It wasn’t until we were studying the Japanese Internment in Social Studies 11 that I became aware that my friend’s families had been displaced from the West Coast of BC because of the government’s fear that these gentle Canadian folk would somehow become the enemy within.
I taught Kogawa’s novel Obasan for a number of years and was always impressed by this painful story of internment, our deep racisms and its lasting impacts on the victims and on Canadian society. I did not know that there was yet another dark secret hidden in Kogawa’s own family that she writes about in her recently released Gently to Nagasaki. In a review she is quoted as saying, “My story is from the belly of the dark. I am forbidden to tell it and commanded to tell it.” Kogawa has also written a fictional account of her discovery that her Anglican Priest father whom she loves deeply, is a pedophile in the The Rain Ascends. “For my part,” she writes, “I hold with a fierce and painful joy my trust in a Love that is more real than we are…. I lost my home, my father was a pedophile, I was sick because of this for many years, I continued on my search to touch God…. God keeps giving us/Nets for falling/Till we fall/Into God.”
The memoir was for me a mirror of sorts to Makoto Fujimura’s Silence and Beauty where he goes over similar territory in relation to the novel Silence and the persecution of Christians in 17th century Japan.
Vancouver Sun full review