Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Jazz is Henry’s escape from his troubles with family and school. The music transcends the troubled situation in Nihonmachi and unites people from different races and backgrounds. Henry and Keiko form a particular bond over the music, specifically an elusive Oscar Holden record on which their friend Sheldon plays saxophone. The music can be heard at crucial moments in the story: when Sheldon serenades a deserted Nihonmachi, when Keiko plays the record from within the confines of Camp Harmony, and when Sheldon’s family and friends gather to hear the record one more time as he is dying.

Situated on the corner between Chinatown and Nihonmachi in Seattle, the Panama Hotel straddles two worlds at war in the 1930s and ’40s. At the time, Chinese and Japanese adults were at war with each other in the United States, too, although their American-born children played together. The Panama Hotel has other functions in the story: It is a meeting place for Henry and Keiko and a storage space for the belongings of interned Japanese Americans. Henry’s ultimate sacrifice involves the Panama Hotel, as he resolves to leave behind his dreams of Keiko if his father ensures the property is not sold. The physical structure of the hotel is one of the few buildings in Nihonmachi to survive over the years, and it stands as a symbol of heritage and perseverance.

During his wife’s illness, Henry refused to put Ethel into a nursing home. His insistence that he could care for her puzzled his son but makes more sense when the reader learns that Keiko and her family were sent away to a relocation center. The Okabes and thousands of other Japanese families spent years behind barbed-wire fences. Henry is very reluctant to put Ethel into a nursing home where she will essentially be a prisoner for her last days. Reflecting on this decision, Henry muses, “Who’d want to spend their last days in some state-owned facility that looked like a prison where everyone lived on death row?” (8).