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Book 3, Chapter 4
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
In 1969, Noa has been living in Nagano, passing as Japanese, and running the business office of Cosmos Pachinko for seven years. He has paid Hansu back for his Waseda education and continues to send money to his family. He has finally decided to follow through on his boss’s advice that a man of his age and position should be married.
Noa has succeeded in his childhood goal of integrating seamlessly into Japanese society. However, the price of integrating has been cutting ties with his Korean family and working in a business he doesn’t respect.
Themes
Noa is attracted to a woman named Risa Iwamura, the head filing clerk at Cosmos. Her family, too, is touched by scandal: when Risa was a teenager, her father, a doctor, had dispensed the wrong medication to some patients, leading to their deaths. Her father then killed himself, leaving the family “both destitute and tainted.” Risa is considered to be unmarriageable because of this tragedy.
Noa is drawn to a young woman who is as “tainted” as he thinks himself to be. Risa has been ostracized through no fault of her own because of her society’s exacting standards, something she’s powerless to overcome. Noa can easily identify with such circumstances.
Themes
Both Noa and Risa have been lonely for a long time, and when they marry, they develop genuine affection for one another. Soon, Risa becomes the highly competent stay-at-home mother of four children; though she has been expelled “from the tribe of ordinary middle-class people, she had effectively reproduced her own tribe.”
Though Noa had pursued marriage out of a desire for a kind of respectability, he’s been isolated for so long that he quickly discovers a refuge in family life. Though Risa no longer has an accepted place within her society, she carves out a place where she can thrive, much as Noa has done.
Themes
Though Noa loves his family, he is careful around them—he doesn’t see his life as a “rebirth,” as he carries his Korean past “like a dark, heavy rock within him.” He lives in constant fear of discovery. He continues to read his beloved English literature, but otherwise maintains no ties to his younger self.
Noa’s happiness in his new life has a hard limit. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t escape the consciousness of his past or the fear that the people he loves will discover it.
Themes
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One day Noa’s family takes a trip to Matsumoto Castle, Japan’s oldest existing castle. When the tour guide explains that the castle is thought to be cursed, Noa’s six-year-old wants to know what a curse is. He tells Noa that if he put a curse on someone, he could always reverse it. Noa tells his son that it isn’t so easy to reverse a curse. Then he takes the children for ice cream.
This vignette in Noa’s family life hints at the burden Noa carries around and conceals from his family. Noa believes he is cursed because of Hansu. Though his little boy thinks of a curse as something in a scary story, Noa believes it’s something real that can’t so easily be gotten rid of.
Themes
