Structure and symbolism in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Joy Kogawa's Obasan follows a Japanese Canadian family during World War II. We see its forced relocation through Naomi, a young girl whose secure family life falls apart. That's the situation. The next step is to ask what Kogawa does with it as a novelist.

The opening gives us two jobs to track. The novel makes its central character heroic and criticizes the majority culture. Then it pairs each job with a technique: form emphasizes heroism; symbols provide the social criticism. Pause at “former” and “latter” and reconnect them to those actual ideas. Otherwise, it's easy to read past the sentence without knowing what the next two paragraphs will explain.

First comes form. The writer compares the novel's structure with an anthropological account of a rite of passage. Someone leaves a secure position, enters a state of alienation in which status and property are lost, and finally rejoins society with a heightened status. That pattern can turn a victim into a hero. I don't need to know the theory beforehand; I need to see how Naomi's story fits it.

At first, Naomi belongs to a close-knit family in Vancouver. Then the family loses its place in society and is sent into work camps or exile. Naomi is separated from her parents and joins her aunt and uncle in a surrogate family. This is the fall from security into alienation. The description of a deathlike state belongs to the rite-of-passage comparison; it isn't a claim that Naomi literally dies.

The final part moves toward integration. Her aunt and uncle nurture her, and family documents and letters help her confront what had been hidden about her past. She comes to terms with that history and with herself as an adult. The exact contents of the letters aren't supplied, so don't invent a secret or assume she reunites with her parents. What matters is the movement from being uprooted to understanding and accepting her history. That's how the structural comparison supports the claim about heroism.

Now we switch to the second job: criticizing the majority culture. Kogawa uses Christian rituals and symbols to question the professed ethics of the society that has rejected Naomi. That suggests a gap between its stated values and its treatment of Japanese Canadians. We aren't being told that Naomi herself practices Christianity.

The example compares her encounter with family records to the biblical image of turning stone into bread. The records contain hard facts about the abuse of her people. Facing those facts is painful, but it can also provide spiritual nourishment: Naomi can recognize the durability of her people and herself. In ordinary terms, understanding what they endured can help her recognize their strength. We don't need to retell the biblical story to follow the comparison we're given.

That brings the two parts together. The writer isn't merely recounting the plot or condemning Canada's treatment of Japanese Canadians. The focus is how Kogawa's literary choices accomplish both things: transforming Naomi's experience into a heroic journey and criticizing the culture that harmed her. The ending credits Kogawa with successfully joining those effects. Neither is presented as the only important purpose of the novel.