Obasan

Introduction:

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 is told as a series of lyrical recollections—a
jagged, semi-linear narrative that traces the family through the years of World War II.

Plot Summary:

The protagonist, Naomi Nakane is a middle school teacher in her mid-thirties. The town
is predominantly white, and Japanese-Canadian Naomi is a bit of an oddity to most of
the residents there. 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 Obasan’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 town is predominantly white, and Japanese-Canadian Naomi is a bit of an
oddity to most of the residents there.

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. Words signinify
reproach and separation; but the child that Naomi remembers is inseparable from the
mother Naomi remembers: “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. . . . The shaft of her leg is the shaft of my body and I am her
thoughts.” Naomi longs to recover the sensation of her mother's immediate presence;
and it is as a falling off from this original and fundamental security of her childhood that
she measures and defines the qualities of her world after her mother's disappearance.
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.

Analysis:

Naomi's individual drama is closely caught up in her linguistic anxiety, which comes to
serve as a synecdoche for her estrangement — from others, from her cultural origins,
from the absent mother who preoccupies her thoughts, from her past.
She remembers about her mother and says “All the while that she acts, there is calm
efficiency in her face and she does not speak. Her eyes are steady and matter of fact —
the eyes of Japanese motherhood. They do not invade and betray.”

Identity : Naomi receives third degree from her students about her love life. It is an
uncomfortable but usual discussion to her as a teacher. Still, she feels the interrogation
acutely because her identity is unresolved. Her tumultuous life has left her "tense" with
"a crone-prone syndrome" and many mysteries, silences, and repressed traumas. Just
as the young Naomi took a while to realize her father was dead, the mature Naomi has
not understood how incredible was the trauma of her sexual abuse, the loss of her
mother, and the disruption of community caused by war. She finally resolves these
issues when she knows the whole truth and, consequently, faces her history. In the end,
she is resolved when she runs out into the night wearing Aunt Emily's jacket to go to the
coulee. There, inspired by the silence of Obasan and what Uncle tried to tell her, she
finally feels at ease with the land and at ease with herself. The nightmares will now
cease and she will bury her family in Canada, her home.

Justice versus Injustice: Injustice in the novel is always mirrored by an accompanying act
of violation. The official policy of scapegoating the Japanese violates the family in
apparent and secret ways. The fishing boats are taken, their civil rights are taken, and
Mother is trapped in Japan as war breaks out. But this is merely the background to the
violation of innocence represented by the awful scene of the mother hen killing the
chicks and Old Man Gower. The sexual abuse of Naomi initiates her into the sexual
world at the same time as the world is going through tremendous upheaval. Sexual
violence is the symbolic gesture of injustice as well as being a very personal injustice—
rape is the metaphoric and real violation of people in this book and all are silent as a
result). It is not only Mr. Gower. Later in Slocan, a boy named Percy is indiscrete with
her. It is Mr. Gower, however, who haunts her and remains the one thing she cannot tell
her mother. His assault on her, she fathoms, can be the only explanation for Mother
leaving and not returning. Because of Mr. Gower, she feels eyes watching her in the
woods and has nightmares of a saw separating her legs from each other and from her
mother.

Memory and Reminiscence: "The past is the future," says Aunt Emily, and indeed it is
the whole purpose of the book. One symbol of Naomi's revelation of the past is the
sweep of her flashlight across the multitude of spider webs in Obasan's attic. Naomi's
search for lost beginnings as a highly subjective reconstruction: "All our ordinary stories
are changed in time, altered as much by the present as the present is shaped by the
past" . Naomi has followed her aunt up to the attic in the middle of the silent night to
find Aunt Emily's parcel that Naomi has been putting off reading for years. Instead, they
find only dust and spiders in the attic. Thus the attic has served as the repository of
memory and what it holds has been forgotten—left for the spiders. There is an
additional reference to spiders in the "weaving" of stories. Her mother and father are
her needles but they leave and it is a long time before Naomi has the pieces from her
aunts to finish herself. Also, her story jumps forward and backward, from center to
edge, but, finally, as a web it catches the identity created by the story—Naomi. In many
ways, Kogawa's Naomi has a certain affinity with the hero Kingbird. By her confessed
remembrance, she gives strength to the anti-nuclear movement and, specifically, to the
redress movement in Canada. As with Naomi, once all the pieces are present and the
full story can be told, only then, Obasan would say, "the time of forgetting is now
come."

Conclusion: Joy Kogawa's Obasan has rightly been celebrated for its power as a political
speech act, as a strong protest against the treatment of Japanese Canadians in the years
of and following the Second World War. ‘Obasan’ does more than record a forgotten
and misunderstood episode from our past. Though its questioning on the problematic of
how history gets written and ethnicity gets defined, it draws our attention to the power
relations that structure our thinking about what is possible and what is desirable in the
contemporary Canada.