Obasan

Obasan, first published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in 1981, is a novel by the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. It chronicles Canada's internment and persecution of its citizens of Japanese descent during World War II from the perspective of a young child. This book is often required reading for university English courses on Canadian Literature. In 2005, it was the One Book, One Vancouver selection. Kogawa uses strong imagery of silence, stones and streams throughout the novel. Themes depicted in the novel include, memory and forgetting, prejudice and tolerance, identity, and justice versus injustice.

Plot

Obasan centers on the memories and experiences of Naomi Nakane, a schoolteacher living in the rural Canadian town of Cecil, Alberta, when the novel begins. The death of Naomi's uncle, with whom she had lived as a child, leads Naomi to visit and care for her widowed aunt Obasan. Her brief stay with Obasan in turn becomes an occasion for Naomi to revisit and reconstruct in memory her painful experiences as a child during and after World War II. Naomi's narration thus interweaves two stories, one of the past and another of the present, mixing experience and recollection, history and memory throughout. Naomi's struggle to come to terms with both past and present confusion and suffering form the core of the novel's plot.