In Search of Someday: Trauma and Repetition in Joy Kogawa’s Fiction

Abstract

This essay brings to the forefront the work by Joy Kogawa that preceded and followed her watershed novel Obasan (1981), which privileges the perspective of a traumatized child to narrate the internment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War. The objective of the essay is to address an overlooked pattern of repetition and revision that can be traced across these multiple texts—a sequel, Itsuka / Emily Kato; a revision for children, Naomi’s Road; and a thematic follow-up, The Rain Ascends—all of which were revisited by Kogawa after their initial publication. Drawing on pivotal work on trauma and memory, the essay considers to what extent Kogawa’s larger story of oppression, dispersal, and forgetting is unconcludable.