'Obasan': revelations in a paradoxical scheme.

Suppose you have a stem of Butterfly Orchid With a cluster of white blossoms in full bloom, How would you arrange it? Would you keep it intact and display a mossive beauty or leave only one or two blossoms to present a modest beauty? Japanese flower arrangement for the tea ceremony chooses the latter, thus the paradoxical idea of enhancing beauty by sacrificing beauty, which is central to the Japanese aesthetic as expressed in many arts and rituals besides teaism and flower arrangement. Obasan, a novel written by second-generation Japanese-Canadian Joy Kogawa, utilizes the same subtle art of "expression through subtraction."

The book conceals ail enormous depth beneath the surface of a calm, modest, natural narrative. One of the novel's most symbolic scenes, which illuminates the heart of this art, is when Aya Obasan brings a bundle of food in a furoshiki, or cloth wrapper, to express her thanks to the men who came to help with the cremation of Grandnma Nakane. "Obasan puts her gift of food discreetly behind the second wood pile, where it will be seen after we leave"(131). Instead of an overt or direct expression of thanks, Obasan hides her gratitude in cloth. As a result of this silent, self-effacing, humble act, her thoughtfulness or gracefulness is all the more defected and esteemed by the recipients.

In Western cultures which favor openness or directness in speech and behavior, this subtle act of concealing or hinting at one's feelings would be regarded as a sign of evasiveness, indifference, or in an extreme case, rejection or abandonment, more often than not inviting misunderstanding or mistrust. However, in Japanese culture "silence" does not necessarily have a negative import; it is rather regarded as a positive force to bring about revelations, allowing one to perceive the very essence of a matter hidden behind silence.

Obasan, born out of the Japanese-Canadian bilingual milieu, deals with the polemics of the language of silence vis-a-vis the language of speech. One of the major tasks that the protagonist of the novel faces is the mastery of both languages in pursuit of the meaning of her suffering - her separation from Mother, her loss of home and country, and her humiliation and alienation by the enforced internment during and after World War II. In the novel, the two modes of language are represented by her two aunts: Aya Obasan embodying silence and Aunt Emily speech. Naomi says of their difference: "One lives in sound, the other in stone. Obasan's language remains deeply underground but Aunt Emily, BA, MA, is a word warrior"(32). The major tone of the book, however, is held by the language of silence, for the writer creates in the novel a contrivance to control Emily's provocative voice by confining it in the package which is to be concealed for nearly twenty years in Aya Obasan's attic. It is planned that Emily's voice spills out of its confinement bit by bit in response to the protigonist's progress in her narration.

The novel consists of thirty-nine chapters, of which only one-thirteenth is alloted to Emily's narration, which appears in chapters seven, fourteen, and twenty-seven. Her voice provides a historical background to Naomi's personal memories about the three different places where she has been brought up - Vancouver, Slocan, and Granton. Emily's narration discloses the buried historical and political facts of the Japanese-Canadians's internment and her indictment against the covered-up crimes and euphemised language of the official letters and documents released by the government. Her language is articulate, straightforward, persistent, and sometimes furious. On the other hand, Naomi's narration is ambiguous, low-keyed, compromising, and acquiescent. In the face of Aunt Emily's assault by tongue Naomi tells herself, "The very last thing in the world I was interested in talking about was our experiences during and after World War II"(33); "Crimes of history,...can stay in history. What we need is to concern ourselves with the injustices of today"(41); "Why not leave the dead to bury the dead?" "Life is so short,...the past so long. Shouldn't we turn the page and move on?"(42). Against this conciliatory Naomi, Emily shoots back, "The past is the future"(42); "Some people...are so busy seeing all sides of every issue that they neutralize concern and prevent necessary action. There's no strength in seeing aU sides unless you can act where real measurable injustice exists"(35); "Reconciliation can't begin without mutual recognition of facts"(183).

In contrast to militant Emily, Aya Obasan and Uncle are as quiet as a windless sea. They voice only gratefulness for life: "In the world, there is no better place....This country is the best. There is food. There is medicine. There is pension money. Gratitude. Gratitude"(42). However, Naomi knows from her experience as a school teacher that "it's [people] who say nothing who are in trouble more than the ones who complain"(34). Obasan., after many years of hardships, "has turned to stone"(198), "surround[ing] herself with a determined kind of stillness"(38). "The language of her grief is silence. She has learned it well, its idioms, its nuances. Over the years, silence within her small body has grown large and powerful"(14). "From both Obasan and Uncle [Naomi has] learned that speech often hides like an animal in a storm"(3).

Stephen, a musician who loves the world of sound, could not "bear the density of [Obasan's] inner retreat and the rebuke he felt in her silences, [and] fled to the ends of the earth"(14). Naomi remains behind in the world of silence, but she, too, will travel far in search of the sounds that will slake her persistent thirst for meaning: "Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word" (epigraph). How the writer responds to Naomi's quest for "living word" to replenish her weary soul, and how the language of silence and the language of speech are reconciled in the person of Naomi, remains to be seen till the end. However, what is clear to the reader is that without Emily's provocative speech uncovering the buried historical and political facts, Naomi's obscure narration, full of enigmatic dreams, nightmares, and vague fragmentary memories of her personal lffe, would remain undecoded. However, at the same time, if Emily's poignant narration overrode the novel, the book might end up a mere collection of political documents or propaganda, losing the beauty of its "literary efficacy" and eventually its "political efficacy."

In her essay on Obasan, Carol Fairbanks uses the term "political efficacy"(78) to measure the extent to which characters develop a sense of political involvement. However, I want to use this term as meaning to what exteint the novel evokes a political consciousness among its readers, leading them to active involvement in social reformation. Kogawa's book, in this sense, is a good example of successful "political efficacy," in view of its remarkable contribution to the advancement of the Redress movement in Canada. In my opinion, this "political efficacy" arises from the "literary efficacy" of the novel's paradoxical scheme of revelations in concealment.

The Riddle of the Folder Structure

Central to this scheme of disclosure through withholding is Aunt Emily's package, which lies at the heart of the novel's series of nested riddles. The series begins with two little epigraphs, one a quotation from The Book of Revelations and the other a prose poem, both placed before the first chapter. They arouse in the audience a sense of bewilderment by declaring the existence of a hidden thing; the former talks of the "hidden manna" and the latter "the hidden voice." With the opening of the first chapter, we are faced with Naomi's question to her uncle, asking for an answer to the "hidden reason" (Gottlieb 36)(1) for their annual visit to the prairie overlooking the coulee. However, this mystery is left unanswered till the end. So are the meanings of the first two riddles, until the story is fully unfolded and their metaphorical implications are detected. Coming into the sixth chapter, we become aware of the existence of Emily's hidden package, which, in addition to Emily's diary, newspaper clippings, and official documents, contains a grey cardboard folder that itself contains two envelopes that further contain the letters, telling about the victimization of Naomi's mother under the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. However, this information also remains unintelligible to Naomi as well as to the reader until the end of the novel, because the letters are written in Japanese and Obasan does not translate them for her.

Erika Gottlieb describes this structure of the novel as "a concentric pattern - container hidden within container within container - creating a sense of mystery and tension"(34), though she mainly refers to the first three riddles (hidden manna, hidden voice, hidden reason) as being associated with a tliree-dimensional landscape-the re-velation as indicating a cosmic world, the poem as Naomi's personal psychological wasteland, and the prairie as the Canadian natural/political landscape. I agree with Gottlieb that the riddles of these three landscapes are interrelated and that the "concentric structure" of the novel "compels the reader to search for a central meaning at the core of the multilayered texture of Naomi's narrative"(34). However, I would like to refer to the way the riddles are arranged as "the folder structure," because the design of the grey cardboard folder provides a key image which will consequently allow us to connect all the riddles and the symbols contained in the novel.

The structure of the grey cardboard folder and the structure of the novel correspond to each other in their design. The folder has two flaps with a red circle tab on each of them and is closed with a red string twirled around the tabs as a fastener (45 and 220). The two flaps are analogous to the chapters beginning and ending the novel, both of which are set in the same place - the moonlit prairie overlooking the coulee where Naomi comes with her uncle once every year. The two red tabs of the folder match the two little epigraphs of the novel. Mother's secret is contained within the folder, whereas the, secrets of the "hidden manna" and "the hidden voice" are folded within the body of the novel. This folder structure evokes the structure of a Buddhist shrine with its two flapping doors, inside of which Kannon, Goddess of Mercy, is enshrined. In Japan, any door with this type of structure is called -door of ~Kannon-biraki'," meaning door opened by Kannon." In view of the role played by Mother, which I will elaborate later, the image of Kazinon begins to be superimposed upon that of Mother in this hidden shrine behind the flapping doors.(2)

The folder structure signifies the interconnectedness of Mother, Aya Obasan, and Aunt Emily. Naomi's dream in chapter thirty-five suggests how the three women are linked. "Mother stood in the center. In her mouth she held a knotted string stem, like the twine and string of Obasan's ball which she keeps in the pantry. From the stem hung a rose, red as a heart" (227). The string in Mother's mouth connects her to Obasan and in turn to Aunt Emily:

Obasan...is winding the twine from Aunt Emily's package ontol twine ball she keeps in the paritry. Obasan never discards anything. Besides the twine ball, there's a ball of string...(44)

The nature of this female linkage is further elaborated through the two Chinese ideographs for the word "love" recalled by Naomi in her dream:

Once I came across two ideographs for the word "love." The first contained the root words "heart" and "hands" and action" - love as hands and heart in action together. The other ideograph, for passionate love," was formed of "heart," "to tell," and "a long thread." (228)(3)

It would not be difficult to identify the first ideograph as signifying Aya Obasan, a woman of tender heart who always resorts to hands and action, instead of words, whenever there is some urgent need to express her love or hide. her agitation. Hers are hands that toil for others, conceal anxiety or apprehension, bring comfort and happy memories, are folded and unfolded to express joy, offer thanks and nourishment, and meet in prayer. The second ideograph no doubt signifies Aunt Emily, a woman warrior of words and action, always seeking justice by telling and writing. Her passion" sometimes gets explosive as a "minefield" (34), but love no doubt is in her. Love like the coulee wind.... Love like a coyote" (8). Just as the word Passion" has a trifold meaning of rage, suffering, and love, Emily's "passionate love' comes out of her rage against the Canadian governments betrayal of democratic beliefs. But what keeps her fury under control is her knowledge of suffering and grief, which are the language of Aya Obasan. Emily's provocative attitude belongs to the Canadian. soil, but she is also endowed with the heritage of a Japanese sensitivity to Obasan's silent language.. Therefore, she never cuts the twine of the package herself but entrusts it to the hands of Aya Obasan, until the time is ripe to open it. The image of the "rose- held in Mothers mouth takes the reader to the coulee scene in the first and last chapters, where "wild roses" grow along the trickhng stream. Flowers symbolize the presence of Mother's tenderness and sweetness, for Naomi's memories of her mother are always associated with flowers - a flowery quilt (25), a flowery scent (47), the singing of "Miss Daffodilly" (51), the flower stuck on Father's pick (211), and "a rose, red as a heart" (227). In another of Naomi's drearns, Uncle appears dancing "a flower dance - a ritual of the dead, and in his mouth is a red red rose with an endless stem" (30). Thus, it is clealr that "a loving heart" is the common thread that ties the three women together, to which Uncle is also joined.

This tri-female structure is superimposed upon the folder structure. The loving hearts of the two aunts are matched with the two red tabs of the folder and tied by the folder's red string, which is connected to Mother's knotted string threaded out of her mouth holding a red rose like a heart at the end. In this linking, Mother situates herself as a central source of love and guidance. "Do not tell Stephen and Naomi [about my tragedy]" (241) entreated Mothers voice, to which the aunts's hearts responded, and the voice was sealed in the folder. The folder, then, was kept in Emily's package, which was eventually left in Obasan's attic in a long silence of over twenty years.

Mother's silence and the aunts's respectful compliance both arise from their loving hearts. However, for Stephen and Naomi who have long suffered from Mother's disappearance, her silence seems a grave contradiction of her love. The meaning of Mother's silence, therefore, must be deciphered. in order to solve this riddle, we must notice the special role assigned to Mother in the novel. Whether it was done consciously or unconsciously by Kogawa, Mother seems t(o be given a divine role to carry out a special mission in the novel. This is suggested by her superhuman endurance of suffering under the devastation of the atomic bomb. She, in the hell of pain, decided not to let her children discover her tragedy, a decision that seems almost beyond human power, even unnatural and aloof, in comparison with Grandma Kato's more human and ordinary attitude of seeking comfort from her family and unburdening herself from unbearable anguish.

Mother as a Symbolic Presence

Erika Gottlieb points out that Kogawa's characters are "almost faceless," devoid of "individual detail and close-ups" (38). Mother, in particular, is allegorical and symbolic. She is a hidden presence only recalled and protected within the memories of her family members. This physically absent Mother is given in the novel a concrete personification by Aya Obasan, who, though a childless woman herself, takes the role of a nurturing mother for Naomi and Stephen. For Obasan, Mother stays in her memory as an immaculate model of Japanese motherhood, the essence of which is "~yasashi-kokoro,' a tender, kind, thoughtful heart" (46).

Although tenderness is often associated with fragility or vulnerability, Kogawa describes it as the inner strength of Japanese motherhood. The following incidents show how similar both Mother and Obasan a,re in their attitudes to agitative situations. The first example is about Mother's response to Naomi's experience of terror while she witnessed yellow chicks, assaulted by a white hen, while the second one tells about Obasan's response to Stephen's experience of violence under the increasingly anti-Japanese mood during the war: "Mama_____"

Without a word and without alarm, she follows me quickly to the backyard.... With swift deft fingers, Mother removes the live chicks first, placing them in her apron. All the while that she acts, there is calm efficiency in her face and she does not speak. Her eyes are steady and matter of fact-the eyes of Japanese motherhood.... They are eyes that protect, shielding what is hidden most deeply in the heart of the child. (59)

One day he comes home from school, his glasses broken, black tear stains on his face. Obasan is hanging up clothes on the line from the back porch. When she sees him, she does not cry out but continues hanging up the laundry, removing the pegs from her mouth one at a time.... "Wat happened?" I whisper as Stephen comes up the stairs. He doesn't answer me.... "What happened?" It is Obasan asking this time and her voice is soft.... Obasan takes him by the hand into the kitchen and wipes his face. (70)

The attitudes described above - calmness, quietness, thoughtfulness, efficiency, and being matter-of-fact in the face of agitation, confusion, and suffering-are counted as key components of Japanese motherhood.

These motherly qualities - summarized under the term "tenderness" - are shared not only by Obasan and Mrs. Nakane but also by the Japanese-Canadian community as a whole. At the Outbreak of the wartime hysteria, the Japanese-Canadian community exhibited exactly what was described above. Naomi remembers that everywhere in the community the watchword exchanged among the adults was "Kodomo no tame," or "for the sake of the children" (21). The episode of an old woman who offered her flannel underskirt to a young mother lacking even diapers for her newborn baby in the confusion of the enforced removal by train is symbolic of this communal spirit of motherhood. A close-range view of this small community, Of course, reveals that it is not a uniform entity, containing such disturbing elements as depicted in the characters of fussy Mrs. Sugimoto, the mean mothers avoiding the weak and the sick, and the Morii gang betraying their own people. However, a long-range view renders it a picture of an undivided, coherent flock of people sharing the motherly role exemplified by Mother, who, in turn, evokes the divine image of Kannon revered in Asian cultures as the Goddess of Mercy.

Another symbolic image Mother presents in relating herself with Obasan and the entire community is the image of suffering. As mentioned earheir, Mother is a victim of the atomic bomb, whose buffering is easily superimposed upon the agony of the Japanese-Canadians as the victims of wartime disenfranchisement in Canada. As Mother endured her torment in silence, the Japanese-Canadians suffered their tragic fate in silence. The following is Kogawa's detailed description of the silent community:

We are the silences that speak from stone. We are the despised rendered voiceless, stripped of car, radio, camera and every means of communication, a trainload of eyes covered with mud and spittle....We are sent to Siloam, the pool called "Sent." We are sent to sending, that we may bring sight. We are the scholarly and the illiterate, the envied and the ugly, the fierce and the docile. We are those pioneers who cleared the bush and the forest with our hands, the gardeners tending the soil with our tenderness, the fishermen who are flung from the sea to flounder in the dust of prairies. We are the Issei and the Nisei and the Sansei, the Japanese Canadians. We disappear into the future undemanding as dew. (111-12)

This image of extinction is repeatedly suggested in the writer's depiction of a "crone-prone syndrome" (8) in the three childless women - Aya Obasan having lost her stillborn babies twice, Aunt Emily unmarried with no children to succeed her, and Naomi remaining single at the age of thirty-six.

Further elaboration of this image of disappearance occurs through the following references or allusions: first, the Israelites who wandered the desert for forty years after Exodus from Egypt, which is suggested in the reference to manna; second, the image of "the suffering servant" described by Isaiah(4) or the image of Christ taken to Golgotha, which are implied in Emily's saying, "What at bunch of sheep we are. Polite, Meek. All the way up to the slaughterhouse ramp" (38); third, the destiny of the Indian tribes driven out of the Canadian prairie, which is evoked by the comparison of Uncle Isamu to the Indian Chief, Sitting Bull (2)(5), and by the story of Rough Lock Bill (144); and finally, the suffering of Naomi's mother, who has perished under the atomic bomb and is enshrined in the folder which resembles Kannon's shrine. All the analogies Kogawa uses here converge in the motif of suffering, and Mother is again a pivotal figure that reflects the ordeal of the Japanese-Canadian community, evoking simultaneously the image of the suffering Christ who was despised and rejected by his people. Thus, it can be said that Mother appears in the novel as a symbolic presence carrying out dual as well as paradoxical roles - a silent sufferer evoking the image of the Christian God and a tender comforter associated with the Buddhist Goddess.

Hidden iove Revealed in Abandonment

The nature of Mother's divine role has been clarified in the previous section, but it remains to be seen how that "divinity" is related to Mother's vigilant silence. Before addressing this issue, however, it is necessary to examine the soil which nurtured Kogawa's spiritual world. Gayle Fujita has observed in regard to Obasan that "religion and morality in Nikkei society derive from both Buddhism and Christianity to form a Japanese-Canadian life neither schizophrenic not a disabling blend" (1986, 148). Kogawa's writing is no doubt a product of her bi-cultural and bi-religious upbringing. Kogawa's father, a model for Nakayama Sensei in the novel, for example, had been a Buddhist before he became a Christian preacher (Kogawa 1990). His dual religious background is clearly reflected in the role of Nakayama Sensei, who, as a Christian minister, offers his dispersed flock a Christian communion, but at the same time, as a spiritual leader of the community, performs any function to meet the needs of his people. Therefore, even at Grandma Nakane's funeral at which Buddhist rites are performed according to the wishes of her husband, Nakayama Sensei presides over the ceremony without any confusion. Obasan, a devout Christian, also follows the Buddhist practice of cremation and gathers Grandma Nakane's bones and ashes with chopstick.

This confluence of Christian and Buddhist streams of tradition flows most beautifully in the writer's world of symbolism. The symbols employed in the epigraph and the prose poem at the beginning of the novel incarnate the writer's inspirational world.

To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna and will give him a white stone and in the stone a new name written (The Revelation of John 2:17)

Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word (the prose poem)

This symbolic confluence reverberates in the natural symbolism of the prairie scenes in the first and last chapters.

The whole dark sky is bright with stars and only the new moon moves.(1)

Above the trees, the moon is a pure white stone.(249)

Whereas Kogawa's reference to "the hidden manna" is derived from her Christian heritage, such symbols as the moon and stone are inseparable from a Buddhist tradition of the community with which she is in contact. Pilgrimages to one's family graves are a common rite observed among the Japanese at the time of obon in summer when the moon becomes full. Uncle Isamu's annual visit to the prairie under the moonlight meant such a pilgrimage - a tribute to the memory of the dead sleeping underneath the stone.

Stone and manna, When combined, provide the reader a clue with which to translate the meaning of silence kept in unison by Uncle, Obasan and Aunt Emily. The quoted passage regarding" the hidden manna" is based on a Biblical legend that Jeremiah concealed "a golden jar of the manna" in an unknown place before the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BC. (II Maccabees 2:5); however, a more pertinent image comes from Exodus, chapter sixteen, which talks of the heavenly bread of manna given to the wandering Israelites as proof of the existence of God's love in the midst of their despair in the wilderness. As mentioned earlier, the fate of the Japanese-Canadians banished into the Canadian wasteland is comparable to that of the Israelites. Uncle's "stone bread"(12) made under such circumstances, therefore, inevitably conjures up this Biblical manna. It is baked for the children, though hard and clumsy like a stone in its outcome, in order to nourish their bodies in their frugal life.

Another character that projects the image of stone is Obasan. Like Uncle's bread, her stoniness is also contradictory. In spite of her stony silence, Obasan is remembered by Naomi as being soft and warm as the "ball of wool bits" she makes(44). Naomi says, "Many of Aya Obasan's things are soft against my cheek. Her fur coat, the fluffy quilt on her bed, and especially Obasan herself"(68). Obasan's silence, though in a way disrupting communication with the outer world, is a sign of deeply hidden love, as illustrated in the incident mentioned earlier of her inconspicuous offering of food to the workers at the cremation site.

Emily is also envisioned as a provider of food in the following description.

In Aunt Emily's package, the papers are piled as neatly as the thin white wafers in Sensei's silver box - symbols of communion, the materials of communication, white paper bread for the mind's meal.(182)

While Uncle's stone bread is a meal provided for the children's bodies, Emily's package is sent for the growth of the children's minds. Both are given as a witness to their love, as manna is given to the Israelites as a witness of God,s love. The fact that Emily's package is described as being "heavy as a loaf of Uncle's stone bread" (31) implies the writer's equation of Emily, Uncle, and Obasan in their weight of love although the modes of language they use for communication are different.

What is noticeable in this characterization of Uncle, Obasan, and Emily is that each is represented in connection with nourishment: Uncle as the baker of stone bread, Obasan as the carrier of bundled food, and Emily as the holder of "white paper bread." This seems to be a reflection of the writer's interest in the episode recorded before the story of hidden manna in Revelation 2:17, which speaks of a people who were tempted to eat the food offered to idols. Kogawa told me that she had been drawn to this episode while reading the Bible one day and had come to conceive of "the hidden manna" as "genuine" food given to those who persevere. She defined the eating of idol offerings as the act of taking "as nourishment anything...offered to us by way of advertising or off these many things we digest as food. If we resist food that does not really feed us, and we stay true to what is deeper, then 'the hidden manna' is given to us." (1990). That is to say, the Japanese-Canadian community is envisioned as the holder of a genuine food in the form of genuine love or sincerity as expressed for example by Uncle, Obasin, and Emily, but because of concealment, the existence of this food was invisible and, in a way, sacrificed.

This invisibility may biffle not only outsiders but even members of the Japanese-Canadian community. For example, Stephen and Naomi do not fully comprehend the adults's expression of love through silence. Both of them have rather felt rebuke and rejection in their elders's hidden speech. Mother's silence, in particular, has been a source of torment for Naomi, who says, "We were lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our mutual destruction"(243). The reason why Naomi felt rejected by her mother derives in part from her own sense of guilt. Right before Mother's departure to Japan, Naomi was sexually abused by Mr. Gower, but she found his hands both "frightening and pleasurable"(65). She kept it secret from Mother, and later felt that Mother's disappearance was a punishment for keeping silent. Her sense of guilt has remained unpardoned for thirty years.

Naomi's thirty-year thirst to recover what was lost has to be quenched, and the years of agony and destruction have to be restored. It seems the answer is hidden in the prayer of Nakayama Sensei: "Teach us to see Love's presence in our abandonment. Teach us to forgive"(243). Why forgiveness? Would it be too much to see Naomi's loss of innocence as being comparable to that of Adam and Eve, who found the experience of eating the forbidden fruit frightening but at the same time pleasurable? Their resulting "paradise lost" was to be recovered by Christ on the cross, which signifies the manifestation of God's forgiveness and of "Love's presence." The abandonment of mankind by God as told in Genesis and his abandonment of Jesus in the New Testament for the sake of a great purpose, which is to say, a greater love of his creation, is paralleled by the mother-daughter relationship in the novel. Naomi, who had felt abandoned by Mother, came to an awareness that Mother's love had been actually manifested to her in the act of Mother's suffering in abandonment and in her painful efforts to protect a dying child in the furious fire of the atomic bomb. Therefore, after having learned about Mother's tragedy, Naomi addresses her, "Young Mother at Nagasaki, am I not also there?" (242). It is an expression of her conviction of Mother's love always abiding with her even in her absence. This image of Mother as a sufferer evokes Christ's suffering and is superimposed on the image of Mother as a comforter associatcd with Kannon, Goddess of Mercy, who has a thousand hands to save sufferers.(6) Mother's hands holding the child are the "hands" outstretched by Kannon, and for Naomi, Obasan's hands were always there to indicate the presence Of Mother's love. This realization allows Naomi to come to terms with the past and recover her affirmation of life in a new perspective.

Kogawa's delineation of Naomi's psychic progress from a state of loss to the recovery of vitality in the face of Mother's silence is comparable with Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, in which a Catholic priest, Ferreira, suffers from the silence of God, who does nothing for the Japanese Christians persecuted by the Tokugawa regime. Through his agony, however, Ferreira grips the heart of God's love revealed in complete abandonment and self-denial. He comes to see that Christ "would have apostatized" to enact love "even if it meant giving up everything he had" (Endo 269); thus follows Ferreira's decision to abandon his priesthood to save the persecuted by denying his faith, a treasure he has cherished more than anything else. Endo cohcludes the novel with the following remarks made by one of the priests who apostatized: "But Our Lord was not silent. Even if he had been silent, my life until this days would have spoken of him" (Endo 298). By this paradoxical statement, Endo seems to suggest that God's silence is a dynamic force which redirects human efforts from a merely awaiting to an enacting love.

A similar view is exressed by Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew, whose statement Kogawa introduced to me during my interview:"We can no longer believe that God protects us, but we must protect God." Another witness is heard from Rosemary Ruether, an American feminist theologian, whom Kogawa also quoted during my interview:

Each of us must discover for ourselves the secret key to divine abandonment, that is, God hag abandoned divine power completely and utterly into the human condition that we might not abandon one another.

In response to Ruether's statement, Kogawa reveals her View as follows:

I read this to mean that we dare to hope, in spite of what seems to be evidence to the contrary, that there is available to us within our human everyday mundane reality the empowerment of an unlimited, basically unimaginable force of love. It may be that we are swinging on the "transcendence-imminence" pendulum in the direction of imminence, the argument being that our cries to the Help "out there" were met by silence and that we did not seek out the Help that is available here in our human condition. Since we cannot accept that we are lost and doomed, since we have faith that we are loved, we are rethinking where our help and salvation lies and are daring to trust that it is in our midst. I don't see that as being only d humanist statement, but as a statement of continuing faith in a terrifying Love that teaches us and does not abandon. (Garrod 141)

Our age, which has undergone the traumatic experience of holocaust, is the age of disbelief, chanting the theme of "God's death." Kogawa's Obasan dealing with the Japanese-Canadians's experience of holocaust, however, is to be viewed as a statement of "continuing faith in a terrifying love" in the age of God"s absence. It is a statement of hope against despair, daring to trust in an "unimaginable force of love" existing in our midst, rather than crying for the help "out there," for love is what is revealed in the pain of our human endeavors to not abandon one another.

Obasan is a book full of paradoxical revelations not only in the novel's artistic devices but also its thematic layout: the device of containing Emily's voice in the package creates a reverse effect of heightening the impact of speech through controlled exposure while bringing out the hidden depth of the language of silence; the twin epigraphs asserting the existence of "a hidden thing" and introducing a series of riddles stimulate the reader's anticipation of what will come in the succeeding story; the structure of the sealed cardboard folder heightens a sense of mystery, which in the end is designed to unfold the secret of Mother's silence or death; and the writer's symbolism blending both Christian and Buddhist traditions illuminates a paradoxical truth of "hidden Love revealed in abandonment."

In closing, it remains to indicate how the language of silence and the language of speech are reconciled by Naomi. In the final chapter, she visits the coulee where she used to come with her uncle, "above the trees, the moon is a pure white stone" (247). Naomi thinks to herself, "If I hold my head a certain way, I can smell them from where I am" (247). Naomi is now certain of the presence of Mother's love, however faint it may seem. In order to detect it, she had to learn a "certain way, to hold her head, that is, to be attentive to silent language. During the years of living with Obasan's silence, Naomi seems to have acquired ah attitude of being attentive to the needs and thoughts of others even before being told. Gayle Fujita calls it "Naomi's non-verbal mode of apprehension summarized by the term 'attendance'" (1985 34) and points out that this sensibility has been fostered among the Japanese-Canadian and American community and inherited as a source of self-realization.

Naomi comes to the coulee wearing "Emily's coat" (246), which she finds warmer than her own. It means that for her, finally, "the avenues of silence" have become "the avenues of speech" (228), something the Grand Inquisitor of her nightmare did not understand. In other words, wearing Emily's protective coat implies Naomi's new determination to don the language of Aunt Emily to commit herself to transmitting the legacy of history. Tile line, "the reflection [of the moon] is rippling in the river-water and stone dancing' (247), suggests that the word confined in the "stone" has finally found its way to "burst with telling." The names of those who have died that Naomi now recalls under the moonlight are inscribed in the stone-like white moon above the trees as "a new name,"(7) as Emilys voice echoes in Naomi's mind: "You have to remember,... You are your history... Don't deny the past- (49-50); "the past is the future"(42).

This essay is an extended version of a talk given at a UCSB Conference on "Asian American Cultural Transformation: A Literature of One's Own," April 27, 1991. My sincere thanks to Professor Gayle K. Sato of Keio University for her encouragement and valuable comments and advice in completing this paper, and also to Professor Elaine Kim and Professor Sau-Ling C. Wong of U.C. Berkeley for their support during my stay i2s a visiting scholar at Berkeley from 1990 to 1991. Without this opportunity the paper would not have materialized.

Notes

(1.) I am thankful for Gottlieb's insightful analysis of Obasan's structure and strategies. "The hidden reason" is the term she uses in her reference to Kogawa's riddles embedded in the novel. I wanted to avoid using the same approach of "riddle-solving," but this was a key concept I had held of the novel so I decided to stay with it. (2.) I am grateful to joy Kogawa for taking time to see me in Vancouver on November 26, 1990. During my interview, I asked her whethter this folder structure was her deliberate contrivance or not. She denied any conscious attempt on her part, saying that "I had none of this in mind. This is your creation or your discovery.... You see, the whole thing is, I am not that conscious, but the reader like yourself can make conscious what is there. This refers to all of US being somehow connected on some unconscious level. We can always discover things through the unconscious layer, but when I work, I often discover much later, after I have written, what it was that was there." (3.) The Chinese ideographs for the words love" and "passion" are written as follows: In the Japanese context, the former tends to connote Agape, the latter Eros. I take it that Kogawa uses the latter for Aunt Ermy for her having a sense of imminency or urgency, which is typical of the nature of Eros. (4.) Cf. Isaiah 53:7 (5.) I concur with B.A. St. Andrews's view of Kogawa's comparison of Uncle to Chief Sitting Bull as People "displaced by war and racial hatred," and with Carol Fairbanks, who also notes Kogawa's allusion to Indians. Fairbanks sees "the golden brown woman" in Naomi's dream as a native woman. (6.) This superimposition of Christian symbolism upon Buddhist symbolism is not new to the Japanese. Japanese religiosity has been nurtured in a mythical climate where Goddess worship has existed since the emergence of the Sun-Goddess Amaterasu-Oomikami in the age of mythology. Consequently, in the seventeenth century when the Tokugawa regime prohibited the dissemination of Christianity in Japan, the persecuted Japanese Christians who went underground disguised their faith by worshipping a so-called Mary-Kannon, whose face was somehow modified from the western image of Mother Mary into the Asian one of the Buddhist Kannon, and more often than not the image of Jesus was secretly hidden behind Mary/Kannon. Sometimes those hiding Christians worshipped the image of baby Jesus, who was held in the arms of Kannon whose face was that of a peasant woman of their own. Shusaku Endo, a Catholic writer, is one of those trying to trace how underground Christians came to hold a mother image in their Christian faith. Cf. Shusaku Endo's "Hahainarumono [Something Called Motherhood]" (7.) According to Shougo Yamaya's Exegesis of the New Testament, "a new name" is considered as referring to the name of the resurrected Christ, which is said to be inscribed in "the white stone." The Buddhist rite of giving a posthumous Buddhist name to the dead could be superimposed upon this account in a Christian context.

Works Cited

Endo, Shusaku. "Hahanarumono [Something Called Motherhood]." Endo, Shusaku Zenshu. Vol. 6 & 11. Tokyo: Shincho-sha, 1975.

. Silence. Trans. William Johnston. Tokyo: Sophia University in cooperation with the Charles E. Tittle Company, 1977. Fairbanks, Carol. "Joy Kogawa's Obasan: A Study in Political Efficacy." The Journal of

American and Canadian Studies [America Canada Kenkyu-sho: Sophia University] No. 5 (Spring 1990): 73-92. Fupta, Gayle K. "To Attend the Sound of Stone: The Sensibility of Silence in Obasan." MELUS 12.3 (1985): 33-42.

. Doctoral Dissertation: "The Ceremonial Self in Japanese American Literature." Brown University, 1986. Gottlieb, Erika. "The Riddle of Concentric Worlds in Obasan." Canadian Literature No. 109 1986):34-53. Garrod, Andrew. Speaking For Myself: Canadian Writers in Interview. Newfoundland: Breakwater Books, 1906. Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Boston: Godine, 1982.

. Personal Interview. November 26,1990. Okakura, Kakuzo. The Book of Tea, A Japanese Harmony of Art, Culture and The Simple Life. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1935. St. Andrews, B.A. "The Ostracized Self: The Saga of the Japanese Canadians in Joy Kogawa's Obasan." AMERASIA 13.2 1986,-87):167-71. Yamaya, Shogo et al. Shinyaku Seisho Ryakukai [The Exegesis of the New Testament]. Tokyo: Nihon Kirisut(z) Kyoudan, 1976.