Obasan (Joy Kogawa, 1981)

It's a national pastime to announce your are moving to Canada in protest of some political thing or person you don't like. A lot of times the person who says this clearly didn't do the research since whatever it was they hated about the United States so much was even more present in the Great White North. While I don't know anybody planning on leaving for Canada over the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, if there were such a person, they would find nothing in Canada to make them feel better.

That's what brings us to the thrust of the featured book, Obasan. The book's title means "aunt" in Japanese, although, especially with the counterpart word for "uncle", it can also be a term of respect to an elder member of the community. Although the book advertises itself as a tale of one family's dealings with Canada's traumatic Japanese relocation policy from the eyes of a child, it is actually framed around that child in her adult years putting together the pieces through memories and the collected evidence of her activist aunt. However she is not the "Obasan" the gives the book its title. Rather it is her great-aunt, the ancient, strong, silent type, who is both a pillar of strength and frustration for the protagonist.

Farewell to Manzanar is fairly standard-issue reading in high schools around here. There are a lot of parallels between the two books, and where they diverge is in the post-war period. It took a lot longer for Canada to come around on their internment policy, whereas the United States declared the camps illegal in 1944. Sure, there was extensive aftermath in both countries, but Manzanar takes a more personal approach, detailed the family's struggles after leaving the camp, overcoming prejudices, and so forth. Obasan, on the other hand, features a family that is not only booted from their British Columbia home, but also kicked out of their adopted wartime home in the mountains after the war ended and forced even further into the interior into truly wretched living conditions. Canada's anti-Japanese laws were so entrenched that Japanese-Canadians weren't allow back to the West Coast even after the war was over, which had a permanent impact on moving Japanese-Canadian culture well into the Canadian heartland.

On a style note, Obasan can be a little confusing. If you like to read stories that maintain a consistent tense, you are going to be a little frustrated by this book. The present tense is employed both in the novel's "present" (1972) and "past" (around 1940 onward) and it isn't always immediately clear when the action changes back. Just to really mess with the inattentive reader, the past tense sometimes slips in when there is a direct memory that doesn't fall in the primary "past" setting.

Like many of the books I've been reading this year, I got my copy of Obasan from the public library. It must have been one of those "core" books that falls pretty darn close to the original publication date and will probably remain in the library collection until it falls apart. It was Godine hardcover with zillions of checkout stamps, but it still seemed pretty sturdy after 35 years of library use. As a core title, copies exist at nearly every public library in the United States, but you can check Worldcat and locate one for yourself!