Obasan
Joy Kogawa
It’s with great guilt that I must admit to not finishing this one. The forced exile and internment of Japanese-Canadians during WWII was a shameful event, and deserves to be carved into the literary record. However, as a novel, I was not able to engage with it.
To me, the narrative voice feels both too distant and too close. It begins from the adult Naomi’s memory of her childhood, resulting in a lot of “I was a child then, and I don’t remember/didn’t understand what was going on.” Then it transitions to a long epistolary section, with Aunt Emily narrating the period leading up to their family’s relocation, which has a lot of “Everything is chaos, I don’t know what’s going on.” And when we shift to Naomi’s first-hand experiences in the Slocan encampment, it becomes overly descriptive, focussing on too many details of the surrounding forest.
I know all of this is meant to evoke Kogawa’s subjective experiences, but I felt that the story might have been better served with a more objective and consistent narrative style. It was too structurally fragmented for my tastes.
