and re-inscribed on the walls of this building. Henry has been dealing with this phenomenon for years, trying his best to forget his first love, Keiko, while he builds a life with his wife, Ethel, and their son, Marty. But like the items discovered in the basement of the hotel, Henry’s childhood memories remain buried just below the surface. Though the hotel stands as a painful reminder to Henry of losing Keiko, he finds that confronting this memory liberates him—not only bringing him emotional peace, but also reuniting him with his long-lost love.