Obasan

Obasan
Author: Joy Kogawa
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 073523390X

Winner of the American Book Award Based on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.

Itsuka

Itsuka
Author: Joy Kogawa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 279
Release: 1993
Genre: Canadiens d'origine japonaise - Évacuation et relogement, 1942-1945 - Romans
ISBN: 9780140169881

Writing Against the Silence

Writing Against the Silence
Author: Arnold E. Davidson
Publisher: Canadian Fiction Studies
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1993
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781550221794

A literary exploration of Joy Kogawa's Obasan.

Locations of the Sacred

Locations of the Sacred
Author: William Closson James
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 1998-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0889202931

In ten essays, James (Queen's U., Kingston) examines various derivations of the sacred in contemporary Canadian culture. Most of the essays focus on the religious aspects of modern Canadian English fiction including the fiction of Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Margaret Atwood, and Joy Kogawa.

Gently to Nagasaki

Gently to Nagasaki
Author: Joy Kogawa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781987915150

Gently to Nagasaki is a spiritual pilgrimage, an exploration both communal and intensely personal. Set in Vancouver and Toronto, the outposts of Slocan and Coaldale, the streets of Nagasaki and the high mountains of Shikoku, Japan, it is also an account of a remarkable life. As a child during WWII, Joy Kogawa was interned with her family and thousands of other Japanese Canadians by the Canadian government. Her acclaimed novel Obasan, based on that experience, brought her literary recognition and played a critical role in the movement for redress. Kogawa knows what it means to be classified as the enemy, and she seeks urgently to get beyond false and dangerous distinctions of "us" and "them." Interweaving the events of her own life with catastrophes like the bombing of Nagasaki and the massacre by the Japanese imperial army at Nanking, she wrestles with essential questions like good and evil, love and hate, rage and forgiveness, determined above all to arrive at her own truths. Poetic and unflinching, this is a long awaited memoir from one of Canada's most distinguished literary elders.

A Song of Lilith

A Song of Lilith
Author: Joy Kogawa
Publisher: Global Professional Publishi
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2000
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781551923666

Joy Kogawa, internationally celebrated author of Obasan and The Rain Ascends, offers a feminist version of the biblical story of Lilith, the "first Eve." Illustrated by Lilian Broca, A Song of Lilith combines poetry and artwork in a powerful ode to truth, transformation, and homecoming.

Simple Recipes

Simple Recipes
Author: Madeleine Thien
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2009-10-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316087130

With delicate language and wisdom, Madeleine Thien explores the longing of families pulled apart by conflicts between generations, cultures, and values.Each of these stories captures a deeply personal world in which characters struggle to reconcile family loyalty with individual desires. In "House," a 10-year-old girl longs for the alcoholic mother who left the house one day never to return. In "Dispatch," a woman tries to hold her marriage together even after finding proof that her husband is in love with someone else. In "A Map of the City, " a young woman's troubled relationship with her father overshadows the course she takes in her adult life. Thien's fresh perspective and spare, haunting prose have already won her prizes and the praise of established masters. "Simple Recipes" is the beginning of a luminous writing career.

Naomi's Tree

Naomi's Tree
Author: Joy Kogawa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 9781554551842

A young couple leaves Japan for the coast of Canada, bringing a cherry seed to plant in their new garden. During the years that follow, the little cherry tree watches over the family as the couple have children, and then grandchildren. Young Naomi makes the cherry tree her special friend, and the tree's branches shelter her as she plays. But one day, war breaks out between the two countries, and the family is sent to an internment camp away from the coast. And though Naomi often dreams of going home, the dream fades as the years go by. The little tree is left behind to mourn its loss. For many years the cherry tree sends out a song of love and peace that reaches Naomi only in her dreams. But the insects and small animals hear the song, and on the wind they send back their own messages to the tree, assuring it that Naomi is safe and that one day she will return. And when she does, the tree will be waiting for her. Based on the World War II story of Naomi and Stephen in Naomi's Road, Naomi's Tree is a poetic story about enduring love and its almost mystical power to heal the spirit.

Articulate Silences

Articulate Silences
Author: King-Kok Cheung
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501721127

In this pathbreaking book, King-Kok Cheung sheds new light on the thematic and rhetoncal uses of silence in fiction by three Asian American women: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and JoyKogawa. Boldly articulating the unspeakable, these writers break the silence imposed by families or ethnic communities and defy the dominant culture that suppresses the voicing of minority experiences. Yet at the same time, they demonstrate how silences—voiceless gestures, textual ellipses, authorial hesitations—can themselves be articulate. Drawing on theoretical works on women's writing, on ethnicity and race, and on postmodernism and history, Cheung takes issue with Anglo-American feminists who valorize speech unequivocally and with revisionist Asian American male critics who attempt to refute Orientalist stereotypes by renouncing silence. She challenges Eurocentric views of speech and silence as polarized, hierarchical, and gendered, and proposes an approach to Asian American literature which overturns the "East-West" or "dual personality" model. Yamamoto, Kingston, and Kogawa interweave speech and silence, narration and ellipses, autobiography and fiction as they adapt and recast Asian and Euro-American precursors. Drawing freely from both traditions, they reinvent the past by decentering, disseminating, and interrogating authority-but not by reappropriating it. A fresh and subtle response to issues relating to cultural diversity, Articulate Silences will be important reading for scholars and students in the fie,4s of literary theory and criticism, women's studies, Asian American studies, and ethnic studies.