Gen Watanabe

Character Analysis

Sorry, not Ken Watanabe. No Last Samurai or Inception here. But Gen Watanabe does have the communications equivalent of awesome warrior skills. He's a translator, which means he's the only person among the hostages who still has a job, as Roxane Coss tells him early in the story (3.141). Though to be fair, she still pretty much has a singing job, especially when that becomes the thing that brings everyone together.

Back to Gen: he really is a likable guy, polite and intelligent. Besides that, he's undergoing his own personal transformation in Bel Canto, as the world created by art and the difficult situation in the house also lets him experience love for the first time. Not so bad, huh?

Gen-erally Speaking (In Every Language Ever)

Gen has a pretty important job in the symbolic world of Bel Canto. If Roxane Coss is all about opera—literally and symbolically—Gen is doing the same kind of work for another big theme: language and communication.

Gen can interpret people to each other. He gives language to the big emotions everyone's feeling in response to the turbulent situation as well as the stunning art of Roxane's singing. He's also the only one with the language necessary for little things like talking to the Red Cross negotiator or figuring out how to get dinner cooked for the whole group when the government sends raw chicken and vegetables instead of a catered six-course meal (6.128-248).

Art can communicate across the barriers of language, but you can't sing opera without words, either. Language can help create a community where one didn't exist before. Gen is the character who makes that happen through language in the book. And his polyglot skills are pretty wicked fierce.

Gen-tly Does It: Gen, Off-Duty

Here's a paradox: the strange and somehow wonder-filled new world created in Bel Canto keeps Gen pretty busy with translation, but it also lets him experience his own emotions fully for the first time ever. And it lets him share them with others, particularly with the young terrorist Carmen. Love opens up a world he'd never imagined, along with a new kind of life.

For example, we see him starting to realize this when he's trying to translate Fyodorov's confession of love to Roxane. Coincidence: he's also thinking about the fact that he and Carmen have just kissed for the first time:

He [Gen] had never said I love you to either his parents or his sisters. He had not said it to any of the three women he had slept with in his life or the girls in school with whom he had occasionally walked to class. It simply had not occurred to him to say it and now on the first day of his life when it might have been appropriate to speak of love to a woman, he would be declaring it for another man to another woman. (7.132)

Falling for Carmen lets Gen discover what it really means to be in love, and that transforms him. Sharing language is the way Gen and Carmen come to know each other well enough to fall in love, much as sharing music is the way that happens for Roxane and Mr. Hosokawa. Even though their relationship is tragically cut off by Carmen's death at the end of the book, it changes Gen forever.

Basically, Gen is one of the characters Bel Canto chooses to explore love and the way it can transform someone. His symbolic roles in relation to both love and language come together in the way Gen's character functions in the Epilogue.

Gen-uine Tragedy: The End is Near

In a surprise move, the Epilogue zooms us to Gen and Roxane getting married in Italy not too long after the hostage crisis ends. This is thoroughly unexpected, and it seems maybe a little off. Sure, they're both awesome people with a lot of respect for each other, but they've both just lost people they passionately loved. Not to mention they've gone through a hostage crisis together.

We're betting in real life most psychologists would agree with Ruben Iglesias in gently telling them they should wait a bit to be sure (Epilogue.26). And it sure feels pretty abrupt in the world of the book, where we've been getting used to Gen and Carmen in the china closet and Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane sneaking to each other's rooms.

On the other hand, you can make a good case that this ending works pretty well on the level of symbolism and character development. The character who most embodies how art changes lives marries the character who most embodies how language lets us interpret each other.

That does make a lot of sense if you zoom out to a Big Symbolism level. In Bel Canto, art can transform your life, but language is pretty helpful if you want to interpret what's going on. Or figure out how to cook dinner. So art and language are pretty intertwined in the book, and maybe this marriage symbolically hints at that.

From a character perspective, it seems like Gen and Roxane have a reasonable shot at being happy together long-term. They respect each other (which makes sense, given their respective language and art super-skills). They're also both trying to reenter reality after a strange and intense and magical and tragic experience, and while that could be hard, it might also give them something to bond over.

Plus, they do seem reasonably well-suited to each other in real life, even if they aren't immediately and passionately in love. We're not saying you should try this at home (in fact, we recommend avoiding a lot of the stuff in Bel Canto in your personal life), but it's believable in the novel that they'd have a successful marriage in the long run.

So that's the case for how Gen and Roxane's marriage functions symbolically at the end of the novel. It's up to you, Shmoopers, whether the ending works for you or not. But that's one way to see it as successful.

Whatever you think of the ending, Gen goes from being everyone's translation minion to being one of the central characters. And it's hard to complain about that. Well, aside from all the tragedy he has to face. But still.