A heartbreaker, but beautifully written, and such an eye-opener about how Canada treated its citizens of Japanese ancestry. Really horrifying—I knew about the U.S. and the internment camps, but this was a bit of a surprise, though I suppose it shouldn't have been, with second- and third-generation Japanese-Canadians forced to give up all their possessions and their homes, and relocate to shantytowns to perform forced labor. Kogawa was originally a poet, and it shows. Recommended. ( )

Naomi is navigating her singledom in 1970s small-town Alberta when a family tragedy brings her closer to a past she's tried to forget. This leads her to reflecting back on her childhood experiences leading up to and inside of an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during World War II. As a child she could not know of the nuance or understand everything that was happening. She saw the tragedy on a different level: the rapid and eventually complete unravelling of safety, security and family. Some readers don't like the child's perspective in this novel, but in that alternative version we would be told how it was the children who would suffer most. This is the story of one suffering child. Now that she is revisiting her memories through adult eyes, with all the relevant documentation before her, new interpretations spring to light and the full story of forced internments and migrations emerges with its impacts on both the young and the old who were made its victims.

The writing style was sometimes an irritant for me, but the content is strong and the message is important. Surrendering to racist fear cost our country valuable unison in wartime, and the wrongs that were inflicted on this segment of our population weakened the moral ground from which our country fought World War II. There was clearly a hypocricy to fighting in freedom's name while we were stealing it away in our own backyard. It does not cancel out the heroism of our veterans or make wrong what we did right, but this story reminds how Canada's leaders and its people - how any people - can be fallible and wrong-headed when they let fear guide them. ( )

The novelized form of the author's grandmother's time spent in a Canadian Japanese internment camp. I found the book to be superficial. (Maybe it was supposed to be as Obasan was 5 years old when sent to the camp) Although a novel, I found several glaring statements about the U.S. internment(s) that had no basis in fact: 1) the US did not confiscate Japanese citizen's property (which they did) 2) "at least the US Japanese citizens had the Bill of Rights--correct, the had constitutional protection; little good it did them, though. I guess I found it a "light" book for such a serious subject. Maybe it was written for high-schoolers or YA???? Or the young girl experienced it at 5 years of age??? 320 pages ( )

Based on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War

Joy Kogawa's novel, OBASAN, first published nearly forty years ago, has become a minor Canadian classic. Its narrator, Naomi Nakane, a school teacher, looks back thirty years at her childhood spent in a desolate Japanese-Canadian internment camp near the tiny "ghost town" of Slocan during WWII, remembering the racism and discrimination and the quiet stoicism of her grandmother and uncle, who raised her and her older brother, Stephen. The family comes together again when her uncle dies, and the dark secrets of what happened to her parents in those years are revealed. But perhaps the most startling part of Kogawa's story for me is how the Canadian government continued to discriminate against its Japanese-Canadian citizens AFTER the war, denying them the opportunity to return to their homes in the west, instead pressing them to either move east or "repatriate" back to Japan. Naomi's family lived in a shed on a sugar beet farm in Alberta and worked like slaves for years.

Of course, the U.S. has its own shameful history of its treatment of Japanese-Americans during the war. I remember reading FAREWELL TO MANZANAR many years ago - another book that has attained that status of minor classic.

OBASAN is a sad, disturbing, and beautifully written little book. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER ( )