Obasan

Naomi is a Japanese Canadian schoolteacher whose adult life is shaped by her childhood displacement during World War II. The death of her uncle prompts her to revisit family documents and memories she has long avoided.

Obasan responds to suffering through endurance and silence, while Aunt Emily collects records and openly demands political recognition. Naomi is caught between those two ways of remembering her family's dispossession.

The novel addresses the forced removal, internment, and property loss imposed on Japanese Canadians during and after World War II. Families were displaced from the British Columbia coast and sent to interior settlements and labor sites.

The book is a novel, but Kogawa drew on her experience of being uprooted as a Japanese Canadian child during World War II. Published in 1981, it helped bring that history into Canadian public discussion.