Previous
I Am Japanese (1986)
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Belonging, Bigotry, and Identity
Silence vs. Communication
Family Dynamics and Inheritance
Memory
Love and Self-Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
Henry enters the basement of the hotel, which is packed full of trunks and looks like “a secondhand store.” Henry feels sure that Keiko and her family’s belongings must be somewhere in the room. He starts looking through items, and finds a photo album with pictures of a Japanese family he doesn’t know. Almost half the photos are missing from the album, and Henry notices that the album’s pages smell like smoke.
The tremendous number of items in the hotel’s basement serves as a testament to how many lives were uprooted—even completely destroyed—due to the U.S. government’s interment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The fact that all of these personal belongings have survived also symbolically represents the way that memories, particularly of trauma, reassert themselves even when they are believed to have been long buried.
Themes
