Obasan – A Poignant Inquiry into the Anguish-Filled Historical Past

““Life is so short”, I said, sighing, “the past so long, shouldn’t we turn the page and move on?” “The past is the future”, Aunt Emily shot back.”

During World War II, after Pearl Harbor, thousands of Canadians of Japanese descent, like their American counterparts, were sent to internment camps. The Canadian government of the time confiscated those displaced families' home and properties (in fact, the internment and relocation smoothly worked due to the fund raised by selling the confiscated properties). The camps were under government-forced curfews and some of the Canadian-Japanese were forcefully repatriated to Japan. It was only by April 1, 1949, the Canadian government revoked this undemocratic practice. In September 1988, the then Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney offered federal apology (and a compensation package). Joy Kogawa’s first and most popular novel Obasan (1981) was a semi-biographical exploration of the trauma and persecution Japanese-Canadians experienced during this particular historical period. 

Born in Canada in 1935, Kogawa, her parents and older brother found themselves relocated from Vancouver to a ghost town in the interior of British Columbia (Slocan) by the year 1941. Kogawa incorporates her own story alongside other wartime experiences to build the life of Megumi Naomi Nakane. Naomi is the protagonist and narrator of the novel which begins in 1972. She is an unmarried 36-year-old teacher, called 'spinster' by one of her mischievous student. She receives news of her uncle Isamu’s death and immediately takes off to see her obasan (aunt). Obasan and Obaji (uncle) were like Naomi’s (and her elder brother Stephen’s) adoptive parents, ever since their father died due to illness and mother disappeared in Japan during wartime. 

Naomi anticipates the arrival of Stephen and Aunt Emily’s arrival for the funeral. Emily is Naomi’s mother’s sister, also an unmarried woman who has spoken up against the racism and persecution, the wartime Canadian government used against the peaceful, law-abiding Japanese Canadian families. When Naomi receives a parcel from Emily, she begins to recall her childhood experiences which turned bleak when their family began to disintegrate in 1941. She wonders about her mother and the reason she returned to Japan, and also the way uncle and aunt avoided talking about her mother’s fate. Six-year-old Naomi’s traumatic experience also includes her encounter with a pedophile neighbor (in real life, author Kogawa’s father was a pedophile which she disclosed in her memoir ‘Gently to Nagasaki’; Kogawa’s novel The Rain Ascends is about a daughter discovering that her father is a pedophile).

Obasan is a beautifully written novel, not just about the detailing of suffering inside the internment camps or systemic xenophobia, but also about grief, truth-speaking, and human’s compulsion to make sense of the past. The aunt characters are brilliantly etched: one lives in silence with stoic resolve; and the other fights for justice. Kogawa’s writing style brings out the smallest of details and she is able to express emotions using mesmerizing descriptive language (and metaphors) that bestows a dreamlike quality to the novel (especially in the childhood perspective of Naomi). The predominant theme in the novel revolves around perils of silence and repression (“Gentle mother, we were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction”, Naomi painfully remarks). Family or a democratic nation, hushing-up voices and feigning ignorance can only bring ineradicable damages.