Obasan

A schoolteacher, Naomi Nakane, pieces together the wartime uprooting of her Japanese-Canadian family: torn from their Vancouver home in 1942, interned in the interior British Columbia ghost town of Slocan, then forced onto the Alberta beet farms, while her mother, trapped in Japan, is lost to the Nagasaki bomb. Kogawa maps the real geography of the internment: the seized coastal home, the mountain camp, the prairie exile, and the silence her aunt Obasan keeps over it all.

The mother

The Vancouver home

Before the war

In their comfortable Vancouver house Naomi's early childhood is warm and secure, her gentle mother at its centre, before the war tears it all apart. Kogawa sets the lost paradise of the family's coastal life, the ordinary happiness whose destruction the rest of the book so quietly and devastatingly records.

The early chapters

explicit Naomi's family lives in the Marpole district of Vancouver before the war, the real coastal city from which Japanese Canadians were removed; sited there.

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