Obasan

Obasan is a novel by the Japanese-Canadian writer Joy Kogawa, first published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in 1981. It is among the books most often set for Canadian literature courses and was the One Book, One Vancouver selection in 2005.

The novel follows Naomi Nakane, who was a child in British Columbia when the Second World War began and who has grown up without a full account of what was done to her family. As an adult she visits her aunt, Obasan, and the novel moves between her memories of the internment and displacement of Japanese Canadians, the letters and documents that described what the government was doing, and the silence that the family kept afterwards. Kogawa writes from the perspective of a child who is present for events she does not understand and an adult who has to put them together later, and the book was one of the first works of Canadian fiction to give a full account of that period, including the seizure of property and the forced movement of families inland.

Kogawa was born in Vancouver to Japanese-Canadian parents and was interned with her family as a child, and she later wrote poetry and a sequel, Itsuka, about the campaign for redress.