Inscrutability and the Unknown Theme Analysis

At one point in the novel, the boy refers to all the Japanese-American people in the camp as “inscrutable,” which means that they are impossible to know. This “inscrutability” was the exact reason why the U.S. government locked up innocent Japanese-American citizens. Since the government could never know for sure the loyalties of these citizens, the government decided to just incarcerate them all.

Otsuka explores this idea of inscrutability in a number of ways in the novel. The family members’ lack of names—they are “the woman,” “the boy” “the girl” and “the man”—provides the most obvious example. Since Otsuka cannot write about every single Japanese person who went through internment, the family’s namelessness makes them more symbolic, as if the family is a stand-in for the thousands of Japanese-Americans who went through similar experiences during the war. But their lack of names also represents how racism erases people’s individuality. As mentioned in the themes of racism and assimilation, stereotypes make all the individuals in a group seem interchangeable, as if they were all the same. Finally, the family’s namelessness could represent the fundamental inscrutability of identity. Names and the act of naming allow us to identify and know the different elements that make up our world. Naming something is almost like possessing it in a way—it becomes more familiar, less unknown. The family member’s lack of names thus preserves their inscrutability, and in a way makes them seem more alive.

This namelessness and the inscrutability it suggests ultimately show that Otsuka wants the reader to become comfortable with the unknown. From the man’s censored letters and his untold experiences at the camps to the mysteriousness of the woman, so much in this novel is left in the shadows. With all these unknown elements, Otsuka seems to gesture towards the fundamental inscrutability of others—of all others, regardless of race or nationality. We can never truly comprehend the true feelings or experiences of other people, no matter how similar or close to them we are.

But instead of fearing this unknown, Otsuka suggests that we should accept it as an essential part of our reality. Fear of the unknown is essentially what caused the unjust incarceration of thousands of innocent Japanese-American civilians, and this same fear has caused untold tragedies throughout history—it motivated the Nazis to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe, and causes people today to denounce all Muslims or Arabs as terrorists. In contrast to this fear that leads to violence and persecution, Otsuka suggests we should empathize with the unknown, accept it, and recognize the fundamental inscrutability of existence—something common to all of us.