Kogawa, Joy 1935–

(Joy Nozomi Kogawa)

PERSONAL: Born June 6, 1935, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; daughter of Gordon Goichi (a minister) and Lois (a kindergarten teacher; maiden name, Yao) Nakayama; married David Kogawa, May 2, 1957 (divorced, 1968); children: Gordon, Deidre. Education: University of Alberta, 1954; Anglican Women's Training College, 1956; Conservatory of Music, 1956; University of Saskatchewan, 1968.

ADDRESSES: Home—845 Semlin Dr., Vancouver, British Columbia V5L 4J6, Canada.

CAREER: Office of the Prime Minister, Ottawa, Ontario, staff writer, 1974–76; freelance writer, 1976–; University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, writer-in-residence, 1978.

MEMBER: League of Canadian Poets, Writers Union of Canada, Order of Canada, 1986.

AWARDS, HONORS: Books in Canada First Novel Award, 1981, Canadian Authors Association Book of the Year Award, Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and American Library Association notable book citation, all 1982, all for Obasan; Periodical Distributors Best Paperback Fiction Award, 1983.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Obasan (novel), Lester and Orphen Dennys (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1981, David Godine (New York, NY), 1982.

Naomi's Road (juvenile fiction), Oxford University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

Itsuka (sequel to Obasan), Viking Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1992, Anchor (New York, NY), 1994.

The Rain Ascends, Knopf (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1995.

POETRY

The Splintered Moon, University of New Brunswick (St. Johns, New Brunswick, Canada), 1967.

A Choice of Dreams, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1974.

Jericho Road, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1977.

Woman in the Woods, Mosaic Press (Oakville, Ontario, Canada), 1985.

A Song of Lilith, illustrated by Lilian Broca, Polestar (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2000.

A Garden of Anchors: Selected Poems, Mosaic Press (Oakville, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Contributor to Canadian Forum, West Coast Review, Queen's Quarterly, Quarry, Prism International, and Chicago Review.

ADAPTATIONS: A Song of Lilith was adapted for the stage under the direction of Kristine Bogyo and produced in Toronto, Hamilton, and Vancouver, 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Canadian author Joy Kogawa is best known for the novel Obasan, a fictionalization of her own experiences as a Japanese Canadian during World War II. Like Obasan's narrator, Kogawa was torn from her family by government officials and exiled into a detention camp in the Canadian wilderness. She published her first book of poetry, The Splintered Moon, in 1967. After two follow-up volumes, she received national acclaim for Obasan. With Obasan, noted Gurleen Grewal in Feminist Writers, "Kogawa proved herself to be among the finest of feminist-humanist writers." In a review of Kogawa's poetry collection A Song of Lilith for Canadian Woman Studies, Shelagh Wilkinson praised the same quality, noting that "It is not very often that we find a feminist text that fulfills our need to celebrate the lost heroes of woman-centred myths [and] read epic poetry that gives us new insights into the strength of stories that have been abandoned through patriarchal selective vision." A Song of Lilith, maintained Wilkinson, is such a book.

Before turning to fiction, Kogawa was a "seasoned poet," explained Grewal. Gary Willis wrote in Studies in Canadian Literature, that her first three volumes of poetry are filled with "lyric verse" and poems that often "express feelings that emerge from a narrative context that is only partly defined." A poem from Kogawa's third collection, Jericho Road, for example, centers on "a striking surrealistic image" that never makes clear who the protagonist's enemies are. Kogawa explained to Janice Williamson in Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers that her poems often arise out of her dreams: "The practice of poetry … is the sweeping out of debris between the conscious and the unconscious." Grewal maintained that, in "fiction too, her endeavor is the same. Through protagonists Naomi Nakane's recollection of her painful childhood, Obasan lays bare the inter-generational pain of Japanese Canadians affected by the Canadian government's relocation and internment of its citizens during World War II."

Obasan was the first Canadian novel to deal with the internment of its citizens of Japanese heritage. The novel focuses on thirty-year-old Naomi. As children, she and her brother Stephen were separated from their loving parents during World War II. Their mother, visiting relatives in Japan, was not allowed to return to Canada, and their father was shipped to a labor camp, while Naomi and Stephen were sent to a frontier town along with their Uncle Isamu and Aunt Obasan. Tragically, their parents never returned, leaving the children to be raised by their aunt and uncle in a house filled with silence. One of the mysteries of Naomi's childhood involved her new family's yearly pilgrimages. As a child, she would continually ask, "Why do we come here every year?"; as an adult she has lost the ability to communicate. As Kogawa writes, Naomi is a victim of "the silence that will not speak." Obasan explores Naomi's search for the answer to her childhood question and shows her long-awaited acknowledgment of what Grewal termed "life's imperative to heal."

At the beginning of Obasan Naomi's uncle has just died; according to Erika Gottleib in Canadian Literature, the bulk of the novel "takes shape as a mourner's meditation during a wake, a framework well suited to the novel's central metaphor of a spiritual journey." Urged by her Aunt Emily, an activist seeking justice for internment victims, Naomi relives her past, thus enabling her to learn about the secrets long held by her family. She reviews documents about the Japanese internment to understand what happened to her family. At the end of the novel, Naomi learns the truth: that her mother suffered and died in Nagasaki, a victim of the U.S. bombing that leveled that city as World War II neared its end. Through her examination of the past and her examination of the truth, Naomi is at last free and learns to speak again.

Throughout the course of the novel, Naomi realizes her estrangement from mainstream Canadian society, as well as from traditional Japanese culture. Kogawa explores the differences between these two groups. As Willis noted of the novel, Obasan is "expressive of a sensibility that wishes to define, in relation to each other, Japanese and Canadian ways of seeing, and even to combine these divergent perceptions in an integrated and distinctive vision." In one scene, Naomi muses on carpentry: "There is a fundamental difference in Japanese workmanship—to pull with control rather than push with force." The contrast between the "restrained" Japanese and the "forceful" Canadians is also apparent in the difference between the Issei—those Japanese born in Japan—and the Nisei—those children born abroad of Japanese parents, as represented by Naomi's two aunts. Neither of their models works for Naomi who "like Kogawa," explained Willis, "has roots in both traditions." By the end of her own exploration, "Naomi blends a Japanese attention to silence with a Western attention to words. Indeed, it is this blending that gives rise to the distinctive beauties and subtleties of Obasan."

Kogawa further enriches her text with documentation of mid-twentieth-century Canadian history. Obasan ends with the widely ignored memorandum sent by the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians to the Canadian government in 1946, pointing out that the deportation of Japanese Canadians was "wrong and indefensible" and "an adoption of the methods of Nazism." Kogawa also includes among Aunt Emily's diaries and notes "a series of chilling non-fictional official papers and newspaper accounts," pointed out Edmund M. White in Los Angeles Times Book Review. These elements serve to emphasize what White described as the "systematic outrages inflicted by the Canadian government on its own citizens," actions that "echo the Nazi treatment of the Jews." Edith Milton opined in New York Times Book Review that Obasan "grows into a quietly appalling statement about how much hatred can cost when it is turned into a bureaucratic principle." White also drew comparisions between Kogawa's novel and The Diary of Anne Frank "in its purity of vision under the stress of social outrage."

The political implications of Obasan have been commented on by many critics, including Grewal who wrote that "this beautifully crafted novel with is moving reso-nances has done invaluable service to its varied readers. It has opened necessary dialogue; it has healed." Yet, Obasan always remains, according to Milton, "a tour de force, a deeply felt novel, brilliantly poetic in its sensibility." Willis noted that the message of Kogawa's poetry is more fully realized in Obasan, "an imaginative triumph over the forces that militate against expression of our inmost feelings." White pointed out that the novel has "a magical ability to convey suffering and privation, inhumanity and racial prejudice, without losing in any way joy in life and in the poetic imagination."

Out of Obasan came the novel Itsuka, as well as Naomi's Road, a version of the story for children. While Itsuka is generally thought of as a sequel to Obasan, Sandra Martin maintained in Quill and Quire that "Kogawa is not so much writing a sequel as reclaiming themes and characters" from Obasan. In Itsuka, Naomi goes to Toronto, gets a job at with a multicultural journal, and takes her first lover, Father Cedric, a French Canadian priest. With Cedric's help, she turns to activism in her desire to win redress for the victims of Canada's internment policies. In Itsuka, the political and erotic plots become intertwined. The book, using a similar technique as Obasan, closes with an apology from the Canadian government, in which it admits to instituting policies "influenced by discriminatory attitudes" toward Japanese Canadians and also to its own "unjust" actions.

Grewal maintained that Itsuka allows "the reader to witness Naomi's growth and personal fulfillment" and that it "openly bears the message of hope and trust implicit in Obasan." Yet, Martin compared Itsuka unfavorably to the first novel, finding that "Kogawa seems too close to the partisan squabbling that accompanies any such [political] movement. She hasn't yet absorbed the facts and translated them into fiction." Janice Kulyk Keefer, writing in Books in Canada, also admited to "a certain disappointment" with the book, one centering on "the absence in Itsuka of the kind of poetically charged language and intensity of perception that give Obasan its extraordinary power and beauty." Still, Keefer concluded that "it would be wrong to fault Itsuka for not being Obasan Revisited." "What Kogawa has done in her new novel is to move into a different kind of imaginative territory," the critic explained, "exposing the politics of multiculturalism that has in may ways abetted rather than eradicated the racism that she presents as an institutionalized aspect of Canadian life."

Like her fictional character Naomi, Kogawa has increasingly turned her attention to political work on behalf of Japanese-Canadian citizens. Although she penned the novel The Rain Ascends in 1995, her writing has centered more on verse since publishing Obasan and Itsuka. The "insight" contained in her verse collection Woman in the Woods, according to Books in Canada reviewer Frank Manley, "is enlightening," due to the author's ability to convey her "passion for life" and her poems' "ability to say volumes with only a few words." These attributes have been cited by other reviewers as characteristic of much of Kogawa's verse. Wrote Martin, "Through her poetry, her sublime novel Obasan, her children's story Naomi's Road, and … Itsuka, Kogawa has written poignantly about how innocent and loyal Japanese Canadians were stripped of their home and their possessions, interned, and dispersed." Grewal perceived a more universal message in Kogawa's work: an emphasis on "compassion and arduous work of healing."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Cheung, King-Kok, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yama-moto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1993.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 78, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1994.

Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Hogan, Robert, and others, editors, Memory and Cultural Politics: New Essays in American Ethnic Literatures, North Eastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

James, William Closson, Locations of the Sacred: Essays on Religion, Literature, and Canadian Culture, Wilfrid Laurier University Press (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

Kreiswirth, Martin, and Mark A. Cheetham, editors, Theory between the Disciplines: Authority/Vision/ Politics, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1990, pp. 213-229.

Ling, Amy, and others, editors, Reading the Literatures of Asian America, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1992.

Pearlman, Mickey, editor, Canadian Women Writing Fiction, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1993.

Williamson, Janice, Sounding Differences: Conversations with Seventeen Canadian Women Writers, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 1, 1994, p. 806.

Books in Canada, May, 1986, pp. 43-44; April, 1992, p. 35.

Canadian Ethnic Studies Journal, summer, 2002, Cherry Clayton, interview with Kogawa, p. 106.

Canadian Forum, February, 1982, pp. 39-40; December, 1992, p. 38.

Canadian Literature, summer, 1986, pp. 34-53; spring, 1988, pp. 58-66, 68-82; winter, 1990, pp. 41-57; autumn, 2002, Ian Rae, "Reconsidering Lilith," pp. 162-163.

Canadian Woman Studies, spring-summer, Shelagh Wilkinson, review of A Song of Lilith, p. 218.

Feminist Studies, summer, 1990, pp. 288-312.

Frontiers, January, 2003, Christina Tourino, "Ethnic Reproductions and the Amniotic Deep: Joy Koga-wa's Obasan," p. 134.

Herizons, December-February, 2000, p. 8.

Kunapipi, Volume 16, number 1, 1994.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 11, 1982, Edmund M. White, review of Obasan, p. 3.

Melus, fall, 1985, pp. 33-42.

Modern Fiction Studies, summer, 2002, p. 362.

Mosaic, spring, 1988, pp. 215-226.

New York Times Book Review, September 5, 1982; March 13, 1994, p. 18.

Quill and Quire, March, 1992, Sandra Martin, review of Itsuka, p. 57.

Semeia, spring-summer, 2002, Tat-siong Benny Liew, interview with Kogawa, p. 195.

Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 12, number 2, 1987, pp. 239-249; 2001 (annual), Guy Beauregard, "After Obasan: Kogawa Criticism and Its Futures," pp. 5-22.