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Book 2, Chapter 18
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
After Hansu leaves, Noa and Akiko have a fight. Akiko doesn’t understand why Noa is upset that she came to the lunch uninvited. She asks him if it’s because he’s embarrassed that he’s Korean. She tells Noa that while it might upset her racist parents that he’s Korean, it doesn’t bother her. In fact, she says, she can arrange for Noa to meet her whole family, because “they’d be lucky to meet such an excellent Korean,” and it might change their perspective.
It starts to become clear that Akiko looks at Noa primarily as a Korean and secondly as a person. She still assumes the categorization of “good” versus “bad” Korean that Noa had to work so hard to escape and believed he’d left behind when he left Ikaino.
Themes
Noa realizes that Akiko will always see him as “some fanciful idea of a foreign person,” and that being with him allows her to think of herself as a good, open-minded person. Noa doesn’t want her to think of him as a “good” or “bad” Korean, but to see him as human. He realizes that this is what he’s wanted more than anything all along.
Dating Noa allows Akiko to feel superior to her overtly racist parents, but there’s something insidious in her attitude as well, which Noa detects. He realizes that she’s always going to see him as a category, which is the very constraint he wants to escape, but which he keeps colliding with, both societally and personally.
Themes
Noa tells Akiko that their relationship is over. Then Akiko says, “He’s your father, isn’t he? […] He looks exactly like you. […] You just didn’t want him to meet me, because you didn’t want me to meet your yakuza papa.” She asks Noa how else he could explain Hansu’s chauffeur or the swanky apartment he rents for Noa. Noa just walks away from her, feeling that he loved her, yet he never really knew her. Shakily, he catches the first train to Osaka.
Akiko picks up on the resemblance that Noa has been too close to notice and draws some conclusions that seem to shock Noa to his core. Noa not only feels alienated from Akiko, but realizes there are other people in his life he hasn’t really known, either.
Themes
Distraught, Noa goes to his mother’s house and asks her for the truth about his relationship to Hansu. Sunja realizes that Yoseb had been right all along about the danger of Hansu’s presence in Noa’s life. Yet she hadn’t known what else to do. Isak had believed that if Noa excelled, no one would be able to look down on him, and Hansu’s help was the only thing that made university attainable. Sunja explains her relationship with Hansu and Isak’s choice to be Noa’s father, adding, “Blood doesn’t matter.” She has always trusted that, somehow, Noa would understand this.
In many ways, this moment—the long-delayed revelation of Noa’s parentage—is the climax of the story. Sunja’s choice to involve Hansu in supporting Noa is put to the test. Isak’s attitude that Noa’s success will outshine all other factors is shown to be questionable, too. Sunja has relied on her belief, like Isak’s, that one’s blood is ultimately not the determinant of happiness or success.
Themes
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Sunja tries to explain that she has little contact with Hansu and doesn’t know what he does for a living, but Noa insists that he’s a yakuza, one of “the worst Koreans,” and that Noa “will never be able to wash this dirt from [his] name.” His entire life, he’s heard Japanese speak scornfully of his Korean blood; now, he learns that he has criminal blood as well, which can never be changed. Sunja thinks that many of the Koreans work for gangs because they have no other options, but doubts that Noa will have compassion on such men. She asks Noa to forgive her, but he says she has ruined his life; he is no longer himself.
After spending his life working hard to rise above poverty and prejudice in Ikaino, Noa now feels that he does, in fact, have contaminated blood. The taunts he’s heard all his life have been vindicated in a way, and this time, he can’t escape those taunts by simply working hard or moving away. Sunja has been perhaps willfully ignorant of the extent of what Hansu does, and she takes it for granted that some Koreans must participate in organized crime in order to survive; but to Noa, there’s no excuse for not resisting such a compromise. He feels that his entire sense of self is lost.
Themes
