57 pages • 1 hour read
The Japanese Lover
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Endurance of Love Across Time
Content Warning: This section discusses racism, anti-gay bias, warfare, and genocide.
The Japanese Lover contains several romances, each of which serves to emphasize the value and strength of love. The primary romance is between Ichimei and Alma, which is mirrored in Seth and Irina, Megumi and Boyd, and Nathaniel and Lenny. Each of these romances possesses a common element of “forbidden” or socially unacceptable love, which the couples need to overcome to be together. While Ichi and Alma avoid the social pressures against interracial coupling by dating in secret for most of their lives, Megumi and Boyd get married openly after Megumi completes her education. Nathaniel and Lenny, like Ichi and Alma, keep their love a secret until Nathaniel’s death, adding another layer to Allende’s overarching message of loving regardless of social pressures. The novel emphasizes the difficulties placed on those whose relationships defy social norms. Irina and Seth are the vessels into which Alma pours her wisdom regarding love, and her final act of leaving Ichi’s letters to Irina constitutes the healing Irina needs to overcome her own trauma.
Nathaniel presents Alma with the reasons why she cannot marry Ichimei: “Because he’s from another race, another social class, another culture, another religion, another economic level” (136). Though many of these elements of Ichi’s identity intersect—his economic class, for instance, is partly the result of the systemic economic disadvantages faced by nonwhite Americans—the common aspect to each is that society, at the time, frowned upon relationships that crossed these barriers. The only social norm missing from Nathaniel’s list is heteronormativity, which he breaks in his relationship with Lenny. However, these romances are framed in a positive light in the novel, with Allende implicitly pitting the characters’ loves against the society in which they operate. In retrospect, Alma concludes that she could not have handled her romance differently, as an open violation of social norms would have opened her and Ichimei up to violence and legal action. By presenting these romances, Allende urges the reader to look at love from a more transcendental angle, not as a matter of marriage, childbearing, or social arrangement, but as a matter of spirituality and a meeting of souls. What matters is not whether these lovers were recognized by society, but how they honored and preserved their passion for each other despite the barriers put in their way.
In Ichi’s final letter, he embraces the idea that love can transcend time and space, relishing his memories of his love with Alma and urging her to do the same. When Ichi comments that “we are both seventeen years old, my Alma” (322), he is reminding Alma, and the reader, that the passion and emotion they shared as teenagers has not left them. Love can remain in a person’s mind and soul long after the moment it was first inspired. When Irina sees Ichi at Alma’s deathbed, the appearance of the spirit suggests that love connects spirits beyond death. Of course, romantic love is not the only love in the novel, and Alma’s relationships with Isaac, Nathaniel, and Irina all emphasize that familial love also lasts forever. At the end of the novel, Irina has overcome her trauma, and she kisses Seth, signaling to the reader that a new and everlasting love is developing.
Immigration and Cultural Assimilation
Immigration and cultural assimilation are challenges that many characters in the novel encounter, and the transition from one environment to another is easier for some than others. Nathaniel, for example, is not an immigrant, but he is gay, which distinguishes him from the other young men in his school environment. In secondary school, he is bullied mercilessly, but once he escapes to Boston, he figures out how to function in a heteronormative society, assimilating before returning to California where he hides his romances. Ichimei, in contrast, has no way of hiding his race and ethnicity, and, though he is a native-born American citizen, he experiences firsthand the difficulties of adjusting to American society. The process of assimilation, through which a person must adapt and conform to the expected social norms of a new environment, highlights some key difficulties in addressing issues of discrimination in the text.
The catch-22 of assimilation for nonwhite Americans is epitomized by the questionnaire Japanese American prisoners are forced to fill out at the Topaz prison camp. The questionnaire demands that the internees “be loyal to the United States” and “renounce their allegiance to the emperor of Japan” without offering American citizenship to the issei and without acknowledging that the nisei are already American citizens with no legal tie to Japan (117). James Fukuda is deported for answering incorrectly, and his family never sees him again. The questionnaire exposes the impossible, racist standards of assimilation, which force Japanese Americans to renounce their identity without offering a new identity in return. Even for the nisei, who see themselves as purely American, they can never fulfill the standard of assimilation because they will always be visibly Japanese, which conflicts with the dominant perception of Americans as white. The same process occurred in America following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, when Muslim Americans and even many non-Muslim Americans of Middle Eastern and Indian descent were forced repeatedly to assert their love of America to avoid suspicion of terrorism.
For Ichimei, his response to the trauma of incarceration and the subsequent discrimination he faced is similar to Nathaniel’s method of coping with a homophobic society: He simply builds his life alongside, but separate from, mainstream American society. At the end of Ichi’s life, he lives with his Japanese American family in a Japanese American community, in which Ichi is a “master,” “called on to give advice to anyone who went astray, to reconcile enemies and serve as a fair arbitrator in disputes” (297). This role indicates that the Japanese American community is self-governed and self-policed, making it adjacent to but separate from the dominant white American culture of California. The goal of assimilation, for immigrant communities, is to retain their identity while adding to it the values and cultural norms of a new environment, but the standard by which a country judges assimilation is often too strenuous, forcing immigrant communities to separate themselves to protect their cultural values from attack.
The Legacies of Racism and Cultural Injustice
A turning point in Ichimei’s life occurs when he shifts from painting the landscape of Topaz to painting Japanese scenes. While this shows his distance from American culture, it also reveals the trauma of incarceration and the lasting consequences of cultural injustice. During the problematically named “yellow peril,” Japanese people are branded as “unfair competition against American farmers and fishermen, threatening white women’s virtue with their insatiable lust, and corrupting American society by their Oriental, anti-Christian ways” (82), which is the same kind of propaganda and stereotyping that has been applied to any number of races. It has a deep and lasting impact on the American cultural psyche, which Allende explores through the Fukuda family.
After incarceration, when Ichimei begins school, the narrative traces the trajectory of racist ideology from ideology to propaganda to violence. Ichi “had not seen the comics where they were portrayed as degenerate and ruthless” (128), referring to anti-Japanese propaganda from WWII, in which Ichi notes “that the Japanese were more hated that the Germans” (128). This hatred, expressed in the comics, derives from racist ideologies, and it proselytizes racism to white children, who then attack Ichimei. After defending himself against physical attacks motivated by racist propaganda, Ichimei is sent to the principal, who blames Ichi for being Japanese, rather than the boys who attacked him, reflecting the ways that adults perpetuate discriminatory violence. Fortunately, Ichi’s teacher, Miss Brody, takes a stand against that injustice by applauding Ichimei, after which he is no longer bothered by other students. However, it is implied that, while Ichimei is not attacked, he is not welcomed, either, reflecting the challenges of assimilation. Though the racism Ichimei faces becomes less intense in the later decades of his life, it never disappears, and his childhood experiences shape the choices he makes as an adult, including his choice to live in a Japanese American community.
The novel also addresses the Nazi invasion of Poland, as well as the Holocaust, in which Jewish, Polish, LGBTQ+, and disabled people were targeted for genocide, but that injustice is not a dominant theme in the text, so much as a background upon which Allende compares the treatment of different groups in America. Alma’s roommate, for example, sympathizes with Hitler, the leader of the Nazi party, in her antisemitism, but Alma quickly changes rooms to avoid her. Later in the novel, when it is revealed that Nathaniel has AIDS, a similar mentality to the racism perpetuated against Japanese Americans comes to light regarding homosexuality, for which some claimed AIDS was a punishment. The fact that racism and other forms of cultural injustice shape the lives and choices of all the main characters illustrates that these problems are endemic to American culture. Nevertheless, as much as Allende emphasizes the continued effects of racism and injustice, she also highlights people like Isaac Belasco, who helps people regardless of race, religion, and sexual orientation, showing how such ideologies are not omnipresent in American society.
Unlock all 57 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Isabel Allende
Featured Collections
Aging
View Collection
Art
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Hispanic & Latinx American Literature
View Collection
Memory
View Collection
Mortality & Death
View Collection
Popular Book Club Picks
View Collection
Pride Month Reads
View Collection
Romance
View Collection
Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love
View Collection
World War II
View Collection