Tough read from the beginning to the end. It’s a fictionalized memoir that explores collective trauma & grief. Excellently written with poetic diction. Which made it hard at times to focus on the storytelling. The backdrop of BC, Alberta & Ontario made me familiarize myself with the geopolitics of North America north of USA, with the detailed descriptions of the locations and the nature. A must read for Asian-American lit!! Trigger warning: death, anti-Asian racism, graphic description of war victims.

The metaphors were almost insultingly overt, dragged on with little to no character development and generally had an irritatingly subdued way of expressing a story that would have otherwise been incredibly interesting.

This is a beautifully written novel that takes me to a time in our country’s history that I otherwise would have never been able to imagine.

The same friend who lent me Fifth Avenue: A Very Social History by Kate Simon also let me borrow Obasan by Joy Kogawa and I'm so glad that she did. I wasn't all that familiar with the Canadian Japanese experience during WWII, but I ended up being quite impressed with Kogawa's work here. The author's writing is compelling, beautiful, and incredibly evocative and heartbreaking. I have to admit that I was really pleased with myself for knowing the Japanese words used in the book. Overall, this novel is a must read for fans of lyrical historical fiction. I need to read Itsuka, the sequel to this novel, soon.

Kogawa's diction is without peer - rich, poetic, and evocative; I was taking down quotes left and right as I read and reread - and her story deserves it. A stunning, emotional, and utterly captivating novel. Singularly told and immensely powerful.

Poetic--though it tries to hard sometimes for that effect--story about a school teacher's memories of her family and their experience during WWII when the Canadian government rounded up those of Japanese descent and placed them in camps--or "offered" them the chance to move away from the west coast to regions in the interior. This historic reality provides the backdrop to one family's relationships.

The Internet informs me that Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan is the first piece of Canadian fiction to deal with the experience of Japanese-Canadians in the internment camps during and after WWII. It's certainly the first book I've read that deals with this dark and painful period of Canadian history.

It is necessarily a dark and painful book, about silence and loss. The protagonist is Naomi Nakane, a middle-aged Alberta schoolteacher who has, like her Uncle and his wife, whom Naomi calls Obasan, tried to put her war experiences behind them, but who, like them, is indelibly marked by those experiences. At first, Naomi's family narrative has large holes: she speaks of her Uncle, his wife, and an aunt Emily, but no one else. The reader imagines that the internment camps are somehow responsible for these lacunae, but does not know how.

But then, when Uncle dies, Naomi returns to the home where she spent her adolescence, cared for by the childless Uncle and Obasan. While she is there, she begins to unravel her family's history, uncover the truth behind long-unmentioned secrets, and break the silence. A family photograph from before the war, taken on the occasion of her brother's birth, shows us the shape of her family before the war, before confiscation, before internment, before relocation: grandparents, the Nakane and Kato families; her grandfather Nakane's older son, Uncle, and his wife Obasan; her father; her mother; her mother's sister, Emily Kato; her brother Stephen. Prosperous people, the Nakanes are shipbuilders, the sea and ships are in their souls.

Aunt Emily, the unmarried sister of Naomi's absent mother, is the only member if the family who speaks of the past. In fact, she is an agitator, an activist, who attends conferences and tries to tell the world what was done to her people. Naomi recalls Aunt Emily talking to her about the vicious racism endured by Japanese-Canadians during and after the war with Imperial Japan.

"The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn’t liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We’ve never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government’s whole idea—to make sure we’d never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. The Americans have a Bill of Rights, right? We don’t.”

And again, "...They took away the land, the stores, the businesses, the boats, the houses—everything. Broke up our families, told us who we could see, where we could live, what we could do, what time we could leave our houses, censored our letters, exiled us for no crime. They took our livelihood—”

Emily is the lightning rod, while Naomi, Uncle and Obasan are silent. The key to unraveling one part of the past, for Naomi and for the reader, lies in Emily's collection of documents, and a journal, given to Naomi to read. In the journal, begun in 1941, Emily records the path of destruction of West Coast Japanese communities from month to month, as first unnaturalised Japanese men are rounded up and sent to work camps, cars and boats and radios are confiscated, and on and on until all those of Japanese heritage, even those full citizens born in Canada, are forced to relocate away from the coast.

In flashbacks, Naomi remembers as a child remembers, her comfortable home and close-knit family taken from her step by step. Her mother travels to Japan to see her ailing mother and is caught there by the outbreak of war; she will never see her mother again, and for decades, Naomi will know nothing of her fate. Grandparents, summering on the coast, are swept up into a filthy internment camp. Cousins, uncles, fathers, family friends are taken away to work camps as far off as Ontario, leaving only women, children, and a few old men, most 'relocated' away from the coast, to camps and 'ghost towns', some lucky enough to find refuge with friends in other provinces. Naomi, her brother Stephen, and Obasan are sent to live in a decrepit shack in Slocum. After the war ends, Uncle, freed from the labour camps, and her father, debilitated by tuberculosis, join them. But then the family is torn apart once more as 'suitable' Japanese survivors of the camps and ghost towns are sent further from the coast - "eastern relocation" as agricultural workers and other labourers - while "unsuitable" survivors like her father are held where they are to await their fate. Uncle, Obasan and Naomi are relocated, forced labourers on a Alberta beet farm; she will never see her father again.

But Obasan is not just about the injustices visited on a people, and the silence that has surrounded those injustices in the national narrative. It is about trauma, both personal and institutional, and how we deal - or don't deal - with it. In Naomi's life, abuse comes in different forms, and abusers are also both personal and institutional. In the end, Obasan is a wrenching novel about a family torn apart by war, politics and racism, the terrible cost in lives, and the price paid by the survivors.

The stockyards and slaughterhouses of prejudice (Joy's term) run strongly everywhere while common sense and compassion hide. Could this still be happening? I felt so much shame when reading this book and so frustrated at the injustices and stupidity from the Canadian Government. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian who deserves the support of their country.

absolutely beautiful writing; i would have liked it better if not for AP lit.

https://ayearofbooksblog.com/2016/07/...

I found an old copy of Obasan as part of my commitment to read more Canadian and to work through the list of CBC’s list of 100 Books that Make You Proud to be Canadian. It is a semi-autobiographical novel based on the experiences of the author, Joy Kogawa when she and her family (along with 23,000 other Japanese Canadians) were displaced from Vancouver and interned during World War II. Obasan, initially published in 1981, was the first novel for Kogawa and has been adapted into a children’s book and an opera which toured elementary schools.

The story is told from the perspective of Naomi. She has returned to the home of her Obasan (aunt), where she had grown up during the war years, to grieve her Uncle who had passed away. As an adult, she is reading through a journal of letters and package of papers that her Aunt Emily had collected over the years when her family was dispersed. Her mother had travelled to Japan prior to the internment, her father tried to keep the family together but had his own health problems and spent time in hospital, her Aunt Emily had gone to Toronto while Naomi, her brother Stephen, Uncle and Obasan relocated first to Slocan, BC and later to a beet farm in Alberta. In a time of slow letters, the family is disconnected and it is only many years later that Naomi understands the plight of her family.

The family home (in real life now known as Kogawa House) was appropriated by the Canadian government along with many of the family belongings. After enduring curfews along the coastal area of Vancouver, the Japanese Canadian’s were forced from their homes and housed in stockyards before being transferred to live in substandard housing in the BC interior. Her family was split with her mother in Japan having traveled there prior to the internment, her father with health problems and in hospital, her Aunt Emily in Toronto while Naomi, her brother Stephen, Uncle and Obasan relocated first to Slocan, BC. As the pressure mounted to remove Japanese Canadians from BC, families were given choices of “returning” to Japan (despite many being born in Canada) or to moving to other provinces. Obasan kept her family fragments together, ensuring the children were cared as they lived in an abandoned chicken coop, labouring in the beet fields in Alberta.

Despite a hesitancy to revisit her childhood, Naomi begins to understand her past through a journal and past correspondence that her aunt has shared with her. She learns the unspoken truths about the loss of her parents as she grieves her Uncle. Despite the hardships experienced, the family was resilient and strong facing their challenges with a stoic resolve.

It is easy to see why the author has been awarded the Order of Canada. She has described her experience in a way that helps readers understand the terrible treatment of Japanese Canadians during the time of Pearl Harbour. It is important for Canadians to understand the “wartime wrongs” which Prime Minister Mulroney acknowledged 43 years later providing compensation packages of only $21,000 (CBC’s Canada: A People’s History).

This novel should be part of Canadian secondary school curriculum enabling students to learn history through fiction. Books such as Obasan, Indian Horse (Richard Wagamese), Three Day Road (Joseph Boyden) and Dance of the Banished (local author Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch) tell important Canadian stories that should be understood to provide perspective and ensure that these events never happen again.

uuf.... no. neni to lehke letni cteni.

I really wanted my students to learn about this era in history, and so many other teachers had recommended it, so I went ahead and assigned it as summer reading before I actually read it. That summer, I picked it up time and time again, trying to force my way through it. It was so boring that I decided to contact my students and tell them not to worry about reading it. They were all happy -- they couldn't read more than a page at a time, either.