The Difficulty of Balancing Cultures in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan: A Critical Observation

The purpose of this research paper is to shed light on Joy Kogawa’s fiction Obasan (1981), which will be viewed as a continuing construction of the difficulty of identity on several levels: individual, social, political, cultural, and generational. Kogawa presents significant concerns of the day, examining the borders of race and culture in the process and arriving at more complicated conceptions of balancing Japanese-Canadian culture in the novel. Obasan chronicles the fight of Japanese Canadian cultures against long-standing racial discrimination, wartime imprisonment, and the double displacement and banishment, all of which were inflicted by Canadians against Canadians of Japanese origin. The question of how an ethnic group might survive and reproduce lies at the crossroads of the tale of cultural pain and the story of women’s lives, a mission that puts on added significance when a cultural group seems to be under siege. The paper will also examine the immigrant and the cultures of disadvantaged communities and metaphorical themes of rebirth with a strong record. The utter disruption of Japanese cultural and physical reproduction that had begun during the war was completed by Canada’s postwar policy of protracted exile and, in some cases, deportation to Japan. In her work, Kogawa openly traces this historical interruption of Asian reproduction. Despite an overt Japanese societal mandate to reproduce, Naomi and her Aunt Emily are both orphaned and unmarried. The paper will employ conceptual notions to underline what one believes the novels convey in terms of identity construction, but the novel itself would be at the centre of the debate. The qualitative method research will be applied to elaborate and examine the critical points.