The girl’s response that the army kills the wild horses symbolically connects the Japanese American prisoners to the horses. Killing the horses would mean utterly depriving them of their freedom and right to live. Likewise, the army has rounded up the Japanese citizens and taken their freedom. In this way, Otsuka associates freedom with the very essence of being alive. At the same time, she also shows how a teen girl’s typical antagonism of her brother (he had been fascinated by the horses earlier) can, in such a dire situation, lead to deeper psychological troubles. The horses had been symbols of freedom to the boy, and now he feels like that freedom has been murdered.
