Welcome to Historic Joy Kogawa House

Globe & Mail: 

Michael Posner interviews

Joy Kogawa about

rewritten "Emily Kato"



Restoring a book to life:
Joy Kogawa has rewritten one of her novels. It's less easy to save her family home, writes MICHAEL POSNER,

Globe and Mail, March 9, 2006. p. R3.
MICHAEL POSNER

For Joy Kogawa, this should be a time of celebration and fulfilment. Penguin has just released her new novel Emily Kato, a substantially revised version of an earlier book, Itsuka. Instead, it's become a time of great anxiety. In less than four weeks, the city of Vancouver is expected to issue a demolition permit to the Taiwanese owner of a small, wood-frame home at 1450 West 64th Ave. in Vancouver's Marpole neighbourhood.

It was in that home that Kogawa spent the first six years of her life before being summarily evicted and resettled, along with some 22,000 other Japanese-Canadians, as part of the federal government's 1942 Second World War internment program. After the war, Kogawa's childhood home was expropriated by Ottawa and auctioned off at below market value.

Now, the Land Conservancy of British Columbia (TLC) is desperately spearheading a campaign to raise $1.25-million to buy it, stop its demolition and convert the heritage property into a writers-in-residence retreat. But as of Tuesday, TLC had managed to collect less than $200,000. The federal Heritage Department has so far indicated an unwillingness to step in with financial aid, although TLC head Bill Turner says he's still hopeful Heritage Minister Bev Oda will change her mind, and that the necessary funds can be assembled in the remaining days.

"There isn't much time," Kogawa conceded in an interview last week in her Spartan condo in downtown Toronto. She will speak and read from her work at a fundraising event at 5 p.m. today at Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity.

  Kogawa says that if she were a member of the Jewish community, she has no doubt that affluent Jews would step forward to save the house. Although there are many equally well-heeled Japanese-Canadians, "not one of them will step forward," she maintains. "It's because of the way this community was destroyed. The dispersal policy was intended to make us never a community again, and it was successful. Cohesion does not exist."

It's rare for an author to do a major revision of a novel and reissue it under another name. But Kogawa has her reasons. For years, she was lauded for Obasan, her thinly fictionalized 1983 account of her family's forced resettlement to Slocan, in British Columbia. "There was not a single negative review. Then when Itsuka came out in hardcover [in 1993], I was killed by a single review in The Globe and Mail. He said it was unpublishable, full of pages and pages of painfully embarrassing writing. It killed me as a writer for years. I took it to heart, even though I didn't know what was embarrassing about it." Although there were other, more positive reviews, "I couldn't hear anything else. I trusted The Globe. I thought that was the truth. Other people were just being kind."

She spent years thinking about how to rewrite it. But now that it's out, she says she can't find it in bookstores and hasn't seen a single review. "Penguin did not advertise it or promote it. My feeling is it's worse than Itsuka. That at least stayed in print. But my question is, is it okay as a book? I just have no idea."

Despite the accolades heaped on Obasan -- Quill & Quire magazine called it "one of the most influential novels of the 20th century" -- Kogawa considers The Rain Ascends (1995) her most important book by far. It's the story of an Anglican priest who is discovered to be a pedophile. The book, she says, "brought me out of debility and weakness and fear into strength. When [retired Anglican archbishop] Desmond Tutu holds out his hands and says, 'all, all, all,' I now understand what that means. It includes the pedophile and even, God forbid, Hitler."

She hopes to address these issues in a new book, still in gestation. The working title is Gently to Nagasaki, where the second atomic bomb was dropped in August, 1945. "It's about Naomi's" -- the fictionalized version of Kogawa -- "search for the lost mother, the lost Goddess, lost love." She sees no fundamental difference between natural disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami or hurricane Katrina and man-made tragedies like the atom bomb that killed millions of Japanese.

"I think humans are a natural disaster. We're here to love each other in the midst of all the disasters in which we find ourselves. We must find the place of kindness, gentleness and forgiveness. The calling is for the weak to become strong, recognize it and then stand with the weak."

Genuine or sham, many writers project a persona of great confidence about the merit of their work. Not Kogawa. Only the favourable opinion of critics and readers she respects, it seems, can validate her talent. Stung by the one blistering critique of Itsuka, she stopped writing and devoted almost a decade to a community-aid project called the Toronto Dollar. Consumers who use the currency -- available from certain ATMs in downtown Toronto -- at participating retailers effectively give 10 per cent of the purchase price to an organization that invests in community projects.

"It's a new paradigm, a way of cutting loose from the greed that motivates the economic model. This is the symbol of money not based on profit first, but on the idea that people can help each other. We can become more realized human beings and more loving. This seems to be at least as important as writing books. Community action can speak just as loudly."

As for her childhood family home, the looming prospect of seeing it destroyed -- for the sake of another monstrous homage to Vancouver's soaring property values -- sickens her. "But if it goes down, it won't go down unseen. Death is a part of life. Murder is a part of life. You can murder buildings. You can murder history. But healing goes on forever. So if it goes down, the healing goes on forever."