Tan, Amy. The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings.
New York: Putnam, 2003.
Vanessa Rasmussen
Kogawa, Joy (Nozomi) (1935– )
Born in Vancouver to Gordon Goichi and Lois
Nakayama (née Yao), Kogawa is a second-gen-
eration Japanese Canadian. Her father was an
Anglican minister, and her mother a kindergar-
ten teacher. During World War II, under the War
Measures Act of 1942, her family, together with
22,000 other people of Japanese ancestry, most of
them Canadian nationals, were interned as enemy
aliens at various inland camps, an experience
she would fictionalize in her best-known novel
OBASAN (1985).
She attended the University of Alberta in 1954,
the Anglican Women’s Training College and the
Conservatory of Music in 1956, and the Univer-
sity of Saskatchewan in 1968. After working as a
teacher, she was employed as staff writer for the
Canadian prime minister’s office from 1974 until
- She worked as a freelance writer and a writer
in residence at the University of Ottawa (1978).
She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets,
the Writers’ Union of Canada and the Order of
Canada.
Joy married David Kogawa in May 1957 and
has two children, Gordon and Deirdre. After the
couple divorced in 1968, she moved to Toronto
in 1970 and began working with the Japanese
Citizens League. The publication of Obasan was
instrumental in alerting a wider audience to the
injustices suffered by Japanese Canadians. Naomi’s
Road, illustrated by Matt Gould, is an adaptation
of Obasan for children. ITSUKA (1991), a novel con-
ceived as a sequel to Obasan, focuses much more
explicitly on the political struggles of the redress
movement to receive official restitution from the
Canadian government.
Kogawa’s most recent prose piece, a short novel
titled The Rain Ascends (1995), deals with Milli-
cent Shelby’s attempts to cope with revelations
about her Anglican minister father’s pedophilia.
She must deal with the chaos caused by these
revelations. As in Obasan, Kogawa experiments
with nonlinear plot development to explore how
the good the Reverend Shelby has done over the
years is offset by his molestation of countless boys.
Kogawa remains interested in the forces of good
and evil, which she often explores through the use
of biblical allusions. In an interview with Ruth Hsu,
she states, “The resolution was the discovery that
Mercy reigns at the heart of the untellable truth.
Mercy is present and unleashed into life when the
journey of truth is made.”
Kogawa, who currently lives and works in To-
ronto, began her writing career with several vol-
umes of highly acclaimed poetry: The Splintered
Moon (1967) was followed by A Choice of Dreams
(1974) and Jericho Road (1977). Kogawa’s prose
benefits from her poetic expertise; moreover, the-
matic connections exist between her novels and
her poetry. Woman in the Woods (1985) is a collec-
tion consisting of three sections titled “For David,”
“She Flees,” and “In the Woods.” Some of the
poems have lush natural settings whereas others,
mainly those in urban settings, exhibit a threaten-
ing apocalyptic tone. Some biographic references
attest to the highly personal nature of these poems
and echo the fears experienced by Obasan’s pro-
tagonist, Naomi Nakane. “In the Woods” particu-
larly anticipates some of the walks Naomi takes
with Father Cedric in Itsuka, and others are full of
the memories and settings of Coaldale, where the
family was resettled after internment.
A Song of Lilith (2000) is Kogawa’s first book-
length poem that combines her poetry with Lilian
Broca’s artwork. A testimony to Kogawa’s interest
in biblical stories and reminiscent of her earlier
uses of biblical allusions, the poem explores the
story of Adam’s mythical first wife, Lilith. A Gar-
den of Anchors (2003) offers a selection of previ-
ously published poems.Bibliography
Hsu, Ruth. “A Conversation with Joy Kogawa.” Am-
erasia Journal 22, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 199–216.Susanna Hoeness-KrupsawKogawa, Joy (Nozomi) 155