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Obasan Cass
by
Joy Kogawa
This powerful, passionate, and highly acclaimed novel tells, through the eyes of a child, the moving story of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. Naomi is a sheltered and beloved 5-year-old when Pearl Harbor changes her life. Separated from her mother, she watches as she and her family become enemy aliens, persecuted and despised in their own land. Surrounded b...more
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Obasan is narrated by Naomi, a sheltered and pampered child who is five years old when her life is drastically changed by the events at Pearl Harbor and the Second World War. As a Japanese Canadian, Naomi is separated from her parents, persecuted and eventually placed in an internment camp - common practice in Canada during WWII.
“If all this sounds like a bird’s-eye view to you, Nesan, it’s the reportage of a caged bird. I can’t really see what’s happening. We’re like a bunch of rabbi...more
“If all this sounds like a bird’s-eye view to you, Nesan, it’s the reportage of a caged bird. I can’t really see what’s happening. We’re like a bunch of rabbi...more
Before I picked up this book, I knew nothing about the history of Japanese-Canadians. Sadly, I know almost nothing about Canadian history, period, and it had never even occurred to me that the Canadian government might have had similar anti-Japanese policies during WWII.[return][return]The book starts with the narrator, Naomi, as an adult in the '70s. When she goes to see her aunt after her uncle's death, she finds a package from her other aunt containing a diary and letters written during the w...more
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Obasan by Joy Kogawa is a landmark for modern Canadian fiction. While Obasan is a work of fiction, it reads almost as a memoir - a narrative of suffering, persecution and rising above adversity. Kogawa's novel deals with the relocation of Japanese Canadians after Pearl Harbour during WWII - a marginalized area of Canadian history which many still are oblivious to.
Kogawa's prose is full of seamless transitions through time; moving back and forth between the main character Naomi's adul...more
Kogawa's prose is full of seamless transitions through time; moving back and forth between the main character Naomi's adul...more
Multi-generational family saga from 1941 to the 1970's told from the perspective of a daughter from age 5 to 35. The book opens with Naomi as a five year old Japanese-Canadian living in Vancouver with her upper middle class family, her mother having just gone to Japan to visit elderly relatives. War measures taken to protect the Pacific Coast from Japanese invasion begin with intering all citizens and residents of Japanese descent in Hastings Park (still in use as a horse race track in Vancouv...more
Title: Obasan
Author: Kogawa Joy
Had you ever wonder what life it is like being a Japanese Canadian Citizen during the Second World War? An award wining novel written by a Japanese Canadian Citizen will tell you. Kogawa Joy had illustrated detail of traditional Japanese life during the darkest age for the Japanese, the World War II.
If you are a person who interested in Japanese culture like me you will absolutely love this award wining novel. By reading the conversation...more
Author: Kogawa Joy
Had you ever wonder what life it is like being a Japanese Canadian Citizen during the Second World War? An award wining novel written by a Japanese Canadian Citizen will tell you. Kogawa Joy had illustrated detail of traditional Japanese life during the darkest age for the Japanese, the World War II.
If you are a person who interested in Japanese culture like me you will absolutely love this award wining novel. By reading the conversation...more
I probably shouldn’t have liked this book, but for some reason I did. I don’t usually like books that have this much morality built into the structure of story, but everything seemed to work in this one. I don’t usually like long or frequent dream sequences, but I actually found some of them quite enjoyable. I found that I hated some of the characters like Aunt Emily and the brother, but it ended up that I wasn’t really supposed to like them an by the end, the main character ended up hating all ...more
This book is about a family that ha s to go through the death of a beloved uncle and mother and this story is about how they deal with every thing and how the family reacts to every thing. Also i loved the ending of the book because it ended how it started and i thought that was a genius way to write a book. And the ending reminded me of the epic of Gilgamesh because the first and last lines of the book were the same. Also i would recommend this book to anybody because it was a very sad but inte...more
I read this one for one of my University classes, and I really enjoyed it! It definitely doesn't cover a light and easy subject, so it isn't the type of book I would usually pick up myself, but I'm glad that I got the opportunity to read it for school because it is one powerful book! I'm proud to be Canadian, but it still always makes me sad to hear about some of the horrible things that have gone on in our country's past...residential schools, and Japanese-Canadians being placed into Internment...more
Is it just me or are you getting sick of books that talk about WWII. I know it's full of fictional potential but it's beginning to feel as though one out of every three novels is dealing with the topic these days. Can't we choose a different war? Or no war at all? I'm beginning to get exasperated.
That being said, Kogawa has written a very interesting book about the topic. From the eyes of the Japanese discriminated against in Canada, this book, for once, moves away from Nazis and Europ...more
That being said, Kogawa has written a very interesting book about the topic. From the eyes of the Japanese discriminated against in Canada, this book, for once, moves away from Nazis and Europ...more
Obasan is a fascinating look into the lives and experiences of a Japanese-Canadian family from the perspective of an adult family member who was born and raised in Canada. Through this novel, the reader discovers what might be to some a surprising aspect of Canada's past: our attempt to remove all Asian immigrants from Canada after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
This is the only book that has ever made me cry. I was genuinely caught off guard by the sheer devastation described in t...more
This is the only book that has ever made me cry. I was genuinely caught off guard by the sheer devastation described in t...more
Reading Obasan was a haunting experience. At a time when I was going through my own sort of identity crisis, it brought home the precarious nature of "citizenship" to a country and the guaranteed - or lack there of - protection that it affords to certain people. I remember the book read like a diary and seemed so personal, the reader almost feels like an intruder at times. An unwelcome spectator of heart-wrenching events within a close knit family, whose sufferings begin and end with t...more
Obasan looks at a dark page of Canadian and US history that makes modern-day caucasians uncomfortable - the racist treatment of Japanese-Canadians and Japanese-Americans during WWII. While the treatment of Japanese-Canadians was far, far less abhorent than the Nazi treatment of Jews, the fact that a society of educated intelligent people could so easily accept and participate in racist oppression of their neighbours and fellow citizens is truly distressing. One hopes that modern Canadians would ...more
Reading this book was an assignment for my English Lit class when I was a Junior in college. Not only was this a book that was thought-provoking and well-written, it was a book that truly changed my life because until being assigned to read this book, I was ignorant of the Japanese internment camps that were established by the USA during WWII. I remember feeling horrified at the prospect that we would have such places where American citizens were housed, but I was more horrified to have never le...more
Joy Kogawa’s Obasan opened me up to a history I barely even knew existed—that of the Japanese Canadians during WWII. I initially assumed, like most people I’ve spoken to, that the US’s treatment of Japanese at this time was far worse than the Canadian treatment. I was wrong. While the Japanese Americans were protected by our Bill of Rights, the Japanese Canadians had no such constitutional protections. Unlike in the US, the Japanese Canadians’ land was seized and sold by the government, they wer...more
Brittany
rated it
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review of another edition
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
Japanese Canadians, those looking to learn more about human rights
How I Came To Read This Book: Grade 12 lit, in Grade 11 from what I remember.
The Plot: This semi-autobiographical tale tells the story of a young girl and what happened to her, her family, and the Japanese people in Canada during WW2 and the internment camps that are often overlooked as one of the darkest periods in Canadian human rights history. From her girlhood days and beyond, the story details how the family was torn apart, and how the curtain was slowly drawn back for the prot...more
The Plot: This semi-autobiographical tale tells the story of a young girl and what happened to her, her family, and the Japanese people in Canada during WW2 and the internment camps that are often overlooked as one of the darkest periods in Canadian human rights history. From her girlhood days and beyond, the story details how the family was torn apart, and how the curtain was slowly drawn back for the prot...more
Really enjoyed this book, but can see why others didn't. The Language is very visual, metaphors and mixed metaphors are created, used and altered thoughout the novel. Reader needs to slow down and truly engage in the Japanese influence in the writing and story-telling. Would be a great novel to teach at a higher level. Too often we teach books too early for the optimum effect and understanding. Just because there are no big words, and is 300pages or less, does not necessarily mean its truly...more
This book was hard for me to get into at first but I soon grew to love the often poetic and passionate telling of this story. This book evoked a lot of feeling for these Canadians of Japanese ancestry and their plight during World War II - this is the first book I have ever seen regarding the Japanese internment in Canada, a fact which I think is not really well known in the United States. Although I cried towards the end, it was a beautifully told story that should be read by many.
I really wanted my students to learn about this era in history, and so many other teachers had recommended it, so I went ahead and assigned it as summer reading before I actually read it. That summer, I picked it up time and time again, trying to force my way through it. It was so boring that I decided to contact my students and tell them not to worry about reading it. They were all happy -- they couldn't read more than a page at a time, either.
What a book!!! I loved it for its stark imagary and vivid symbolism, and most of all the calm way she recited the events that destroyed so many Japanese Canadian families. I could never in a million years have written about this stain on our national integrity in such a non-judgemental way. How all these children survived the tearing apart of their families and go on to lead productive lives is beyond comprehension.
One of the first books to make me feel truly angry. It is a beautiful tale of human ugliness and forgiveness, and a much needed read by Canadians so as to face our historical skeletons. This is one of those books that highlights the error of having leaders, like our current cadre, who read only business books and have MBAs: they have no history, and so lead us into human ugliness. An eye opening book.
I hadn't known about the treatment of Japanese Canadians during WW2! A painful, personal book. The protagonist's older family members felt especially real.
I kept getting thrown out by Kogawa's style, though. It feels, um, very Creative Writing course-ish? It makes sense that she writes poetry -- I'm not at all saying there's something wrong with her style, but I guess I'm not very good at reading poetry.
I kept getting thrown out by Kogawa's style, though. It feels, um, very Creative Writing course-ish? It makes sense that she writes poetry -- I'm not at all saying there's something wrong with her style, but I guess I'm not very good at reading poetry.
After a bit of a dry spell with novels, Obasan for me was like an incredible waterfall of language and historical context. Kogawa is clearly a poet, which is vital to the telling of this narrative because the horrors faced by these Japanese-Canadian characters cannot be expressed in simple prose.
Set in Vancouver in the WWII era, this novel tells Naomi's coming-of-age story during intense discrimination and disruption to her identity and community. I read this novel while teaching...more
Set in Vancouver in the WWII era, this novel tells Naomi's coming-of-age story during intense discrimination and disruption to her identity and community. I read this novel while teaching...more
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There were things I loved about this book and things I hated. The author is a poet and it shows, there was a lot of beautiful writing, but it is slow and not much happens. The characters aren't too appealing and it is by nature depressing. I did learn that the Canadian internment of the Japanese-Canadians was even more egregious than what was done in America. Meh, I wouldn't recommend it.
Poetic, moving and overall very sad. I enjoyed the imagery and poetry that the author used, but felt that I never got a glimpse into the narrator's life as a (presumably) functioning adult after reading so much about the character's traumatic childhood. A scathing indictment of Canada's policies and actions towards its citizens of Japanese descent, sadly with little resolution or reparation.
Finished too late for the teen reading challenge, in part because I'm not convinced it IS a YA book even though that's where it's shelved. And since we were rating based on perceived popularity rather than quality, I wouldn't have been able to give it a high score. It was a haunting look at the lives of Nisei Japanese Canadians during and after World War II.
when i was recommended with this book from my english teacher for summer reading just because i'm asian, i was not excited about this book.. a story about a japanese family who lived in canada during wwii.. i heard stories about the time that japan ruled over korea from my grandparents.. i learned about wwii from history classes.. but when i read this book, everything changed.. not only it changed my view on japan and america but also on good and evil.. most people associate japan during WWII wi...more
I read Second Violin by John Lawton on the way to France, not realizing that much of that novel centered around the internment of British aliens during WWII. I read Obasan on the way back to Canada so it provided an interesting comparison of the British internment activities and the Canadian treatment of Japanese aliens AND citizens after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I'm very proud to be Canadian but this was a sad time in our history. The evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the wes...more
Obasan dragged quite a bit in my opinion. Its progression was too slow to be very engaging and I wouldn't have made it through it if reading it hadn't been a requirement for English class. Though the ending was good, readers have to have the patience to read the first three quarters of the novel. Not the best, in my opinion.
I read this book years ago and loved it. The title still appears occasionally on recommending reading. .. but the book is getting hard to find. I recommend looking in your library for it. It would seem that good books have too short a lifespan.
this book is about a child's experience in the japanese internment camps.
this book is about a child's experience in the japanese internment camps.
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