Joy Kogawa · 1981 · exile

Joy Kogawa's 1981 novel, from her own childhood. In 1942 the Canadian government removed twenty thousand Japanese Canadians from the coast, took their houses and their boats, and did not give them back afterwards. Naomi Nakane is five when it starts, and the book is a grown woman going through her aunt's papers thirty years later trying to find out what happened to her mother.

1. 1
   Vancouver

   A house in Marpole with a goldfish and a piano, and a father who is a boatbuilder - and then Pearl Harbor, and the notices, and the boats impounded and the families given a week and one suitcase each.

2. 2
   Slocan

   A ghost town in the Kootenays, a shack with no insulation and a stove, and years of it - and Obasan and Uncle keeping a child fed and clothed and never once explaining, which is the silence the whole novel is about.

3. 3
   Granton

   After the war they are not allowed back to the coast, so they are dispersed east to the Alberta beet fields - a family of fishermen and carpenters thinning beets in a hut, which Kogawa calls the worst of all of it.

4. 4
   Vancouver

   In 1972 Naomi reads the letters Aunt Emily kept: her mother went to Nagasaki in 1941 to see her own mother and was there in August 1945 - and asked, in writing, that the children never be told.