Summary Of The Novel 'Obasan' By Joy Kogawa

The first impressions of the novel were not positive. “Obasan” by Joy Kogawa was published in 1981 and has a lot of meaning towards racism that occurred in Canada. Kogawa’s novel draws the relationship between Japanese and Canadians during the world War Two in the reader’s mind and describes how hard it was for Japanese people to live in Canada during that period. One of the biggest themes the author uses is “Silence”. To find the theme silence is quite easy as it can be found everywhere in the novel. In Japan, being silent can be analyzed as manners but on the other hand it can be described as suffering because the symbolism of silence might display suffering from a racist society but are finding their own way to beat it. Throughout the novel,

One of the famous philosophers Socrates calls these lies as “noble lies”. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that there are two types of lies: one is a normal lie and the other is a noble lie. It is a necessary lie and a noble lie is based on justice (Socrates, book 7).

According to Socrates, Obasan’s deception to Naomi about her father can be seen as necessary in order to make her less mournful. From the book, it is clear that Naomi’s life was not that easy because her neighbor abuses her, which inevitably leads to rape. Her mother disappears when she was young without telling her, and Obasan knows that Naomi was having an extremely hard time. Obasan’s silence was a necessary deception but at the same time Naomi learned more things through Obasan’s silence than her words. As reported by Shin from Shih Chien University, she comments that “Though silence surrounds Naomi, eventually she will comprehend that silence implicates a far richer vastness than what words can express” (Shin, 6). To be more specific, Obasan knows that telling Naomi the truth will hurt her feelings, so by lying to her using silence she can avoid giving her more pain thus, the deceptive lie to Naomi was a noble lie. As a final point, Obasan’s silence benefits herself in order to protect herself from the racial society and also it benefits others and helps them understand more by using