Obasan
(Book - Regular Print)

Sequel: Itsuka.

The story of the incarceration of Japanese Canadians during and after World War II became popularly known through Joy Kogawa's novel, Obasan, originally published in 1981. Kogawa's novel depicts the "silence" the community maintained over three decades after their incarceration and the pain it went through in trying to break the silence. The sense of loss of one's youth, happiness, identity, community, property, occupation, and even family, and the impossibility, which the novel describes, to regain or even to rebuild one's dislocated "self" can only be truly understood by understanding Japanese Canadians' wartime experience--their detention, dispossession, dispersal and deportation--as a whole. Kogawa's novel broke Japanese Canadians' silence.

990 L,Lexile

990L,Lexile

Accelerated Reader,Grades 5-8,6.6,12,SD,Quiz 8084,English fiction.

Accelerated Reader AR,MG,6.6,12,8084.

Accelerated Reader,Grades 5-8,6.6,12,SD,Quiz 8084,English fiction.

American Book Awards, 1983