Obasan
Japanese-Canadian novel
Set in Vancouver (urban, professional,
West Coast), British Columbia, &
Alberta (rural, manual labor, interior)
Historical context: 1930’s-1960’s,
Pacific War, WW ll, anti-JapaneseCanadian prejudice, forced
evacuation, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
nuclear holocaust
Plot, characters, narrative structure
• ‘Happy’ Japanese-Canadian family in Vancouver
• Mother leaves to visit grandmother in Japan
• Pacific War breaks out, mother never returns,
family is forced to break up, Stephen and Naomi
sent to live in Alberta with father’s half-brother &
wife, ‘Obasan’/aunt
• Father dies, brother leaves, uncle Isamu dies, Aunt
Emily gives Naomi papers on family internment
history, children learn of mother’s disfigurement
in Nagasaki nuclear explosion, later death
Naomi’s character, 6-8, explained
through flashbacks
• Childhood sexual abuse: Old Man Gower,
62-65
• Mother’s ‘abandonment’ 26-27, 66
• Family breakup, loss of home, father, Aunt
Emily,
• Physical, social, emotional deprivations,
suffering, isolation.
Feb 1942, 21,000 Japanese Canadians forced
relocation from West Coast; later, 2,700 sent to
Alberta to work on beet farms
• Until 1949, restrictions
applied to Japanese
Canadian as to where they
could resettle.
• US Supreme Court, 1944,
“Ex parte Endo” loyal U.S.
citizens, regardless of
cultural descent, could not be
detained without cause.
January 2, 1945, exclusion
order rescinded entirely.
Narrative structure: non-traditional, nonlinear (70, 71), riddle-structure
• Emphasis on TIME: present psychological
condition, situation
• Use of dates, journals, diaries, newspapers,
memos, etc for chronological piecing of
different memory moments
• Collage, assemblage, juxtaposition,
layering, more ‘poetic’/emotional
patterning/dream sequencing than
logical/rational sequence
Novel’s stylistics/aesthetic devices
• Polyphony: Presence of many different
voices/’tongues’ (English, Japanese;
articulate, inarticulate, mute; poetic, official,
journalistic, diary, Biblical, interior,
characters’, etc), & their significance.
• e.g. 219 “kodomo no tame ni” “for the sake
of the children”; 46 “yasashi kokoro,” 56
(Obasan’s speech, family ties, ethnic
identity)
Close reading, 2 epilogues
(Bible, Revelations, verse 217;
Response (Heteroglossia: presence of
voices within ONE utterance)
Significance of Christian discourse, 219229: Obasan (monoglossic)
Juxtaposed with ‘heteroglossic’
commentary: Naomi, narrator
Significance of internal textual evidence
& external biographical context.
Varying, single, contradictory
interpretation or a complex of
entangled socio-cultural affects?
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•
•
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Consolation, uplift, shared spiritual values?
Irony, split perspectives, doubt?
Criticism, parody, rejection?
Ambivalence, ambiguity, indeterminacy?
Emotional affect?
Dialogism as key to novel’s meaning
(Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination)
• “Dialogue may be external (between two different
people) or internal (between an earlier and a later
self).”
• “Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological
mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia.
Everything means, is understood, as a part of a
greater whole.”
• Hybridization: “mixing, within a single concrete
utterance, of two or more different linguistic
consciousnesses, often widely separated in time
and social space.”
Further developed as thematic clusters:
• Christianity/belief system/values/power: where
& how dramatized in action & character
motivation, and within what con/text?
• e.g. Obasan, Nakayami-sensei, 232, 240
(submission)
• What interrogates these values? What other
discourses are represented?
• Aunt Emily’s political activism/political
empowerment/secular values, 33-42, 77-1i0
(resistance)
Obasan: major ‘voice”--Issei, repressed,
submissive, ‘nurturing’: 18-19
• Repetition, narrow range of articulations:
old, lost, forgetful, everybody someday dies
• Silence
• Forgetfulness, 23