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Book 3, Chapter 19
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
Solomon goes to the curry restaurant where Mozasu, Goro, and Haruki habitually eat on Wednesdays. He’s visibly upset. Goro says he went to the old woman’s funeral and that she’d died of a heart attack, and Haruki has heard no complaints about her death. Solomon explains that he was fired, but feels hesitant to say too much with Haruki, a high-ranking Japanese police detective, present; and he doesn’t want to hurt the men’s feelings. Goro understands Solomon’s hesitation and assures him that he had nothing to do with her death, and that Kazu was just using Solomon for his Korean connections.
Solomon seems to be a little naïve about the way things worked for his father’s generation, not quite realizing that all three men have benefited from yakuza connections in one way or another. The fact that he’s relatively sheltered from such things underlines the extent of his father’s success in pulling himself up from the bottom. Solomon will probably never know the full story of what’s happened with Goro and the elderly Korean woman, but in any case, he’s now experienced discrimination of a kind that he hasn’t known before.
Themes
Phoebe doesn’t answer the phone, so Solomon returns to the hospital to visit Hana again. Hana tells him that he should take over Mozasu’s pachinko business. She says that his father and Goro are honest men, and anyway, nothing is ever going to change in Japan—it will never integrate Koreans like Solomon, and it will never accept diseased people like her. She tells him that Mozasu sometimes visits her and prays for her. She’s known many elite men in her work, and Mozasu is better than all of them.
Hana has always been an outcast because of her family situation and now because of her illness. She’s done “dirty” things with many outwardly good men who have society’s approval. From this perspective, she assures Solomon that his father is a much better man than most, and he shouldn’t pursue a “respectable” career out of a foolish hope that Japanese society will come around to accepting him.
Themes
