KOGAWA, Joy Nozomi 1935-

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: Attended University of Alberta, 1954, Anglican Women's Training College, 1956, Conservatory of Music, 1956, and University of Saskatchewan, 1968.

ADDRESSES: Home—25 The Esplanade, #1418, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1W5, Canada.

CAREER: Office of the Prime Minister, Ottawa, Ontario, staff writer, 1974-76; freelance writer, 1976-78; University of Ottawa, Ottawa, writer in residence, 1978; freelance writer, 1978—.

MEMBER: 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, 1982, Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, 1982, and American Library Association notable book citation, 1982, Periodical Distributors Best Paperback Fiction Award, 1983, all for Obasan.

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 Books (New York, NY), 1993.

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

POETRY

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

A Choice of Dreams, McClelland & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1974, Mosaic Press (Oakville, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

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

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

A Song of Lilith, Polestar Book Publishers (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2000.

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

Contributor of poems to magazines in the United States and Canada, including Canadian Forum, West Coast Review, Queen's Quarterly, Quarry, Prism International, and Chicago Review.

SIDELIGHTS: Joy Nozomi 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 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, wrote Gurleen Grewal in Feminist Writers, "Kogawa proved herself to be among the finest of feminist-humanist writers." Out of Obasan came the sequel, Itsuka, and Naomi's Road, a version of the story for children. In addition to pursuing her career as a writer, Kogawa has turned her attention to political work on behalf of Japanese-Canadian citizens.

Before turning to fiction, Kogawa was a "seasoned poet," wrote Grewal. Gary Willis observed in Studies in Canadian Literature that Kogawa's 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 17 Canadian Women Writers that her poems often arise out of her dreams: "The practice of poetry," she says, "is the sweeping out of debris between the conscious and the unconscious." Grewal maintained that, "In fiction too, her endeavor is the same. Through protagonist Naomi Nakane's recollection of her painful childhood, Obasan lays bare the intergenerational 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-six-year-old Naomi. As young children, she and 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. Naomi and Stephen were sent to a frontier town along with their Uncle Isamu and Aunt Obasan. When their parents never returned, they were raised by their aunt and uncle in a house filled with silence. One of the mysteries of Naomi's childhood was a yearly pilgrimage. As a child, Naomi continually asked "Why do we come here every year?" and as an adult, Naomi has lost the ability to communicate; as Kogawa writes, she 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, as Grewal wrote, "life's imperative to heal."

At the beginning of the novel, Naomi's uncle has just died, and the rest of the novel, according to Erika Gottleib in Canadian Literature, "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. Naomi reviews documents about the Japanese internment to understand what happened to her and her family. And at the end of the novel, Naomi learns the truth that has been kept from her, that her mother suffered and died in Nagasaki, a victim of the "other holocaust," as Grewal called it. Naomi, through her examination of the past and her examination of the truth, at last is 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. Observed Willis of Obasan, "[it 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 born in Japan—and the Nisei—those born abroad, as represented by Naomi's two aunts. Neither of their models works for Naomi who "like Kogawa," writes Willis, "has roots in both traditions." By the end of the 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 this era of Canadian history. Obasan ends with the widely ignored memorandum sent by the Co-operative 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 nonfictional official papers and newspaper accounts," as Edmund M. White pointed out in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. These elements serve to emphasize what White called "systematic outrages inflicted by the Canadian government on its own citizens [which] echo the Nazi treatment of the Jews." Edith Milton in the New York Times Book Review wrote that Obasan "grows into a quietly appalling statement about how much hatred can cost when it is turned into a bureaucratic principle." White also found that "the novel, in turn, shares some of the tone of The Diary of Anne Frank in its purity of vision under the stress of social outrage."

Obasan's political implications have been noted by many critics, including Grewal who wrote, "This beautifully crafted novel with its moving resonances 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."

Itsuka is generally thought of as the sequel to Obasan but Sandra Martin commented 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 where she works on a multicultural journal and takes her first lover, Father Cedric, a French-Canadian priest. With his help, Naomi 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 admitted 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." But Keefer also noted that "it would be wrong to fault Itsuka for not being Obasan Revisited." She wrote, "What Kogawa has done in her new novel is to move into a different kind of imaginative territory, 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." As Martin observed, Kogawa "has written poignantly about how innocent and loyal Japanese Canadian were stripped of their home and their possessions, interned, and dispersed." Grewal further sees a more universal message in Kogawa's work: an emphasis on "compassion and arduous work of healing."

Kogawa turned back to poetry after publication of her novels. The "insight found [in Woman in the Woods]," wrote Frank Manley in Books in Canada, "is enlightening." He also lauded the book's "passion for life" along with "its ability to say volumes with only a few words." A more recent poetic text, A Song of Lilith, takes as its theme the Biblical story of Adam's first companion, Lilith, who was created out of clay to be his equal. When this harmonious relationship is destroyed, Lilith escapes from Eden and is subsequently banished from earth. Yet she returns many generations later to comfort and help humanity in its distress. The poem was commissioned by theater director Kristine Bogyo as part of a multidisciplinary production incorporating poetry, projected paintings, and original music. The piece has been produced in Toronto, Vancouver, and other Canadian cities.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

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

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 78, 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, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1996.

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 17 Canadian Women Writers, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1993.

PERIODICALS

Ariel, October, 1999, Laurie Kruk, "Voices of Stone: The Power of Poetry in Joy Kogawa's Obasan," p. 75.

Booklist, January 1, 1994, p. 806.

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

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.

Christianity and Literature, summer, 1999, Deborah Bowen, "Faithfully Reading Elie Weisel and Joy Kogawa, Two Generations After," p. 487.

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

Kunapipi, Volume 16, number 1, 1994.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 11, 1982. p. 3.

MELUS, fall, 1985, pp. 33-42; winter, 1999, Helena Grice, "Reading the Nonverbal: The Indices of Space, Time, Tactility and Taciturnity in Joy Kogawa's Obasan,"p.93.

Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, spring, 1988, pp. 215-226; September, 2000, Apollo A. Amoko, "Resilient ImagiNations: No-No Boy, Obasan and the Limits of Minority Discourse," p. 35.

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

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, autumn, 2001, Sarah B. Hood, "A Loft with Lilith," p. 26.

Quill and Quire, March, 1992, p. 57.

Studies in Canadian Literature, Volume 12, number 2, 1987, pp. 239-249.

ONLINE

Voices from the Gaps,http://voices.cla.umn.edu/ (September 17, 2003), biography of Joy Kogawa.