to shield a small child in her understanding of the effects of war. Naomi Nakane knows that her understanding of her past is limited, so the young woman, prompted by her aged uncle’s death, seeks to recapture her history from the silence in which it has been enveloped. She turns to question Obasan, her beloved and respected aunt, who reared and protected her, only to face the same reticence and silence the aunt has maintained for thirty years. Gradually, however, through the contents of a package of documents from Obasan’s attic, Naomi learns of the past. In the package, she finds letters, journals, clippings, and other documents which eventually help her to discover her past. In the end, when the family’s clergyman reads letters written in Japanese and relates their contents to Naomi and her older brother, they learn how their mother died in Japan after great suffering, a victim of the nuclear blast which devastated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Obasan is more than a personal narrative; it is a fictional rendering of the history of the Japanese in North America. The story is told through the experience of a family and their friends, who were torn in haste from their homes and community to be exiled in a much fiercer climate in the interior of Canada, with families separated and sent many ways—the victims, as they saw it, of racial prejudice implemented with bureaucratic coldness and official dislike hardened into law. In the United States, the Japanese were released at the end of World War II to seek their own lives, but in Canada, they were treated harsher. They were urged, in some ways forced, to return to Japan; many of them did, wishing to cooperate with the government of their adopted land. Those who remained in Canada were prevented from returning to British Columbia until April, 1949, more than three years after the end of the war. The novel ends with an excerpt from a memorandum sent by a joint committee to the Parliament of Canada, in which the committee fruitlessly, as it turned out, urged the government to remove the Orders-in-Council which exiled Canadians of Japanese ancestry from their prewar homes. The 1946 recommendations pointed out that the treatment of the Japanese minority was really a threat to the security of all minorities in Canada and was in contradiction to the United Nations Charter, to which Canada had subscribed.

In recent years, in the United States as well as in Canada, people of Japanese ancestry, regardless of age, have actively sought redress for what was done to them in the past. Official commissions in both countries have been reconsidering the treatment of the interned citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II. In this light, there is a special relevance to Joy Kogawa’s novel, which reveals in a detailed way, as only fiction can, how terrible the experience of those innocent persons was during the years of their exile and internment. One problem facing those who are trying to recapture this past is the difficulty which young people in particular have in grasping the terror that gripped the West Coast of North America in the weeks and months after the successful sneak attack by the Japanese Navy on Pearl Harbor. That attack eliminated opposition to Japanese aggression in the Pacific, so that military and naval forces of Japan were everywhere successful in their conquests. There seemed to be nothing to prevent them from landing on the western shores of Canada and the United States. The fear of a possible, even imminent, Japanese invasion was the emotional force which led to the internment of citizens of Japanese ancestry, lest they aid the enemy forces in such an invasion.

As Joy Kogawa’s novel shows, Americans and Canadians of Japanese ancestry were for the most part fiercely loyal to their adopted homeland, but that loyalty was suspect by the rest of the population. Differences in language and culture militated to keep the people of Japanese ancestry apart from the rest of their neighbors, and Obasan shows how the Japanese, proud of their culture and sure of their cultural independence, unwittingly helped to keep themselves apart from other groups. Neither side truly understood the other. Indeed, Obasan suggests that neither side has yet achieved any real understanding of the other.

Although she has been a writer for many years, Joy Kogawa has not published a novel previous to Obasan. She has, however, published three volumes of poetry; she has worked as a writer in the Canadian Prime Minister’s office; and she has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa. Obasan is an accomplished novel, and one hopes that it will not be Kogawa’s last.

In Obasan, Joy Kogawa is telling both her personal story and the tale of all Japanese Canadians exiled from their homes during World War II. She was six years old, one year older than the character of Naomi Nakane, when her family was evacuated to the ghost town of Slocan, eastern British Columbia, from Vancouver. Authentic newspaper clippings and real letters of protest written by a Japanese Canadian activist elaborate and enhance her personal memories.

The actual time frame of the story is only a few days, from the phone call that alerts Naomi at school that her uncle has died to the time that it takes family members to assemble in Granton, Alberta, for his funeral. Special emphasis is placed on family unity throughout the novel, with the families of Naomi’s mother and father “knit . . . into one blanket . . . till the fibre of our lives became an impenetrable mesh.” Within that scenario, through a complex series of flashbacks, the migratory saga of both a single family and an ethnic community evolves. The first eleven chapters are an exposition of Naomi’s family history. Her beautiful, idyllic home is described, and there are memories of her mother telling Naomi Japanese folktales at bedtime. There is also a threat—Old Man Gower, who lives next door, abuses Naomi, and she is too afraid and ashamed to tell her mother.

The next twenty chapters convey the devastation that the family experiences following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan and their removal inland from the coast for security reasons. One guiding principal explains the stoicism of the adult family members, a Japanese phrase that is repeated throughout the novel: “kodomo no tame—for the sake of the children—gaman shi masho—let us endure.” The endurance takes the form of hiding from the children critical information about their mother, who returned to Japan to help her ailing mother, Grandmother Kato, and never returned. Her fate is only revealed to them after they have become middle-aged adults.

The facts of the family’s evacuation are largely told in letters that Emily has written to Naomi’s mother, Nesan, in Japan and that Grandmother Kato has written home. Dream sequences and flashbacks to Naomi’s childhood are also important to the narrative, as are political documents. Newspaper clippings and misleading photographs touting “grinning and happy” evacuees ironically hide the cruel facts about hard labor conditions and the lack of adequate shelter and nourishment. The path that the novel follows is a downward spiral from a position of familiar and community love and harmony into increasing discomfort and pain. Flashbacks reveal how basic needs are gradually stripped away and the extended family unit is split apart. When the story is brought back to the present time, the events explaining Nesan’s detention in Japan are told, culminating with the description of the bombing of Nagasaki and the horrifying aftermath in which she dies an agonizing death.

The penultimate chapter is a poetic eulogy that Naomi speaks to her dead mother. In it, Naomi strives to make sense of her mother’s death, of the reasons that she has not been made aware earlier of the circumstances of the death, and of her mother’s profound love for Naomi and her brother, Stephen. Though sad, the novel ends in a beautiful affirmation of life and the living, and it is a stirring testimony to the endurance of her mother’s memory. The book ends with the voicing of grief and with the liberating catharsis that follows deep suffering.

*Vancouver

*Vancouver. Largest city in British Columbia that was home to many Japanese Canadians before World War II. Schoolteacher Naomi Nakane’s grandparents came to Canada from Japan in 1893, and she herself was born in Vancouver in 1936 and has lived there happily through her first six years in a large and beautiful house on West 64th Avenue in the Marpole district.

In 1972—the time present of Obasan—the thirty-six-year-old Naomi remembers the house vividly: its living and music rooms, her father’s study, the kitchen, the playroom, the backyard. She also remembers exploring Vancouver with her family, from Kitsilano Beach to the zoo at Stanley Park. She recalls as well the exhibition grounds at Hastings Park, however, where in 1942 many of the twenty-three thousand Japanese Canadians living along the British Columbia coast “were herded into the grounds and kept there like animals until they were shipped off to roadwork camps and concentration camps in the interior of the province.”

Slocan

Slocan. Ghost town in British Columbia’s interior to which Naomi and her extended family are sent. In this former mining settlement, they spend three years living in an abandoned two-room shack. Aside from their shack, Naomi and other internees spend some of their time at the Odd Fellows Hall in town, where they watch movies every Saturday night, and in the public bathhouse. (The original Native American name for this village was “Slow-can-go,” meaning “If you go slow . . . you can go.”)

Granton

Granton. Small town in southern Alberta, not far from the city of Lethbridge. From 1945 to 1951, Naomi, her brother, her Uncle Isamu, and her Aunt Aya (the “Obasan” or “aunt” of the novel’s title) live in a hut on the Barker farm, some seven miles outside of Granton. Prohibited by the Canadian government from returning to Vancouver (where their home has been confiscated) after the war, Naomi and her makeshift family live in “a small hut, like a toolshed, smaller even than the one we lived in Slocan.” Naomi’s father, who has been hospitalized for years, dies of tuberculosis in 1949. In 1951, Naomi and Stephen and their uncle and aunt finally move into a house in Granton itself. It is on a bluff a half mile from the Barker farm to which Naomi and her uncle go, at the beginning and end of the novel, to stand at the edge of the Canadian prairie that reminds Uncle Isamu of the Pacific coast, where he worked as a master shipbuilder and fisherman before the war. It is to this house that Naomi returns to be with Aunt Aya when her uncle dies in 1972.

Cecil

Cecil. Small rural town some 150 miles northeast of Granton, where Naomi Nakane is a single school teacher in the time present of the novel.

*Nagasaki

*Nagasaki. Japanese city on which the United States dropped an atom bomb in 1945. After the war ends, Naomi learns that her mother died a horrible death as a result of that atomic attack.

Her mother had returned to Japan in 1939 to nurse her mother and was trapped in Nagasaki by the war. The novel personalizes the bombing, but, even more directly, questions the internment of loyal Canadian citizens who were uprooted from their coastal homes and forced to spend the remainder of their lives in internal provincial exile. At the end of the novel, in a metaphor that taps the earthy imagery used throughout Obasan, Naomi muses:Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh, Canada, whether it is admitted or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. . . . We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt.

Though some of the men in Kogawa’s novel are admirable—Naomi’s father and Reverend Nakayama, for example—they clearly play a secondary role in this story of a woman’s maturation and fulfillment. Naomi has two female role models, one reticent and one motivated. The novel recounts Naomi’s nascent, blossoming self-image and identity as she is guided by first one and then the other of these figures. She learns that the past cannot be denied, that she cannot change her history and that, if she lets it, her history can even provide some direction for her future. Stephen, who has sublimated his ethnicity in adulthood, cannot repudiate the remarkable childhood that he has shared with his sister. It was an experience which, at least on a subconscious level, binds them with a terrible glue. Denying it makes him ill at ease; accepting it gives Naomi knowledge and power.

Kogawa’s saga is useful on at least three levels. First, it shows how a woman is empowered and nurtured by her female ancestors, both in life and in death. Second, it shows how inner strength can deliver an oppressed people out of a bondage of racism and abuse; in particular, the novel is an illuminating historical chronicle of the Japanese internment during World War II, told with the objective facts of journalism and with the subjective evocation of poetic language, scripture, and reverie. Third, the multiple linguistic forms give the work a richness.

In the United States, many eloquent first-person narratives, some more fictionalized than others, offer telling documentation of the horrors of incarceration suffered by Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans in the 1940’s, but in Canada, Kogawa’s novel is by far the most significant account. Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter (1953) is perhaps the closest to Obasan in tone and purpose. Among other compelling accounts are Toshio Mori’s short-story collection Yokohama, California (1949), Mine Okubo’s nonfiction work Citizen 13660 (1946), and Yoshiko Uchida’s autobiography Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family (1982).

Canada
Canada is a vast and sparsely populated country, part of both the British Commonwealth and NAFTA. It is widely regarded as a neutral and non-threatening nation. However, the stories of Amerindian and Inuit displacements, as well as the internment of Canadians of Japanese descent during World War II, are still whispered. Additionally, recent disputes with European countries, particularly Spain, over fishing territories point to more significant environmental issues.

Canada's constitution is relatively new and somewhat unsettled. After gradually gaining nominal independence, discussions to revoke the British North America Act began in 1927, marking the initial step towards Canadian independence. This state of limbo persisted until 1981, when the Constitution Act was passed under Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. The Act was subsequently endorsed by Queen Elizabeth II the following spring, effectively replacing the British North America Act as Canada's governing document. Unfortunately, not all provinces were prepared to accept the Act. Quebec sought independence and refused to sign. To keep Quebec within the union, the Meech Lake Accord of 1987 offered it the special status of a “distinct society.” The Inuit and Amerindians of Canada were also granted “distinct society” status. This special status for Quebec angered the provinces of New Brunswick and Manitoba, which refused to ratify the Act. Another compromise was attempted with the Charlottetown Accord of 1992, but it was rejected by referendum.

World War II
Under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada entered World War II earlier than the United States, contributing over one million men to the Allied forces and losing 32,000. Anti-Asian sentiment had been prevalent in Canada during the late 1930s and was officially manifested when the government confiscated the fishing fleet of Canadians of Japanese descent. This racist policy escalated to hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In the United States, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which mandated the immediate evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. In Canada, where evacuation had already begun, the process was expedited. Consequently, 21,000 Canadians of Japanese descent were forced into work and internment camps far from the West Coast. Of those interned, 17,000 were Canadian-born, making their removal a severe violation of human rights and civil liberties. Unlike in the United States, where confiscated property was eventually returned, Canada continued to restrict the movements of Japanese Canadians for many years after the war and never returned confiscated property. As a result, the Japanese community in the United States recovered much more quickly.

The illegality of the removal did not go unnoticed, even within King's own government. However, Asian immigrants had long been viewed by both the United States and Canada as "sojourners," or temporary residents who would eventually return to their home countries. Additionally, before the early 20th century, Asians were subjected to various mandates that effectively barred them from obtaining citizenship and restricted their ability to own property. Thus, granting Asian immigrants the same status as other immigrants was a relatively recent development. This does not justify the internment, but it helps explain the perception of Asians as perpetual foreigners and, consequently, a potential security threat during World War II. In other words, the resentment towards "foreigners" taking jobs from citizens fueled the eagerness to scapegoat certain groups. The idea of dismantling the prosperous Japanese-Canadian community by seizing their land, ships, and fishing areas shortly after the Great Depression contributed to the removal hysteria.

National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC)
The NAJC secured the Redress Agreement in 1988 with the Government of Canada on behalf of all Canadians of Japanese descent. This agreement was a settlement for the restitution owed to Japanese Canadians who were illegally interned and dispossessed of their property during World War II. As a result of the Agreement, the Government of Canada issued a formal apology for the violation of human rights committed through internment and dispossession. Additionally, the government provided symbolic payments to the affected Japanese Canadians and established a $12 million community fund to be managed by the Japanese Canadian Redress Foundation. Lastly, the government created the Canadian Race Relations Foundation to research and combat racism.

Canada's Liabilities
Beyond the demand for redress from Canadians affected by the government's actions during World War II, Canada has faced other cultural challenges. Throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, indigenous peoples in Canada won numerous court cases and received money and land from the government. Their success was aided by similar movements in the United States, where tribes sought to have treaties honored. With few exceptions, this remained a legal struggle with positive outcomes. Another ongoing issue is oil revenue. Alberta and Newfoundland have various disputes with the government over regulation, pricing, and revenue sharing. In Newfoundland, these disagreements delayed the exploitation of the vast Hibernia oil reserves offshore until the 1980s.

A more intense source of tension in Canada has been the situation in Quebec and among French-speaking Canadians in general. This issue is more complex because it touches on the fundamental principles of government and the status of Quebec. During the 1970s, the Quebec Liberation Front carried out several terrorist activities, prompting the government to invoke the War Measures Act during peacetime and to outlaw the group. The designation of French as Quebec's official language helped alleviate some concerns. In 1976, the separatist Parti Quebecois, led by Premier Rene Levesque, came to power in Quebec and promptly proposed independence. However, the referendum on this proposal was defeated, with 82% of eligible voters participating.

Autobiography
The novel presents a first-person narrative of a woman who is breaking her silence about various aspects of her life and the history she has experienced. As the narrator, the adult Naomi is confronted with the death of her uncle Isamu, prompting Obasan to encourage Naomi to read Emily's parcel filled with factual anger. Essentially, it is time for Naomi to confront the past. However, Naomi's reaction is unusual. She recounts personal memories and childhood experiences that seem disconnected from the story's political focus. Consequently, the narrative shifts between the present moment of her uncle’s death and past events, starting with Naomi as a quiet little girl dealing with the loss of her mother. Given that the perspective is Naomi's, who often received no answers to her questions, the recollection is vague, and the characters remain mere presences rather than fully developed personalities. This results in a nearly pure recollection of girlhood, whose testimony is more compelling than the factual details collected by Emily.

Imagery
The novel's imagery blends Christian and Buddhist traditions, manifesting in allegorical moments and vivid dream sequences. However, the central symbol of the novel is Naomi's mother. She is not so much a character as a remembered figure. Naomi has few memories of her mother and frequently asks others to share their recollections of her. This portrayal makes her more of a guiding spirit than a real person. The words that evoke her mother are almost prayerful. For instance, “Mother, I am listening. Assist me to hear you.… You are tide rushing moonward.”

All such language complements the superhuman account of Nagasaki, where Naomi's mother protected the children under her care despite suffering radiation burns. This apocalyptic event, both in its language and structure, is the novel's climax. Remarkably, it is conveyed in a soft-spoken manner and simple sentences, “it was my mother.” As a symbol of motherhood, maternal culture, and pre-war happiness, she survived the ultimate weapon with horrific disfigurement. Her survival motivates Naomi to piece her life together and ultimately share her story as a form of healing for the entire community.

Diction
The novel's language is meticulously chosen, playing an active role in the plot in unique ways. This is because the novel aims to break the silence imposed on the victims. Naomi recalls, “We are the despised rendered voiceless, stripped of car, radio, camera and every means of communication.” By remaining silent, however, the victims are incomplete. “If you cut any of [your history] off, you're an amputee.… Don't deny the past.” These words come from Aunt Emily, whose concise and provocative writing style contrasts sharply with the overall poetic narrative. Aunt Emily intends to convey the truth, but as with the two ideograms of love, there are different ways to tell the story.

Given the sensitivity of the situation—some wish for the story to remain untold and forgotten, while others want it loudly proclaimed—each word is meticulously selected, and the narrative heavily employs allegory. The stone bread crafted by Uncle is likened to the manna that sustained the Israelites. Uncle is also paralleled with Sitting Bull, thereby comparing the displacement of the Japanese to the earlier confinement of indigenous peoples to reservations. Similarly, Emily's parcel is akin to the stone bread in that it nourishes the mind. Biblical references are frequently used. “When I am hungry, and before I can ask, there is food,” evokes the Christian gospel. Allegorical language also weaves Buddhist imagery into the narrative, introducing the “white stone” and the concept of nature's dance. Kogawa's language effectively blurs the lines between dream or story and reality, past and present, and nature and the individual.

Dream Vision
The narrative contains numerous dreams, all rooted in the two driving forces of the novel—sexual abuse and the loss of Naomi's mother due to the war. Naomi's dreams stem from her anxiety about sex, triggered by early abuse, and her fears that this traumatic initiation may have caused her mother to leave. However, her dreams also provide insights into the interconnectedness of her family. It seems her uncle is trying to assist her, making it difficult to distinguish the dream vision from the story's reality. In one dream, Uncle performs a ceremonial bow as part of the flower dance. Naomi's challenge, then, is to understand the ceremony she must undertake to lay the ghosts of the past to rest. She ultimately achieves this realization in the novel's climactic epiphany.

Obasan, a novel by poet Joy Kogawa, won both the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Canadian Authors' Association Book of the Year Award. It was the first novel to address the internment of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II. Published in 1981, it coincided with intensified efforts by Japanese Canadians to seek redress from the Canadian government for the internment. The novel has been extensively analyzed, particularly for its exploration of themes such as landscape, identity, and cultural heritage.

Canada, a vast and sparsely populated country, is part of the British Commonwealth. Despite its reputation as a neutral nation, its history includes the displacement of Amerindian and Inuit peoples and the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada joined World War II before the United States, contributing over one million people to the Allied forces and suffering 32,000 casualties. Anti-Asian sentiment was widespread in Canada during the late 1930s, and the government expressed this prejudice by seizing the fishing fleet owned by Japanese Canadians. This racist policy escalated to hysteria following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

In the United States, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which mandated the immediate evacuation and internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast, despite two-thirds of them being American citizens. In Canada, the evacuation process accelerated, resulting in the internment of 21,000 Japanese Canadians in work camps and internment camps far from the West Coast. Of those interned, 17,000 were Canadian-born, making their internment a severe violation of human rights and civil liberties. Unlike the United States, which returned confiscated property after the war, Canada imposed restrictions on Japanese Canadians for many years and never returned their property, causing the Japanese community in the United States to recover more quickly.

Members of Prime Minister King's government recognized the illegality of the internment. However, both the United States and Canada had long viewed Asian immigrants as "sojourners"—immigrants expected to eventually return to their home countries. In the early twentieth century, Asians faced various legal barriers that prevented them from gaining citizenship and owning property. Granting Asian immigrants the same status as others was a recent development. These historical factors contributed to the perception of Asians as perpetual foreigners and potential security threats during World War II. Additionally, economic resentment towards "foreigners" taking jobs from citizens fueled the support for scapegoating. The desire to dismantle the prosperous Japanese-Canadian community by seizing their land, ships, and fishing areas, especially in the aftermath of the Great Depression, further exacerbated the removal hysteria.

In 1988, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) secured a Redress Agreement with the Government of Canada on behalf of all Canadians of Japanese descent. This agreement addressed the restitution for Japanese Canadians who were unlawfully interned and stripped of their property during World War II. As part of the agreement, the Canadian government formally apologized for the human rights violations that occurred due to the internment and dispossession. Additionally, the government provided symbolic financial compensation to those affected Japanese Canadians and established a community fund of $12 million, managed by the Japanese Canadian Redress Foundation. Furthermore, the government founded the Canadian Race Relations Foundation to promote research and combat racism.

Obasan is an autobiographical novel that recounts the experiences of Naomi, a third-generation Japanese-Canadian schoolteacher, who was sent to an internment camp during World War II. Before her relocation to the camp, Naomi is sexually abused by a neighbor. When her mother travels to Japan, Naomi believes it is because of the abuse and feels responsible. After the Canadian government interned her remaining family members, Naomi's father passes away in a work camp. Later, Naomi discovers her mother's death in Japan. Despite the challenging circumstances and historical context of her story, the novel avoids becoming a tragedy. This is largely due to the quiet resilience of the title character, Obasan, who holds the keys to the past that Naomi must come to terms with. Ultimately, Naomi finds reconciliation in an epiphanic conclusion reminiscent of Goethe, as she embraces and is embraced by the Canadian landscape.

Kogawa has often drawn inspiration from her own experiences for her writing, starting with her debut poetry collection, The Splintered Moon, published in 1967. In this collection, she reflected on her marriage. Her subsequent three collections also had autobiographical elements, where she began to delve into themes she would later expand upon in Obasan.

She wrote about living a hybrid life as a Japanese-Canadian Nisei, her divorce, an abortion in 1971, and the deaths of her uncle and mother. She also touched on the silence of her aunt, Obasan, and the activism of women fighting for justice and redress.

In 1992, Kogawa continued Naomi's family saga in Itsuka, detailing their efforts to seek redress from the Canadian government for their unjust internment. Other works exploring similar themes include Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, which tells the story of a Native-American man striving to heal from his traumatic experiences fighting for the U.S. Army in the Pacific during World War II. His path to redemption is found through his struggle and eventual success in reconnecting with his tribe's traditions.

Additionally, Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy narrates the coming-of-age story of a young girl grappling with sexual traumas. Like Naomi, Lucy's sexual secrets complicate the already challenging journey of growing into womanhood as a racial minority.

Sources
Cheung, King-Kok. "Attentive Silence in Joy Kogawa's Obasan." In Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Elaine Hedges and Shelley F. Fishkin. Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 113-29.

Fujita, Gayle K. "To Attend the Sound of Stone: The Sensibility of Silence in Obasan." In Melus, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 33-42.

Gottlieb, Erika. "Silence into Sound: The Riddle of Concentric Worlds in Obasan." In Canadian Literature, No. 109, Summer 1986, pp. 34-53.

Harris, Mason. "Broken Generations in Obasan." In Canadian Literature, No. 127, Winter 1990, pp. 41-57.

Kelman, Suanne. "Impossible to Forgive." In The Canadian Forum, Vol. LXI, No. 715, February 1982, pp. 39-40.

Potter, Robin. "Moral—in Whose Sense? Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror." In Studies in Canadian Literature, 1990.

Quimby, Karin. "'This is my own, my native land': Constructions of Identity and Landscape in Joy Kogawa's Obasan." In Cross-Addressing: Resistance Literature and Cultural Borders, edited by John C. Hawley. State University of New York Press, 1996, pp. 257-73.

Rose, Marilyn Russell. "Politics into Art: Kogawa's 'Obasan' and the Rhetoric of Fiction." In Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Vol. XXI, Nos. 2-3, Spring 1988, pp. 215-26.

Ty, Eleanor. "Struggling with the Powerful (M)Other: Identity and Sexuality in Kogawa's Obasan and Kincaid's Lucy." In The International Fiction Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1993, pp. 120-26.

Ueki, Teruyo. "Obasan: Revelations in a Paradoxical Scheme." In Melus, Vol. 18, No. 4, Winter 1993, pp. 5-20.

White, Edward M. "The Silences that Speak from Stone." In Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 11, 1982, p. 3.

Willis, Gary. "Speaking the Silence: Joy Kogawa's Obasan." In Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1987, pp. 239-49.

For Further Study
Chua, Cheng Lok. "Witnessing the Japanese Canadian Experience in World War II: Processual Structure, Symbolism, and Irony in Joy Kogawa's Obasan." In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Temple University Press, 1992, pp. 97-108. This essay examines the ritualistic structure and "ironic narrative mode" of Kogawa's novel. Chua also argues that Obasan "poses an ironic challenge to the Christian ethics upheld by Canada's majority culture."

Garrod, Andrew. Interview with Joy Kogawa. In Speaking for Myself: Canadian Writers in Interview. St. Johns, Newfoundland: Breakwater Books, 1986, pp. 139-53. A comprehensive interview where Kogawa discusses her childhood, her theological and political beliefs, and her writing process, particularly her work on Obasan.

Grewal, Gurleen. "Memory and the Matrix of History: The Poetics of Loss and Recovery in Joy Kogawa's Obasan and Toni Morrison's Beloved." In Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan. Northeastern University Press, 1996, pp. 140-74. This essay provides insightful comparisons between Obasan and Toni Morrison's Beloved as novels that "depict the process of loss and recovery" through "ceremonial performances of memory."

Kanefsky, Rachelle. "Debunking a Postmodern Conception of History: A Defence of Humanist Values in the Novels of Joy Kogawa." In Canadian Literature, Vol. 148, Spring 1996, pp. 11-36. In her "defence" of a humanist perspective in Kogawa's novels, Kanefsky directly challenges critics who interpret these works through a postmodern lens of history and language. She argues that both Kogawa and her protagonist ultimately embrace a humanist belief that "What's right is right. What's wrong is wrong."

Kogawa, Joy. "Is There a Just Cause?" In Canadian Forum, March 1984, pp. 20-24. In this thought-provoking editorial, Kogawa discusses her personal involvement in and understanding of social activism. She affirms "the paradoxical power in mutual vulnerability" and asserts that "our wholeness comes from joining and from sharing our brokenness."

Kogawa, Joy. "What Do I Remember of the Evacuation." In Chicago Review, Vol. 42, No. 3-4, 1996, pp. 152-53. Originally published in 1973, this poem provides an intriguing look at Kogawa's reflections on the evacuation years before she wrote Obasan. Similar to the later novel, the poem derives its expressive power from the ironic contrast between "adult" realities and childhood perceptions.

Omatsu, Maryka. Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese Canadian Experience. Toronto: Between the Lines, 1992. This book chronicles the struggle of Japanese Canadians to secure redress from the Canadian government.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. Random House, 1979. Said explores the historical perspective of how Western powers view Eastern or Oriental people. Essentially, it is a history of stereotypes and the attitudes that support policies like internment.

Sunahara, Ann Gomer. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese-Canadians During the Second World War. Lorimer, 1981. This detailed work examines the Canadian internment of Japanese Canadians. It is a book that Aunt Emily would value for its thorough documentation.

Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton University Press, 1993. Wong provides compelling "intratextual" and "intertextual" analyses of Obasan in this study of Asian American literature. She focuses particularly on Kogawa's use of the "stone bread" image and her "obsession with mobility" in the novel.

Yamada, Mitsuye. "Experiential Approaches to Teaching Joy Kogawa's Obasan." In Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays, edited by John R. Maitino and David R. Peck. University of New Mexico Press, 1996, pp. 293-311. Though primarily aimed at educators, this essay offers a valuable model for reading Kogawa's novel through three different lenses: "the aesthetic, the historical, and the experiential."