Dec 16, 2009

Obasan | Characters

Obasan centers on the memories and experiences of Naomi Nakane, a schoolteacher living in the rural Canadian town of Cecil, Alberta. The story begins in 1972, when Naomi and her Uncle Isamu visit the coulee, a shallow grassland ravine to which they return "once every year around this time." Though Naomi seems unaware of it (until the end of the novel), her uncle returns to the "virgin land" of the prairie each year to mark the anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Naomi simply recalls that "the first time Uncle and I came here was in 1954, in...