Obasan

Obasan (1981), a seminal work of Asian-Canadian literature by Joy Kogawa, follows main character Naomi, a thirty-six-year-old woman of Japanese descent, as she is forced to reconcile the violent history of her family and her people during the internment of Japanese people in World War II. The novel opens with the death of Naomi's uncle, and her subsequent return to her Aunt Emily's home to go through his belongings and grieve together. As she spends time in her aunt's house, Naomi remembers her own troubled childhood during the internment of Japanese people, the brutal racism in Canada during that period, and the fate of her mother, whose disappearance haunted her youth. The novel is told as a series of lyrical recollections—a jagged, semi-linear narrative that traces the family through the years of World War II.

As the novel opens, Naomi works as a teacher in the small town of Cecil, Alberta. The town is predominantly white, and Japanese-Canadian Naomi is a bit of an oddity to most of the residents there. During the school day, Naomi finds out that her Uncle Isamu has passed away. She immediately goes to visit Isamu's widow, whom she calls Obasan.

Once at her Obasan's house, Naomi is surprised to find that her aunt is not grieving nearly as intensely as Naomi had imagined she would be, given the recent loss. Her uncle's presence is still felt in the loaf of nearly inedible homemade bread he was notorious for, which sits on the counter. Obasan takes Naomi upstairs into the attic, where she looks for something from her late husband. Meanwhile, Naomi reflects on the strange disappearance of her own mother thirty years before. This spirals into a long reflection on Naomi's past, which includes some memories recalled during waking hours and some strange, memory-fueled dreams she has while staying in her aunt's house.



Many of Naomi's memories center on the lives of her family during World War II and the internment of Japanese people in Canada. Although Naomi was young when this happened, she has vivid memories of many troubling incidents. She remembers her childhood home in Vancouver, B.C., and her favorite childhood fairytale, the story of Momotaro, the boy who emerged from a peach. She also remembers, with pain, the man called Old Man Gower who molested her repeatedly as a child, and the beginning of the racism to come when her older brother, Stephen, began to struggle in school because his classmates called him “Jap.” She recalls, in dreams, the activism work of her mother's sister, her Aunt Emily, and wakes to remember that Stephen and Emily are coming to the house today.

A package arrives for Aunt Emily, and Naomi opens it to find many letters that Emily wrote during her years as an activist and just after the disappearance of Naomi's mother. She chronicles the deteriorating conditions of Japanese-Canadians during this period in Canadian history, leading to the letters being confiscated during Japanese internment. For a while, Naomi remembers going with Obasan and Stephen to a small mining town, where they lived in a hut to escape being held in camps. She recalls being saved from drowning by a local man in that camp town. Other memories flood in and Naomi feels overwhelmed.

The novel ends, after many more memories of the aftermath of internment on her family, with a reading of some letters from Naomi's maternal grandmother. Naomi's mother had gone to visit her own mother, Grandma Kato, in Japan in 1945. They were caught in the Nagasaki bombing, and many of the family members, including young mothers and babies, died or contracted cancer from the radiation. Grandma Kato says that Naomi's mother did not want her children to know what happened to her from the bomb. Naomi's mother was found weeks after the bombing, alive but horrifically disfigured with maggots living in her skin. She didn't want her children to see her this way and died soon after.



The story ends as Naomi reflects on feeling the presence of her mother while driving to the ravine where she went on many trips with Uncle Isamu during the summers as a girl.

Joy Kogawa is a Japanese-Canadian poet and novelist, born in Vancouver, B.C. to Japanese parents. She has written three novels, Obasan, Itsuka, and The Rain Ascends, and half a dozen collections of poetry. Much of her work is based on her own experience of the Japanese internment during World War II. Honored by both Japan and Canada for her literary works, she now lives in Toronto.