ik had heel eerlijk niet verwacht dat dit boek iets voor mij zou zijn want ik ben normaal gesproken niet zo van de historische fictie, al helemaal niet als het gaat over de tweede wereldoorlog maar dit was een perspectief waar ik nog vrijwel niks over wist en ik vond het ontzettend interessant! af en toe een beetje aan de vage kant, maar heel mooi geschreven

Obasan is set in the years sourounding Pearl Harbor. It vaguely reminded me of Hotel At the Corner of Bitter and Sweet set in America but Obasan is set in Canada. If you are interested is the North and South side of this part if history I would recommend reading both

*** BEWARE OF SPOILERS!!! ***

"We have to deal with all this while we remember it. If we don't we'll pass our anger down in our genes. It's the children who'll suffer." p.36

I didn't really know what to expect when I started reading Obasan ('Aunt'), by Joy Kogawa. In Holland World War II is the main war of the 20th century and the Canadians, Americans and British were 'the good guys' that liberated us. My father was imprisoned in a Japanese camp in Indonesia as a child, so the Japs were the bad guys (next to the Nazi's of course). And that's an understatement.

I am embarrassed to say that I never thought about what happened to German and Japanese people in the allied countries during the war. And I am certainly not the only one. I guess we are too busy over here thinking about what happened to 'us'. I was born 25 years after the end of the second World War but still I grew up with stories about The War.

And now I have to correct myself. Because Obasan is not just about Japanese people in WWII, but about Canadians. Issei, nisei and sansei (first, second and third generations) were all considered enemies of the state, even though they were Canadian citizens. Born and raised there. Their loyalty to the country made them co-operate to cruel regulations. They were sent to camps, disowned and often their Canadian nationality was taken from them. Like I said: this happened to Canadian-born people. And it did not happen to German-born Germans!

Of course it was not only their loyalty to Canada but also their cultural background that made the Canadian-Japanese do what their country asked of them:

It is always so. We must always honour the wishes of others before our own. p.128

Maybe the worst shock I got is that everything became even worse after the war ended. Japanese Canadians were not allowed to return home (their property was seized anyway), but sent to even more remote areas of the country if they were unwilling to go to Japan. Canada wanted to get rid of them. Pure racism - in Canada, of all places. If I can believe Obasan, the USA was less rough on its citizens. At least their properties hadn't been liquidated.

You can probably tell I am impressed by what I read. And I certainly won't forget it. Although there is a part that I found a bit slow, Obasan is well written and interesting. The mystery about Uncle and Mother made me want to go on reading, even when the story was a bit tough. Every Canadian kid should read this book in high school!

What is done, Aunt Emily, is done, is it not? And no doubt it will all happen again, over and over with different faces and names, variations on the same theme. [..] Is there evidence for optimism? p.199

I chose some quotations for this journal entry that suited what I wrote about the book. It means that I had to leave out the kind of quote that reminds me of favourite and emotional passages. Well, you can't have it all...

must reread and reread

After a bit of a dry spell with novels, Obasan for me was like an incredible waterfall of language and historical context. Kogawa is clearly a poet, which is vital to the telling of this narrative because the horrors faced by these Japanese-Canadian characters cannot be expressed in simple prose.

Set in Vancouver in the WWII era, this novel tells Naomi's coming-of-age story during intense discrimination and disruption to her identity and community. I read this novel while teaching Postcolonial Women's Novels, and what strikes me about this book is how ardently the characters claim their Canadian identity over their Japanese identity. A very different postcolonial perspective than the novels I'm teaching now.

But more importantly than any of that, this novel moved me to the core and taught me about a history that I new very little about. It's a beautiful, heartwrenching read.

(Audio to hear the Japanese language spoken) - Obasan started off as an AMAZING book, with rare synesthesia where you have several bodily senses activated at the same time. Not a typical WWII book whatsoever for the first quarter of the book, and I was simply not prepared for this wonderful experience. Needless to say, I slowed down and let all the senses wash over me, taking in the beauty of the language and the prose of the story. I could hear the waves crashing. I could taste the soup. I could feel the paper tissue in my hands and hear the crinkling in my ear.

But then, as Kogawa got further into her relatives's stories of survival in the Canadian--Japanese internment camps, her writing style completely changed and became somewhat choppy, to the point that I wondered if it was even the same writer. The story, then, even with the terrible accounts of racism and discrimination that the Japanese experienced in their own country, became diminished, and I had a hard time staying with it. Or perhaps, I am just overly saturated with WWII stories at this point.

The thing is, there aren't too many accounts of the Japanese-Canadians during the second World War, and I know that this was an incredibly important story to write and an important story to read so that we don't repeat this horrible history.

I learned much, and I am thankful that this author put her family's story on paper for the world to read. It was good, but it wasn't great. Perhaps if she had kept to her original style, I would have given this a much higher rating.

"...and I am reading the careful table of contents of a book that has no contents." (page 150). Funny quote because that is exactly how I felt while reading this book. I was assigned this in English class because our teacher wants to inflict severe brain damage on all of us. Obasan started out decent, I had my hopes in the beginning. The writing is mature, vivid and all around well done for the first 30 pages, several promising characters and some background information is introduced. Then the book really starts. The author decides that she is going to use these characters and real life events they went through to demonstrate her own past hardships. The conflicts presented in this novel are serious issues/events that need to be addressed but instead of communicating through the moral/message of the story the author manipulates events and characters to be able to voice her grievances. Obasan is a book about a women remembering events of her childhood and reflecting on the hardships she and her family went through. It is a series of memories/scenes that do not create a plot or story. This book is an unstructured mess of insightful mush and quotes and rants which build up to be a bunch of words on a pages with no real thought or plot line. Joy Kogawa has important opinions and first hand hardships to voice but a novel for not the platform to do so. This should have been an essay or an article, to write this as a fictitious story is obscene. Never again will I go near this book.

An eye-opening book about internment during WWII in Canada of Japanese as well as Canadians of Japanese ancestry. Although it's a novel, you can feel the very real, raw suffering of the author when she writes about something she herself lived through. The injustices are heartbreaking.

this book was difficult for me to get through, and unfortunately i've boiled it down to one very shallow symptom: i am not a fan of the japanese aesthetic.

typical of japanese literature, this book is very dense and metaphor laden. the basic premise is interesting enough to me, japenese canadians interned during ww2; however, i was fighting through the thick with a machete and my arms got tired. i recognize the high points, it's good qualities, but kogawa just didn't cut it for me. i'd wade through two hundred+ pages before i became genuinely interested in something (usually correspondence via Aunt Emily) and that was fleeting.

i'd still recommend it for someone who really wants to spend some time with it.

Obasan took me by surprise. If it weren't in 500GBbW, I may never have read this, and the story it tells might have remained for me one bald, shame-concealing line in victorious history books. I started reading, not knowing what it was about. It opens gently, quietly, with a scene of undulating hills covered in tall grasses, that is tranquil and beautiful, yet troubling because there is a silence behind it, an uncertainty about meaning, an uncertainty about being. Shall I shatter this uneasy peace only for the sake of being heard? Last weekend at Bare Lit Festival, I listened to Joan Anim Addo speaking about the compulsion to write: "You have to get this out, or it will kill you."

One thing that I kept reflecting on as I read was the title, why this title? Why name the story for Obasan, the most unobtrusive, the quietest, the least exciting person in the cast. Even the name 'obasan' is anonymous, as it means 'aunt' and is not a personal name at all. But when sparky activist Aunt Emily provokes Uncle and Obasan and they declare that their gratitude to the Canadian State, I felt I was beginning to understand; Obasan's story would die with her, because she will not tell it; her way of being does not allow for such painful outpouring.

Naomi, the narrator, has suppressed her own memories, she feels with Obasan, but gradually she lets them come back, she answers the offering of Emily's story with her own, which is Obasan's; it is the story of all Japanese people in Canada, first, second, or third generation, at the time of WWII. They were classified as enemy aliens, dispossessed and displaced, often to concentration camps. Families were broken up. Naomi, with Obasan and Uncle and her brother, lived in a shed, then a smaller shed, through Canadian winters. They worked on a farm, cheap labour, back-breaking. They survived, and they are grateful.

Joy Kogawa shows us some of the ways racism affects Naomi's sense of self:

In one of Stephen's books, there is a story of a child with long golden ringlets called Goldilocks who one day comes to a quaint house in the woods lived in by a family of bears. Clearly, we are that bear family in this strange house in the middle of the woods

Occasionally, Naomi directly voices her struggles to live up to Obasan's ideals

We must always honor the wishes of others before our own. We will make the way smooth by restraining emotion. Though we might wish Grandma and Grandpa to stay, we must watch them go. To try to meet one's own needs in spite of the wishes of others is to be “wagamama” - selfish and inconsiderate. Obasan teaches me not to be wagamama by always heeding everyone's needs... It is such a tangle trying to decipher the needs and intents of others

Of course, the tangle is complicated by others' considerateness.

I see an ethics of respectful care as central to the Japanese-Canadian community. Care is paramount, automatic, unostentatious. There are so many deeply touching moments and so much casual evidence, of care. Obasan personifies this, and way she eases all the hard things the family endures shows how care and respect could produce a society of physical and emotional ease, leaving heart and thoughtspace for enjoyment and contemplation. Obasans lead the way in making possible all the world's sweetness. But the gentleness of Obasan is counterpointed by Aunt Emily's sharpened sense of justice as well as her academic's eloquence; Naomi must step uncomfortably into Emily's mode:

”Some people,” Aunt Emily answered sharply, “are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing all sides unless you can act where real measureable injustice exists. A lot of academic talk just immobilizes the oppressed and maintains oppressors in their positions of power”

Naomi recoils from what she sees as stridency here, but I really like to hear a fiction author deploying the language of social justice with such precision. This might be a violation of the injunction to show not tell, but as a teacher I can see that it is BOTH, form and illustration, and value it as such, because it begins to make politics accessible and relevant to the reader, as Emily intends to make it for Naomi. In my country, school education certainly makes zero effort to do that, so hurray for books picking up the slack.

Emily's speech is not at all the typical style though. I was increasingly in love with Joy Kogawa's starkly beautiful prose, the shimmering veil of images through which she draws truth like a mud-slicked, weed-strewn treasure from the lake-bottom of memory

I am clinging to my mother's leg, a flesh shaft that grows from the ground, a tree trunk of which I am an offshoot – a young branch attached by right of flesh and blood. Where she is rooted, I am rooted. If she walks, I will walk. Her blood is whispering through my veins. The shaft of her leg is the shaft of my body and I am her thoughts

Without telling, without explicitness, the theme of belonging and connection is vital. Naomi repeatedly experiences separation and loss. She introduces herself at the start, subtly, as discontented, melancholy, but it took me a long time to come to know this later Naomi through the unfolding of the child Naomi's memories. Each episode of trauma breaks or damages a strand in the weave that wraps her, affirms her. This includes abuse by a neighbour, the many departures of close family members and the loss of language:

Some of the children attend Japanese-language classes but I hear Obasan and Uncle whispering that it is unwise to have us go. The RCMP, they are saying, are always looking for signs of disloyalty to Canada

While Naomi values her Japanese heritage and traditions, especially bathing, her older brother reacts to the racism around them by rejecting anything 'too Japanese'. I liked how this was emphasised by, for example, the different lunches that the two children take to school:”my lunch that Obasan made is two moist and sticky rice balls with a salty red plum* in the center of each, a boiled egg to the side with a tight square of lightly boiled greens. Stephen has peanut-butter sandwiches, an apple, and a thermos of soup”. Obasan prepares a nourishing meal for each child, respecting their very different preferences.

My favourite sub-text is Naomi's awareness of native people. When she is speaking as an adult, she mentions that some of the Japanese children in the class she teaches could pass for native, and vice versa. Yet, there is no communication. Remembering the way the Japanese children shortened and selected their names (her full name is Megumi Naomi Nakane) to make them as Canadian as possible, she mentions that a native girl was called Annie Black Bear, and was triumphant when the teacher calle her Annie Black by mistake. Both groups are subject to racism but its effect is silence and attempts to assimilate, militating against any solidarity between them. Naomi recalls playing with a violent young friend, Kenji, who introduces her to a man who lives alone on the edge of their town, Rough Lock Bill. This character tells the children the story of how Slocan got its name, from the words used by the natives who first settled there 'slow can go'. He repeatedly prods Kenji and Naomi to talk, to respond, but they are taciturn, especially Naomi.

“Birds could all talk once. Bird language. Now all they can say is their own names. That's all. Can't say any more than their names. Just like some people. Specially in the city, eh? Me, me, me.” He jabs his chest with his thumb and grunts. “But smart peple don't talk too much. Redskins know that. The King bird warned them a long time ago.”

Rough Lock Bill gives up the conversation at this point, but returns to save Naomi from drowning later. In this exchange, he offers the opportunity to break silence, but indicates respect for Naomi's choice to keep it. He speaks of the 'Indians' 'Redskins' as others, but we suspect that he is talking about his own people. Like the Japanese, he distances himself from a maligned identity.

Despite this silence, the inclusion demonstrates an awareness that issues of belonging and connection for migrant settlers like the Japanese. can't be isolated from the issue of Canada as stolen land, of the state as genocidal expropriator. Emily, for instance, expresses deep allegiance to the state, and is forced into a critical attitude by events. For Naomi, belonging is in both culture and land, and the forced migration she experiences sensitises her to tension between them.

We might expect the recovery of memories, though painful, to bring healing, but the discoveries it leads to, relating to the USA's bombing of Nagasaki with nuclear weapons, are devastating. Each turn in the narrative is a new wound. Repeatedly, Nami asks why remember, why speak? This act cannot raise the dead, undo the violence, bring back what is lost. Yet, spurred by Emily, who treats Obasan with such profound disrespect we know there must be yet more unsaid, Naomi and Joy Kogawa have broken the silence that Obasan held to protect them all, like a shield absorbing a terrible impact, and now that they are strong enough to speak, will there be an answer?

this was a very well crafted book and apparently was a very important turning point in canadian literature and I can very much respect the importance of this story being told. but dear god it was a distressing read, I felt sick all day after finishing it

Insightful. Heartbreaking and raw depiction of racism and war.

The language was a little too flowery for my taste. Some of the details felt unnecessary and made an otherwise interesting story boring in some chapters.