Lost Objects and Dispossession in Novels About the Japanese Canadian Internment

“We’ve only lost things”: Lost Objects and Dispossession in Novels about the Japanese Canadian Internment

Lara Jean Kinuye Okihiro

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

“We’ve only lost things”: Lost Objects and Dispossession in Novels about the Japanese Canadian Internment

Lara Okihiro

Department of English University of Toronto

Abstract

Novels about the Japanese Canadian internment are obsessed with things, often depicting collectors and hoarders who have heightened relationships to the objects around them.

Analysing Jessie L. Beattie’s Strength for the Bridge (1966), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

(1981), Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field (1998), and Frances Itani’s Requiem

(2011), this thesis argues that the novels’ preoccupation with things indicates how integral things are to subjectivity, as well as how painful and traumatic losing one’s belongings can be.

Renewing our attention to the material, as the novels indicate, this project analyses the multiple and complex meanings of the objects in the novels in order to fill-in the contours of the internment, bringing into view the difficulties of an often overlooked or misunderstood experience. Whereas the internment predominantly appears as a matter of property losses for which the population could be compensated, this project offers a revised view that appreciates dispossession and the loss of property as a particularly difficult and traumatic experience, and as a violence purposefully intended to eradicate the Japanese Canadian population from the west coast. Evoking phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and Marxist thinkers, I argue that ownership and private property are not

about personal gain but deeply social comportments that help individuals understand themselves as uniquely part of history and uniquely responsible for the world. My analysis of the novels further demonstrates how a deep sense of trust that is necessary for entering into the world and into social relationships fundamentally depends on stable relationships with objects. To this end, I suggest rethinking issues involved in accommodating others (refugees and exiles) in terms that appreciate that such trust and sense of responsibility are at stake. Moreover, I argue that, even when characters are able to carry on with their lives, the trauma of displacement and dispossession remains, and that we should try to keep this in view in order to respect and appreciate the plights of others more fully. Finally, this thesis contributes to ethical debates by proposing an ethics of materialism, whereby I argue that attending to material items can forge stronger relationships to the world and to each other.

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Acknowledgments

For their assistance through the course of this project, I am indebted to Julian Patrick, Victor Li, and Mari Ruti for their consistent encouragement, for their inspiration, and for the careful and insightful reading they have taught me and given to my work. It has been a pleasure and honour working with you. I also thank Christopher Lee, Karina Vernon, and Lynne Magnusson for their astute and generous attention to my work and for their very thoughtful questions. Smaro Kamboureli, Roy Miki, Joy Kogawa, Kirsten McAllister, Russell Brown, and Linda Reid (Nikkei National Museum) have also provided me with invaluable conversation, as have many others in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. Thanks to the generous and open faculty members and staff, to my intelligent and inspiring colleagues, and to the students I have had the pleasure of teaching along the way. I am grateful to those who have offered questions and comments during panels and workshops at ACCUTE, ACQL, and TransCanadas Conferences, and at the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas at McGill University. I am also grateful to the University of Toronto, the Department of English, the Province of Ontario, and the Jackman Humanities Institute for their financial support. My deepest appreciation goes to my friends and family across Canada and the ocean, including Aude, Elio, Téo, Marius, and Jules Di Paolantonio, Janis Bridger and her family, Masumi Okihiro, and Helen Okihiro. I am forever grateful to my parents, Fran Okihiro and Richard Okihiro, and to my grandmother, Hisa Okihiro, for all their love and support, and for their stories of the past. My infinite love and thanks to my partner in life, love, and all things – my co-conspirator – Mario Di Paolantonio, and to Kira Di Paolantonio and Imogene Di Paolantonio, our “philosophers of wonder,” who have taught me so much about myself and the world in their six years of life. This project is dedicated to the memories of Jean Donley and Koichiro Okihiro, my grandparents, and to Magdalena Di Paolantonio. And it is dedicated to Hisa, Kira, and Imogene who bookend a living history that channels through these pages.

Table of Contents List of Plates ...... vi Introduction: Things Lost and Left Behind ...... 1 0.1 Things in Literature about the Japanese Canadian Internment 4 0.2 Overview of the Argument 9 0.3 The History of the Japanese Canadian Internment 12 0.4 Fictional Things 18 Chapter 1 “We’ve only lost things”: The Significance of Everyday Items and the Things Lost in Internment in Jessie Beattie’s Strength for the Bridge ...... 21 1.1 Background 26 1.2 Things in the Novel 30 1.3 Keiichi’s Things 34 1.4 The Joy of Possession 41 1.5 Fragile Things and Racism Before the Internment 51 1.6 Fragility and Bare Life in the Internment 55 1.7 Perverse Attachments 62 1.8 We’ve Only Lost Things 65 Chapter 2 Losing Things and Losing Trust: Multiple Losses, Transitional Objects, Agoraphobia, and Hoarding in Obasan ...... 69 2.1 The Critical Debate 73 2.2 Multiple Losses 78 2.3 Massive Losses 86 2.4 The Repercussions of Lost Things in the Lives of the Characters 95 2.5 Hoarding 96 2.6 Agoraphobia 104 2.7 Final Thing 113 Chapter 3 The Material Wounds of Internment: The Broken Things and Damaged Bodies in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field and Frances Itani’s Requiem ..... 118 3.1 Material Impoverishment and Existential Dislocation: Things in Requiem 124 3.2 Tainted Objects: Things in The Electrical Field 133 3.3 Bin’s Collection of Smalls and the River of History 140 3.4 Beautiful Things 145 3.5 “New Wounded” Subjects 151 3.6 Bin and Asako as New Wounded 154 3.7 What Remains after the Disaster 166 Conclusion: An Ethics of Materialism ...... 170 4.1 The Remaining Things 174 Works Consulted ...... 185

List of Plates

“Properties of Teiji Morishita 466 Cordova St. E Vancouver, B.C.,” page 3 Nikkei National Museum ……………………………………………………………………… 2

Introduction: Things Lost and Left Behind

In late 2015, during the fervour surrounding the Canadian government’s decision to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees to Canada, the Globe and Mail published an article and photo- essay about what two families were deciding to pack with them on their journey. According to the article, the families suffered “from the anxiety of packing”: from selecting what to bring and leave behind, and figuring out how it would all fit. The author, Samya Kullab, describes the family members choosing between necessary and sentimental items, and remarks that even “jars of cured eggplants, photographs, an old watch, a hairdryer, a teddy bear” appear as pieces “of a person who once had to decide between life and death.” The photographs accompanying the article display bottles of makeup, kitchen utensils, jewellery, movies, and family pictures arranged on a black background. Almasa Habash describes packing incense because the smell “‘brings back strong memories’” and reminds her “‘of better times in Syria’” when, for example, the fragrance meant guests would be arriving. The Habash family’s objects also include their daughter’s teddy bear named after a cousin left behind, and the keys to their house, which they locked up thinking they would be able to return to it after things settled down. For the Habash family, these items maintain a sense of who they are, their relationships to others, and their specific place in the world. However, the photographs of these few objects also suggest all that is lost even while these few items are kept: the homes, all the missing household items and heirlooms, the friends and family members, the times of burning incense and welcoming guests, the daily routines they lived and breathed.

Looking at the pictures of the Habash and Dalaa families’ items, I cannot help but think of a very different document I have in my files from my research trip to the Nikkei National Museum archives in Burnaby British Columbia: a long, nine-page list of household items and furniture listed room by room, entitled “Properties of Teiji Morishita 466 Cordova St. E Vancouver, B.C.” The list appears to have been attached to an official form – entitled “Office of the Custodian, Japanese Section, File No. 5078” – on which “persons of the Japanese race having property in any protected area” were

supposed to give “full particulars” of their property in order for its “proper administration,” but which was later used for the unjust liquidation of the items. On the official form, under the “Statement of Personal Property Owned,” Morishita first wrote, “There should be so many household equipment that I cannot give details,” but he crosses this out and attaches the nine regular sized sheets of paper listing everything he and his family had owned and kept in their house in single-spaced lines of typewriter print with a few hand-printed numbers and words. Organized under headings indicating the rooms of the house, from the parlour to the bedrooms and the store room, the inventory of household items includes dolls, books, a fish bowl and bird cages, window blinds, champagne glasses and bowls, umbrellas, hammers, furniture – such as a three-

Page 3 of “Properties of Teiji Morishita 466 Cordova St. E Vancouver, B.C.,” Nikkei National Museum.

piece chesterfield set, tables, lamps, beds – as well as appliances – a sewing machine, range, washing machine, tin stove, and vacuum cleaners. There are no pictures of these items and very minimal description: the list uses only sparse adjectives, like “square” and “Japan made.” And beside each entry is the estimated monetary value of the item with the numbers totalled at the bottom of each room list, the grand total of all their things being $3,985.41.

Like the objects discussed and displayed in the Globe and Mail article, Morishita’s list of objects tells us about him and his family: that they were financially comfortable and interested in both Japanese and Canadian arts, culture, and aesthetics. Morishita was a merchant, partnered with his brother-in-law in a store business, who owned a nine room, two storey house with a large garage, housing many necessities and comforts for him and his wife, Sawa, and their five children. The glass ash trays and vases, the carpets and curtains, the floor lamps with silk shades, and the chikuonki (gramophone), evoke a comfortable and richly decorated space in which they appreciated English and Japanese music and books, and may have played the samisen (musical instrument). They collected decorative dolls and statues, even had a dark room with a photo enlarger, kept a butsudan (shrine), and had pets (the fish and birds). However, similar to the photograph of the Habash families’ things, what Morishita’s list of household items and personal objects also signifies for us is how much was lost. For, unlike the Habash family’s household effects that might be (though are probably not) still preserved within their locked up house for which they keep the keys, we know what happened to the Morishitas’ things.

We know that between 1943 and 1944, all the property was sold by the government, if it was not looted first, and that by February 1946 (nearly four years after being forcibly displaced and after the war ended) so little remained for the interned family that Morishita writes to the Custodian’s Office appealing to withdraw enough money from his own savings account to feed and dress his undernourished and insufficiently clothed children (Morishita “Letter 11 Feb 1946”). Indeed, there was and remains such a lack of things for Japanese Canadians that, years later, completing research at the Nikkei National Museum, I found that though the museum has a lot of

documents, photographs, letters, and articles from the 1940s and onward, it has very few objects, especially objects that would show its audience and patrons what pre-war Japanese Canadian life was like.1 Against the impoverished circumstances of the Morishita family and the Nikkei National Museum’s collection, the nine-page list of items presents a kind of negative archive, showing us a ghostly, shadow image of what the family and community had and the life the members led when they had sufficient clothing and adequate nourishment before their internment in isolated camps in the mountains. Not a repository of the things themselves, but an inventory that can only represent what existed through and as an absence, and without even pictures, the list of things suggests how irrecoverable the items and the life to which they belonged are. And, it reminds us just how much families like the Morishitas and the Habashes lose when they are forced to leave their homes. The reader of the document is left wondering what happened to the fish in the fish bowl, the pair of canaries, and the two lovebirds in the cages in the parlour, and what happened to the family members.

0.1 Things in Literature about the Japanese Canadian Internment

The haunting absences and the negative outline of his family’s former house and lives conveyed in Morishita’s document suggest the opposite of what Edward Said says, in “Reflections on Exile,” is the greatest virtue of exiles: their ability to leave all things and all places behind (185). Quoting “Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony,” Said writes, “‘The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his’” (185). However, far from being unencumbered by attachments and thriving because they have learned to accept being separated from places and things, the nine-page list shows that those expelled from their homes do not always get used to being without their things and do not easily give up their attachments, rather holding on to the documents of the missing items years later. Similarly, the novels about the Japanese Canadian internment

1 People of Japanese ancestry lived in Canada for over 60 years before the internment. The majority of the artefacts in the museum are articles that would have been necessary for daily living and that were easily portable, like kitchenware and clothing. When I visited, I saw a radio and a turntable, as well as some butsudans. Linda Reid, the Research Archivist at the museum, recounted seeing a butsudan at a sale many years ago that she was sure belonged to her uncle, and having to buy it back, so to speak. A database of the museum’s collection is available to view online.

show that exiles, especially those forcibly removed from their homes, have particularly deep and strong attachments to things. Like Morishita’s document that testifies to the value of objects when none of these objects remain, the novels appear haunted by objects and their loss insofar as they depict characters that, having experienced the internment, are often collectors who have heightened relationships or reactions to the fictional material items depicted in the texts. In Obasan by Joy Kogawa, The Electrical Field by Kerri Sakamoto, and Requiem by Frances Itani the characters within the novels keep things, even to the point of hoarding items and fixating on particular objects. Obasan, in Kogawa’s novel, is a particularly impressive hoarder who, as the protagonist, Naomi, describes, “never discards anything,” including used twine and “wool bits” she carefully wraps on sticks and stores in the pantry (46-7). To convey a sense of all she accumulates, her house, room-by-room, appears as follows. In the attic, she stores “a number of cardboard boxes, a small trunk, [and] piles of magazines and newspapers” (23), including things that are not useful to her such as old “chisels, hammer, a mallet, a thin pointed saw” from Japan, and issues of “Mechanix Illustrated,” along with bundles of letters and old ID cards (24). She also keeps the frayed and moth-eaten patch-work quilt Naomi’s mother made when Naomi was four years old (26). In the kitchen, Obasan keeps old mandarin orange boxes under the table filled with more packages, notably one for Naomi from her Aunt Emily enclosing a diary, documents, and letters written during WWII (31). And in the living room, boxes are tucked under TV trays and the “window ledges are covered in plants,” so that, for Naomi, the house is like “an obstacle course” and there “is barely room to stand” (244).

Similarly, Asako, in Sakamoto’s novel, and Bin, in Itani’s novel, collect and store things. Asako’s house is not as cluttered and messy as Obasan’s, but she does keep and wear the old clothing of her mother, who died years before, like “Mama’s old shoes that I wore out of stinginess” (40) and “Mama’s good mohair sweater” (38), up the sleeves of which she stuffs old and used tissues. Her coat probably also belonged to her mother because like the other worn garments, it too is “shabby” (92). Asako keeps two dozen extra pairs of stockings she purchased in the city stored away, opening one “new pair every two years over the past twenty” (6). Additionally, she keeps all kinds of old

photographs, papers, and cards in a drawer in the dining room cabinet, and she collects articles from the newspaper, carefully cutting and pasting them into a notebook that seems to be “growing” with her additions (66). Moreover, Asako consistently engages with her things, perpetually dusting, fluffing pillows, changing sheets, and deadheading plants in her garden. And, Asako even fixates on things, most notably talking to the framed photograph of her dead brother Eiji.

Bin, on the other hand, is not the keeper of his house, winding twine or ordering and cleaning in the same way Obasan and Asako do. However, he keeps a collection of tokens and figurines, which he calls, “my array of smalls, collected over the years” and which he displays along the windowsill in his studio (21). All of the smalls are in some way broken, and they each remind him of the places where and times when he acquired them. Because of the damaged nature of the things he collects, their injury being integral to why he keeps the token, Bin also imagines and understands himself as a unique kind of gatherer of objects: as the “protector of fractured and broken goods” (Itani 21-22, italics are in the original). Moreover, as an artist, he makes things insofar as he produces paintings that, like the broken artefacts, similarly connect to his feelings and his past. And, having just suffered the sudden loss of his wife, Lena, Bin inherits and is dealing with a number of items that he did not feel were his responsibility before, most notably a package from the past like Naomi’s: a packet of documents and letters pertaining to his and his family’s internment, which Lena, who was an historian, had previously compiled.

In addition to the novels that are the subject of this dissertation, a number of other books by Japanese Canadians or about the internment display a preoccupation with things, testifying to dispossession as a particularly complex and meaningful issue that persists, rather than, as Said suggests, a positive quality one can internalize and use. For example, in Kyo Maclear’s novel, The Letter Opener, the protagonist’s mother lives in a Japanese Canadian retirement home with former internees who collect bonsai trees and “Popular Mechanics” magazines (102), while the mother herself, due to Alzheimer’s, has begun to obsessively acquire and keep things (106).2 Moreover, another character is a

2 As Naiko, the protagonist-narrator, describes, “The contents of her dresser became a source of preoccupation and constant rediscovery. When something caught her eye it was adopted – like an Expo 67

Holocaust survivor who returns to her home to find it mostly empty except for some “valueless debris” – “clarinet reeds”, “a ball of twine, candle stubs” – that become for her “as precious as heirlooms” (34-5). In Lynne Kutsukake’s recent novel, The Translation of Love, set in Japan during the American occupation right after WWII, because of their impoverished and desperate circumstances, the characters are very conscious of the smallest things and their value, looking out for what can be salvaged from junk, like buttons from scrap cloth, and “old newspapers and magazine’s for recycling” (159). And for the Japanese Canadian characters, who had been interned in Canada but later “repatriated” or deported to Japan, and whose impoverishment includes being deprived of their “dignity . . . honor . . . pride and . . . sense of self worth” (148), keeping objects is a means of silently expressing and asserting oneself in such hard times. As the narrator expresses of the protagonist’s thieving Japanese Canadian father: “He took because white people took. . . . So wasn’t it natural that he should want to take? That he should want to know just how it felt to take something from somebody else? . . . Because what he had lost was everything” (148).3 Additionally, Sachiko Murakami’s book of poetry, Rebuild, about housing structures and issues of ownership, dwells on her father’s lost property during the mass uprooting and dispossession of Japanese Canadians.4

In some other examples of books that contemplate things, both the recent book of poetry Mannequin Rising by poet, academic, and critic Roy Miki, and the novel A Tale pin she attached to her tennis visor, or a cosmetics case she carried around with her for weeks” (107). The mother immigrated from Japan, and therefore did not experience the internment like her fellows in the home, such as Roy Nakano, a former “‘enemy alien’” who lived “‘in the camps.’” Similarly dealing with memory and things, and appearing haunted by the past, Naiko (a Bartleby figure) has a job with Canada Post sorting, tracking down owners to, and even destroying undeliverable mail. 3 Toshio Shimamura is a janitor working for the Occupation forces who steals medicines and drugs both to sell on the black-market and to keep for the sake of keeping or as a kind of revenge (147). Also, for Aya, the protagonist whose mother committed suicide during the internment, a coat, stuffed with secret messages her mother wrote on scraps of cloth and that Aya later finds, is an important link to her mother and evidence of her mother’s love (258-9). 4 For example, in the poem entitled “Rebuild,” Murakami invokes a difference between losing property because it was somehow destroyed (turned “to dust”) versus property being silently removed and renamed: “The home, / erased. All knickknacks back to dust. If only / that happened. Instead a neighbour / buys the bicycle, paints it blue. Instead / the graveyard markers are tactfully removed. / Instead names are changed, a farm’s, / and the official memory. Now a child is born in exile.” (81). The poem suggests that at least some debris or mark remains with the destruction of property; but, when property silently changes hands and histories of ownership are erased from the land, which is the experience of those forced into exile, as well as First Nations people, it is harder to perceive and appreciate the loss. In a very practical example, one might be able to claim insurance on a destroyed property, but Japanese Canadians could not make insurance claims on their property losses.

for the Time Being by Japanese American and Canadian author Ruth Ozeki appear obsessed with objects. Although the internment does not prominently appear in these texts, both of them are concerned with the prevalence and meaning of objects in our world of commodities and global capitalism and what becomes of the subject and identity in this world. In Miki’s poetry collection, mannequins are both the material items used to represent us in shop windows in order to make a sale, and a figure of us (a man- of-kin) as beings who are becoming increasingly empty and inanimate in our relationships to each other and the world around us. In Ozeki’s novel, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, things and debris assumed to be from the 2011 tsunami that hit Japan begin to wash up on Canada’s west coast, including a Hello Kitty lunchbox that Ruth, the protagonist, finds and investigates.

One exception to the tendency of literary texts about the internment to be especially concerned with objects is Jesse L. Beattie’s Strength for the Bridge, which is also the first novel ever written about the experience of Japanese Canadians during WWII. This novel is a much more straightforward description and fictional account of the experience of the internment, in which objects are part of the setting and background of the action of the story but are rarely the things that characters collect and obsess over. Unlike the other novels under consideration in this dissertation, seldom are objects in Beattie’s novel meaningfully related to history, memory, or identity, nor do they have values beyond the uses for which they are intended. However, the effect of not being preoccupied with objects leads to questions such as why the novel does not include significant things, and what the effect of not having such things might be for the novel, for our understanding of the history it depicts, and for an understanding of the relationship between the characters and their things.

Of course, novels and literature about the Japanese Canadian internment are far from the only texts in which things factor in as having enhanced meanings and in which characters develop close relationships with things or even fixate on them – I think, for example, of John Clare’s nostalgic writing in his poem “To my Cottage,” or George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss and the Tullivers’ deep, sentimental feelings for their land and property, as well as John’s obsession with collecting objects in Virginia Woolf’s short

story, “Solid Objects.” 5 Or, focusing on Canadian literature, I think of Esi Edugyan’s The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, in which Tyne inherits a house in a small prairie town that has a history and power of its own; Wayson Choy’s novel Jade Peony, in which the jade token channels the family’s history and Sek-Lung feels it beat in the palm of his hand; or Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry, in which she constructs a false auction catalogue of a fictional couple’s personal effects, using staged pictures and descriptions to create and evoke sympathy for imagined lives. However, in the texts about the Japanese Canadian internment, the consistent preoccupation with things and with keeping them, and with the recurring figure of the collector and the hoarder, signals the experience of the internment itself and how difficult the experience was. Indeed, the texts suggest that being forced to give away or sell one’s things or having all one’s property taken away was a particularly troubling experience. Moreover, by consistently focusing our attention toward things, their very personal and necessary meaning for characters, and the significant harm that comes about when such things are lost, the texts about the internment suggest that being deprived of all one’s things is one of the most significant issues of the internment. In other words, the texts urge us to consider that dispossession was a much more devastating aspect of the Japanese Canadian internment than is normally considered.

0.2 Overview of the Argument

Taking my cues from the novels about the internment by Beattie, Kogawa, Sakamoto, and Itani, and investigating their characters’ relationships and preoccupations with objects, this dissertation centres around three concerns. Firstly, I consider the relation between characters and their objects, particularly in the experience of involuntary exile and dispossession, to conceive of how important things are to the people who own them

5 For the Tullivers, in Mill on the Floss, things are intimate parts and extensions of themselves that sustain the characters and bring them comfort and confirmation. Mr. Tulliver sentimentally feels “the shape and colour of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good, because his growing senses had been fed on them” (287-8), and Mrs. Tulliver laments that her household belongings will “go into strange people’s houses” when the family is bankrupt and has to sell everything (232). In “Solid Objects,” John’s interest in a small object he finds on the beach leads him to obsessively collect similar objects – he imagines each object “leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it” – finally causing him to forfeit his job in parliament and his relationships with others.

and interact with them, even when such items appear as integral to the characters and their development. Secondly, when objects are understood as being so foundational to the subject, I consider how harmful it is for the characters and their communities when they are forced to separate from their things or their things are taken from them. In this way, and I aim to offer a revised view of the internment that appreciates dispossession as much more harmful experience than it is often acknowledged to be. Indeed, besides giving us fictional objects, in the wake of such thorough dispossession (that impoverishes generations and destroys the tangible links testifying to and maintaining family and community histories), the novels’ obsessive interest in things conversely appears as dwelling on the loss of things and the profound personal and communal effects of such material losses. Also, whereas the relationship between the characters and their things reveals itself as a very intimate one, the government’s targeting of personal property during the internment comes into view as an attack both against the human rights of the people and on the people themselves, eradicating them from the British Columbian coast. As the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights corroborates, things profoundly matter in orienting people and maintaining communities, whereby property is recognized as a basic right: “Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others” and “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” Finally, given that dispossession remains a timely issue because people continue to lose personal property either as a result of having to leave their homes or because their property may be targeted by governments as part of their persecution, this project aims to contribute to cultivating a new appreciation for the meaning of things for those who are displaced.6 Because trauma and difficult living does not always appear as such, I will propose that contemplating things and their values helps us to sense more generally the effects of displacement and other disasters that otherwise would only exist in our blind-

6 In her 2016 Massey lecture, “The Return of Mass Flight,” academic and former Special Advisor to the UN, Jennifer Welsh tells us that we are currently witnessing “forced displacement on a scale we have never seen before” with sixty-five million people currently displaced, almost half of them being children. According to Welsh, that means approximately one in every 113 people in the world is displaced. For Welsh, it is imperative that we partake in a “mindset shift” and that we work on “reimagining the refugee and the plight of refugees in contemporary times” (“The Return of Mass Flight”). In its small way, and through literature and the question of the importance of things and property, this is partly what this dissertation aims to do.

spots. In this way, I will argue that attending to the material can forge more ethical relationships to the world and to each other.

Though this dissertation circles around the above aims, each chapter focuses on an analysis of one or two of the novels and the relationships between the characters and their things. Chapter one investigates the lack of objects in Beattie’s Strength for the Bridge, as well as the claim that the liquidated property was only a matter of losing replaceable things, implying that such losses were not very meaningful. By analysing the novel through the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Sara Ahmed, however, even the background objects in the novel appear significant and integral to the characters. Subsequent to appreciating the complex and profound value of things for the characters, the novel’s depiction of Keiichi Wakao and his family being uprooted and dispossessed invokes the extent of the impoverishment and devastation that was part of the internment experience. And, effectively, as I will argue, the loss of things in the novel signals the loss of a world for the characters. The novel’s depiction ultimately reveals the internment experience as one of bare life, in which the characters appear as exceptions to all meaning.

Chapter two examines Kogawa’s Obasan, the most well-known and influential novel concerning the internment, showing how the novel depicts the property losses suffered by the characters during the internment as related to so many other losses whereby the experience of losing things appears as infinitely destabilizing: loss after loss after loss without end. Arguing that such traumatic undoing deeply affects the protagonists long after their family’s experience, because the characters lack the trust necessary for sustaining relationships and transitioning into the social world, I consider how both Obasan and Naomi internalize their exceptional losses. Obasan becomes a keeper of everything – a hoarder – and Naomi refuses all things and exchange, becoming rather isolated and agoraphobic. This chapter refocuses attention on the quality of trust, showing how an elemental sense of trust is necessary for community and society but also how trust requires relationships with stable things to develop, whereby we are called on to rethink the consequences of dispossession as harmful to a social world.

In the final chapter, I evaluate Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field and Itani’s Requiem to consider the effects of the loss of property on the emotional and internal worlds of the protagonists. And, I suggest how the psychological repercussions of the characters’ experiences of dispossession shape and haunt Asako and Bin. Arguably, in both novels, the characters either appear to recover from their difficult pasts by the end of the novel (Bin) or appear to other characters in their storyworlds as managing relatively well despite their traumas (Asako). When traumatic experience does not appear or no longer emerges as something we can readily identify, this chapter asks how we can conceive of the trauma, and if it even matters that we do. Comparing how the protagonists in each novel relates to his or her things and turning to the work of Catherine Malabou and her conception of the “new wounded” – those who are but do not appear to be traumatised – I evaluate the qualities of being numb and dissociative. I also examine Malabou’s suggestion that even when trauma does not appear or is not identifiable, it may have been powerful enough to cause material wounds “in the brain.” In this way, I suggest that the disaster of material losses remains apparent through the body’s incorporation of the experience into itself whereby the body itself becomes an object. Not only an experience for the Japanese Canadian figures in these novel, this dissertation gestures towards considering how the subject also becomes a numb object through other experiences of traumatic dispossession, or even, following Malabou’s, Miki’s, and Ozeki’s suggestions, through our modern experiences of global consumerism and our loss of meaningful objects. To conclude this dissertation, attending to the examples of the fictional collectors that are the subject of this project, I will indicate how the material itself is the stuff we need to return to (as the necessary ground) so that we can find meaning in the world and build meaningful relationships.

0.3 The History of the Japanese Canadian Internment

Before beginning this argument, however, I want to provide some historical background on the experience of the forced displacement and dispossession of the people of Japanese ancestry in Canada, with a view toward the contributions this project aims to make to our understanding of the event. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Canadian government, like the American government, pressured by “anti-Japanese members of

parliament” (Adachi 202), began restricting the rights of people of Japanese descent living along the coast of British Columbia. The orders were issued under the War Measures Act, and the restrictions included impounding all the population’s fishing boats and closing down Japanese newspapers and schools.7 On 16 December 1941, the government ordered that “all persons of Japanese origin in Canada, regardless of citizenship” register with the Registrar of Enemy Aliens (Adachi 200 and “Reference Timeline”). Though the RCMP, the navy, and the army found no reason for further action against the Japanese Canadian population (Adachi 203), the government issued an order allowing for the creation of a “protected area,” an area 100 miles wide along the Pacific coast of Canada from the Yukon to Canada’s southern border “from which enemy aliens could be excluded,” and began sending men to work and road camps (Adachi 209). By 26 February 1942, “all persons of Japanese origin” were restricted in “‘their employment or business,’ ‘their associations or communications,’” and any activities related to disseminating news or propaganda; they could not possess cameras, firearms, or radios; a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed; and the government formally announced that mass “evacuation” would take place (Adachi 217).8

Soon afterward, the British Columbia Security Commission was established and given the mandate and power to “‘plan, supervise and direct’ the evacuation” (Adachi 217) of all Japanese Canadian men, women, and children, the majority of whom were Canadian citizens. The order also stated that all property belonging to evacuees “was to

7 Orders-in-Council are tools that the government can use to implement or change legislation by making recommendations to the privy council (made up mostly of current Cabinet members) that go into effect once they are signed by the Governor General (see “Glossary - Orders in Council,” Privy Council Office). In other words, orders do not undergo normal parliamentary procedures and debates. In Obasan, Naomi remembers a pamphlet entitled “‘Racial Discrimination by Orders-in-Council,’” listing the dates and results of a number of different orders pertaining to Japanese Canadians during the war – “‘Seizure and government sale of fishing boats. . . . Liquidation of property. . . . Deportation. Revocation of nationality’” – and on which Emily crosses out the words “‘Japanese race’” writing “‘Canadian citizen’” instead (34). 8 As many critics have shown, language was used to justify the actions of the government. In Redress, Miki argues that “evacuation” was a “euphemism coined by the government” that ultimately helped the government “translate the inherent racism of its policies for Japanese Canadians into the language of bureaucratic efficiency” (50-1). Indeed, “evacuation” suggests there was an immediate threat from which the Japanese Canadian population was being saved by moving away. Similarly, the term “internment” is not exactly appropriate because, as Miki explains, it “properly refers to the incarceration of individuals from enemy countries,” not a country’s own citizens (2 (footnote) and 71). Still, like Miki and others and without a more suitable term to describe what happened to Japanese Canadians from 1942-49, I use “internment” when referring to the experience as a whole, including the forced displacement and dispossession of Japanese Canadians.

be placed in the custody of the Custodian of Alien Property” as “‘a protective measure only’” (Adachi 218 and “Reference Timeline”). Separating families and communities, between March and October 1942, the government forcibly displaced nearly 22,000 people from their homes, sending the men to work on road camps while all the women, children, elderly, and those men unable to work were sent to a number of different hastily constructed and insufficient dwellings in ghost towns and camps in the interior of the province of British Columbia. As part of the “evacuation,” many people were rounded up and held in the Livestock Building of the Hastings Park Exhibition Grounds in Vancouver before finally being sent to the camps (Adachi 218). In order not to be separated, some families (those who could afford to do so) opted to move together as labourers to beet farms in Alberta; however, this option, called “self-sustaining,” required that the family pay for all of their expenses – travel, moving, and finding a home – and they often needed to find a sponsor offering a job in advance. Whereas labouring on a beet farm allowed family members to stay together, this option is now generally considered to have resulted in some of the harshest conditions.

As early as June 1942, Japanese owned farms that had been forcibly entrusted to the Custodian were being sold to veterans without the owner’s consent (“Reference Timeline”) and the government also sold the impounded cars and fishing boats (Adachi 233, 320). In January 1943, an order granted the Custodian the right to dispose of all Japanese Canadian properties in his care without the owners’ consent. Though the internment was planned as a temporary measure during which property would be kept under the “protective custody” of the Custodian, and the displaced population had organized themselves and their property with the expectation or at least the hope in mind that they would return to their homes and businesses after the wartime hiatus, the government began liquidating all the property of the displaced Japanese Canadian population without the owners’ authorization and even despite their outright dissent.9 The property was sold at very low prices. Though the interned population was paid for

9 In an historical coincidence, Adachi quotes a description of one such auction sale, which echoes and recalls for me Morishita’s list of household items: “‘chesterfield suite, Doherty organ, roll-top desk, buffet, dressers, half-ton chain block, lawn mowers, sewing machines, bench tools, electric irons, beds, tables, chairs, crockery, pots, pans, etc.’” (322). He also describes tenders being asked for “an ‘eight-room frame dwelling with garage.’ All transactions were ‘for cash’ and business was reported to be ‘brisk’” (322).

the work they performed in the camps, as well as a maintenance fee by the Security Commission, the money was not enough to support the people and their families when food and supplies were expensive and they had inadequate housing and jobs (Adachi 259-60). Subsequently, the interned population was required to use what little they received from the involuntary sale of their property to sustain them “in a situation which was none of their own doing” (Adachi 260). When the war ended, rather than being allowed back to British Columbia (though not to their homes because they no longer had any), the government compelled the internees (many of whom had never been to Japan and whose families had been in Canada for generations) to choose to be “repatriated” to Japan or dispersed as labour throughout Canada east of the Rocky Mountains.10 The restrictions preventing the people of Japanese ancestry from re-entering British Columbia and the “protected area,” among other restrictions, were not lifted until 31 March 1949, four years after the war ended.11

Of the many wrongs that were committed against the interned population, in his book Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice, Miki suggests that the worst was the people of Japanese ancestry in Canada being denied their rights, even to the point of being “denied the most fundamental legal right, the right of habeas corpus” (71) – the right to appear before the law and to question their imprisonment. Indeed, the government was “able to contravene the Geneva Convention edict that nations not ‘intern’ their own citizens” (Redress 70) by not interning or imprisoning them at all, but by infinitely ‘detaining’ them at the will of government officials. Additionally, we might think another grave injustice of the internment was how family members and communities were involuntarily uprooted at least twice – once to an internment camp and then “east of the Rockies” (but perhaps also to work camps or Hastings Park) – becoming irreparably separated and unbound each time. In Obasan, Naomi never knows what happened to her friends from Slocan (203) and she wonders what may have happened to

10 The procedures for “repatriation,” or sending Japanese nationals and Canadians of “Japanese Racial Origin” to Japan, began in 1945 with the first boat of deportees leaving on 6 January 1946 (Adachi 309). The deportation orders were not repealed until January 1947, more than a year after the war ended (Adachi 317). 11 The restrictions, overseen by the Minister of Labour, included controlling “the Japanese in such matters as employment, business, travel, residence and association ‘with any persons’” (Adachi 336). In Obasan, Kogawa makes the day the restrictions are removed 1 April, April Fool’s Day, 1949 (219).

all the different people she once knew so well from before or during her life in the camps. Among the injustices of the internment, the government considering infants and children to be “enemy aliens” (along with their untried parents) might stick out as especially egregious. However, the preoccupation with things that appears in the novels (and in the Morishita document) focuses our attention toward the material injustices of the government’s policies and their significance to the people, as well as their significance to how we might more fully appreciate the harm done in the government’s treatment of its citizens of Japanese ancestry.

Indeed, the mass uprooting, displacement, and dispossession of Japanese Canadians is perhaps best described in terms of Maurice Blanchot’s idea of the disaster: as a traumatic event whose import is great enough that it fundamentally alters everything in its wake, yet that never appears as the traumatic and destructive event that it is. As Blanchot explains, the disaster “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact,” so that even when it comes – when it is present or has passed over us – it does not appear to have come (Blanchot 1), but “has always already withdrawn” (Blanchot 1-2). In Blanchot’s idea, not only has the event been forgotten, but also it never fully appears to those who have lived or witnessed it. Similarly, the treatment of Japanese Canadians during and after WWII (the effect of losing one’s rights and being separated from family members and communities) often does not appear in historical consciousness, at least insofar as Canadians often fail to appreciate how Canada was and continues to be not always the multicultural haven we often imagine and promote it as being.12 At other times, the internment is spoken about as a “blessing in disguise”: unpleasant as it was, people survived, their rights were restored, new communities were built, and they were better off for it because they were forced “out of their ethnic ghettos” (Redress 310).

Contemplating the property, however, brings the devastation of the experience to light in a way that reminds us, in slightly different terms, how unjust the experience was,

12 In a contemporary context, I think in particular of the immigration detention centres in which people languish for years without proper hearings and as exceptions (the exceptionally forgotten) to the law (see Muriel Draaisma’s “Immigration detainees on hunger strike” and Joe Friesen’s “Hundreds of Canadian children held in immigration detention”), or the recent poll in which “one in four Canadians wants the Liberal government to impose its own Trump-style travel ban” (Peter Zimonjic’s “1 in 4 Canadians”), even as communities and cities welcome potential refugees arriving from the United States.

for example, insofar as the uprooted population had to pay for their own forced internment, and, as Miki articulates, the government “considered property ownership a threat to national security” (Redress 111). Additionally, in considering the things and objects – the material – lost during the internment, we are impelled to consider the different and multiple meanings that people give to property. And, appreciating these multiple meanings and values of the objects, particularly for those who owned but were deprived of them, begins to fill in and give contours to an experience that otherwise might be too easily overlooked or may appear to have been “not such a bad experience.” Moreover, the issue of lost things highlights the difference (or perhaps “différance”) between the multiple, personal, lived and communal meanings of material objects for the Japanese Canadians versus the practical, abstract, accountable value of property as far as the actions and policies of the government were concerned.13 Though both the Japanese Canadians and the government officials dealt with the same material things, their conflicting understandings and experiences of (or lack of experience with) the material points to an aporia of sorts, in which the meaning of things cannot be definitely defined or claimed. Yet, overlooking the meanings of things and of property for those who owned and lived with them allows one to view the internment as an event in which property was profoundly and even intentionally misunderstood, and in which Japanese Canadians were subjected to the violence of being separated from the things that were necessary to sustaining them, their memories, and their communities. Indeed, Wayson Choy, in an interview about his novel The Jade Peony, suggests that people become sociopathic when they lack an appreciation of the meaning of things, in which case, applied to the internment, we can read the government as impelling Japanese Canadians into pathological attitudes when it denied them their property.14 Furthermore, the gravity

13 The difference might be described as living in a home versus appraising a house. Nicole Yakashiro evokes this distinction in her description of her work with the Landscapes of Injustice project, in which she, along with others across Canada, explores the complexities of property loss and the questions that arise when we better understand “the diverse conceptualizations of value” at play in the internment (“A Yonsei’s Cultural Journey” 5). 14 As Choy explains: To my horror, I have met people who are not able to invest in objects some treasured personal values, people who can’t even understand that gesture. Sociopaths, for example. (“An Interview” 39) Besides suggesting that forced dispossession could have made people pathologically antisocial, we can also read Choy’s claim in terms of the internment as suggesting that the government’s lack of respect for

of the internment experience appears through the ways in which property remains an unresolved issue, not only in the literary texts and even after the Redress Agreement of 1988 that included an official apology from the government and $21,000 compensation payments to individuals. Many people and families never recovered from the poverty to which they were reduced, even through subsequent generations.15 And, thinking back to my experience at the Nikkei National Museum, there remain few objects for community memory or continuity.

0.4 Fictional Things

Although this project aims to fill-in the gaps and give more shape and sense to an exceptional experience through an analysis of the novels written about it, one more aspect to consider before beginning is that this project is more precisely concerned, not with material artefacts at all, but with fictional ones: the material things portrayed in fictional accounts. On one hand, this project is about fictitious items because literature gives us fictional things where no physical thing is left. In this case, literature and literary things allow us to come to the experience indirectly when it has already passed us by and because little to no evidence remains.16 On the other hand, according to Bill Brown, in

property and property rights shows that government officials and the bureaucratic system that enabled them were also (pathologically) antisocial and lacking conscience. 15 In Sachiko Murakami’s poem “Moving Day,” the speaker, invoking her father, describes the home to which he cannot return existing only as ghostly property: “. . . the home / he didn’t even own: chronic renter, the family his debtor. / All property of ghosts. To the home he could not return to / his kin swell, hoard earth, buy back more / than the land was taken. What’s left for me: / poker chips, piggy banks of pennies I lugged / clear across the country . . . .” (85). After his internment experience, the father is never able to own a home, only rent, and the speaker’s inheritance is meager poker chips and pennies, which lack value, either in the case of desiring to feel the comforts of a home or in the case of trying to buy a house. 16 I think, for example, of the idea that we need representations to think about events like the Holocaust or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because nothing remains from such destructive and devastating experiences. See Kyo Maclear’s description of the problem of imaging what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in her cultural studies and theory book, Beclouded Visions (4), and my discussion of this issue in “Divergence and Confluence, Mapping the Streams of Hiroshima” (168-9). Regarding the lack of evidence and remains of the Japanese Canadian internment camps, in many cases, the camps were levelled and any signs of the Japanese internees were removed from the ghost towns, whereby few traces remain or the even older history of the 19th century gold rush is more prevalent. Both Obasan and Requiem depict their protagonists going back to the camp sites and finding nothing or almost nothing there. Some exceptions would be in New Denver, where there is a museum and a few housing shacks remain (see Kirsten McAllister’s cultural studies examination of the New Denver museum in Terrain of Memory), and in Kaslo, which I visited with my Japanese Canadian grandmother several years ago. Her family had been interned in Sandon, which we also visited (and in which only buildings and artefacts from the Gold Rush remain), but she was interned along with her husband’s family in Kaslo. There, she and her newborn son,

his discussion of the relationship between “materiality” and literature, and the role of things in literary texts, literature grants us a unique opening through which to ask questions about the importance of things because “a text must obviously (self- consciously, and at times ostentatiously) work to fabricate a material world for its reader” (“The Matter of Materialism,” Material Powers, 66). Unlike the objects that we might happen upon or routinely encounter in our everyday lives, authors deliberately create things in texts to generate worlds for readers. And because authors deem them significant enough to intentionally depict them in their texts and storyworlds, novels are, for Brown, a good site for analysing the complex dynamics concerning objects and their meanings, particularly the relationship between a represented object and the larger historical- material field (or what Brown calls “object culture”) from which the object derived (66).

Thinking of Brown’s earlier conception of things versus objects in “Thing Theory” (2001), which rather seems to contrast with his idea of things as good points from which to begin an analysis of culture, society, and history, we might imagine that literature, in a way, provides us with already broken objects. In his earlier essay, and invoking Heidegger, he argues for a distinction between “objects” that belong to our projected meanings, our social interactions, and our culture and history, and “things” that are wholly inaccessible to us and fundamentally different from ourselves. And, he suggests that we only begin to get a sense of this other world of things when objects break down or stop working for us (“Thing Theory” 4). However, relating “thing theory” to his ideas about literary things, we could say that fictional objects always appear broken insofar as they are not useful to us in any utilitarian sense (we cannot pick up the words and use them as hammers) and insofar as they belong to a process of reading that often moves at a different, slow pace. This different pace allows us to glimpse into and dwell with other possibilities, experiences, and ideas of the world. For this project, the

my father, shared a room with another woman and her children in a former hotel. When we visited the hotel, now the Langham Cultural Society, there was a plaque on the wall with a layout showing who occupied which room during the internment, and one room was made up to look as it may have appeared at that time. According to my grandmother, the posted layout was not correct and she had occupied room 26, not the room that was listed for her in the exhibition. When the centre’s director took us to visit the room, which was then an office for an artist or cultural worker, the name “Lara” was written on the wall. In this accident of history that affects traces and implicates us in unpredictable ways, decades after my grandmother and father had vacated the room, someone with the same given name as myself occupied it.

view through literary objects would be toward a different understanding of forced dispossession and the stakes involved in such an experience.17

Moreover, besides analysing the fictional artefacts and all their layers of meaning in order to better understand the socio-cultural and historical moment to which these fictional things refer – and that the authors were attempting to grasp in representing the lives of internees as authentically as they could – objects in literature also tell us a lot about the story’s characters, reflecting their psychological complexity. Just as a collection, and a collector’s feelings about and interactions with objects, reflect something of her personal history and relationships, her inner workings, and her desires, things belonging to and surrounding fictional characters also reveal (and create for us readers) the desires, anxieties, predispositions, and complex histories of the characters. As well as adding further dimensions to the characters, examining the characters’ relationships to things also illuminates an appreciation of the very personal and psychological harm that the novels suggest results when one is forced to lose her things. In these ways, fictional objects are powerful and important because they create an affective encounter, whereby the complex meanings, reactions, and feelings invoked by a relationship to an object – in this case, a character’s connection to a fictional one – can produce an emotive force that suggests all the many, even unsettling, ways the world and history (Japanese Canadian history) exist for us.18

17 Though I use ‘thing’ and ‘object’ conscious of Brown’s distinction, I use them more interchangeably as it seems to me that the distinction between them, according to Brown or, more recently, to the thinkers of Object-Oriented Ontology, is much more slippery. 18 My invocation of affect theory here to suggest the complexities and possibilities involved in depicting objects in the novels and short stories, relies on Seigworth and Gregg’s description of affect as “a palimpsest of force-encounters traversing the ebbs and swells of intensities that pass between ‘bodies’” and as “mark[ing] a body’s belonging to a world of encounters” (“An Inventory of Shimmers,” The Affect Theory Reader 2). In other words, affect relates to both the traces of feeling or meaning (the unconscious remains of encounters, particularly when their full significance cannot be completely grasped) as well as the complex and multiple feelings and meanings of strongly felt encounters through which people relate to each other and the world, and whereby they are able to locate themselves as being in and a part of that world. In this case, even through fictional objects and encounters, we might be better able to understand and locate ourselves in relation to the complexity of the mass dispossession of Japanese Canadians.

Chapter 1 “We’ve only lost things”: The Significance of Everyday Items and the Things Lost in Internment in Jessie Beattie’s Strength for the Bridge

Jessie L. Beattie (1898-1985) has been nearly forgotten by history. Although she was a relatively successful and prolific writer from the 1930s to the 1970s, her works are no longer published or read.19 However, in 1966, fifteen years before Kogawa published Obasan, Beattie published the first novel about the Japanese Canadian Internment, Strength for the Bridge. Unlike the subsequent novels about the internment by Joy Kogawa, Kerri Sakamoto, and Frances Itani, whose protagonists are nisei or sansei (second or third generation) characters born in Canada, and who recount their internment experiences through their childhood memories, Beattie’s novel focalizes the experience through an issei character, Keiichi Wakao – a first generation immigrant from Japan experiencing the internment as an adult. Another difference between Strength for the Bridge and succeeding novels about the Internment, one that is particularly appropriate for my discussion of things, is that Beattie’s novel is much less occupied with material items. Whereas Kogawa’s, Sakamoto’s, and Itani’s protagonists collect and keep things from the past, sometimes finding themselves overwhelmed by the detritus that remains, and other times building protective relationships with or even becoming fixated on their things, Beattie’s novel does not use and engage with objects in similarly meaningful and symbolic ways. Unlike Obasan who hoards or Asako, in Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field, who talks to photographs, Beattie’s novel does not depict obsessive collectors, and the objects in the novel are rarely over-determined and invested with significance or memories occasioning heightened reactions in the characters. Rather, the majority of

19 I first learned about this novel from a reference to it in the bibliography of Ken Adachi’s history of Japanese Canadians, The Enemy that Never Was, and I have not seen it mentioned anywhere else, nor have I found any critical literature on the novel or its author. The only comment I found on the book was a short critical review by Al Purdy in The Globe and Mail entitled “Good Theme, Lifeless Tale,” which suggests why critical interest in the novel never developed: the novel is rather an uninvolving and flat read. When I asked them, Russell Brown (editor of An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English) had not heard of this novel nor of its author (email correspondence), and Roy Miki remembered owning a copy, which he described as particularly sentimental (interview).

things in the novel are everyday and background objects: the houses people live in, the ships they use to cross the ocean, the items they sell in their shops, the belongings that are stolen or liquidated. And, though the novel mentions meaningful items, such as the Buddha figurine that Keiichi’s mother gives him and the letter his father writes on his deathbed, it also misplaces them insofar as it fails to return to these things, dropping them from the narrative altogether.

However, the novel’s most poignant claim about the meaninglessness of objects – of objects as only simple, straightforward material items without affective meanings – takes place when the protagonist’s wife, Ryoko, suggests that the mass liquidation of Japanese Canadian belongings and property was only a matter of people losing things. Ryoko makes the claim near the end of the novel, once the war has ended and she and Keiichi begin to imagine where they will go once they are released from the internment camp, now that many of their children have moved elsewhere. When Ryoko admits that she wants to go back to their home on Davie Street in Vancouver, Keiichi, who refrained from telling her the news beforehand in order “to spare her the pain” (209), hesitates. From this delay, Ryoko surmises that they no longer possess the house: “‘I’ve heard from others about their losses, but I thought we had escaped. Our home is gone? That’s what you were going to tell me, isn’t it?’” Keiichi confirms the loss of their house, explaining, “‘First there was vandalism. . . . Later, the house and land were sold by the Security Commission.’” After a pause, Ryoko responds, “‘It’s wonderful . . . . We’ve only lost things’” (209).

According to Ryoko, or at least what she tries to convince herself of in this moment is that, the loss of her home and everything in it is not such a significant event, but an incident in which she suffered material and replaceable losses rather than one in which she lost her former life and livelihood. On one hand, the statement about only losing things is meant to suggest that love, life, friendship, and health are more important than material items and property, whereby we should interpret that, though Ryoko and her husband have lost their home, they still have each other and their children. Property and personal belongings, according to Ryoko’s comment, and according to the message being advanced by the novel as a whole, are simply material items that can be removed

and replaced without too much emotional or financial strain. Superfluous to the story about a man and his family, things are dispensable in a way that the lives of the family members and the love that they share are not. On the other hand, given the massive upheaval the novel depicts and that the characters in the novel live through – being displaced from their homes and interned, separated from family members and friends, immense material loss, and uncertainty about their futures – Ryoko’s claim that everyday material items do not have important or additional meanings seems rather too abstract and unrealistic for an historical fiction. When things are caught up in circumstances of such personal and thorough loss, when the losses were forced on the people and included nearly all their belongings, can things still just appear as replaceable things?

How does one make sense of the novel’s lack of weighty objects and lack of characters’ meaningful and complex relationships to things? On the level of written form, we might consider the novel’s depiction of objects as merely things implies that the novel is not a very engaging read, or as Al Purdy described, in his review of the novel for The Globe and Mail, the novel is made up of “plodding description” without “vivid access to life and human emotions” and whose characters are not “fully realized and fleshed-out” (1966). Even as the novel must be admired for the degree of historical detail it incorporates, particularly given how little information on the internment was available at the time it was published (in either academic or popular books and media), it is not very compelling. And its characters lack full and complex emotional lives, not least of all, we might consider, because the narrative takes its material objects for granted. Depicting characters’ meaningful, reluctant, or fixated relationships to their belongings, or offering readers exceptional objects endowed with memories, may have helped develop the characters’ inner lives and emotional dimensions for readers. However, as far as what the novel implies about how we should understand the internment and the population’s dispossession, presenting objects as straight-forward and replaceable material items, whereby Ryoko claims it is wonderful that the family only lost things, suggests that the losses the Japanese Canadian population suffered were not so bad. In other words, the novel seems to suggest that those who lived through the experience only really lost property and material items that could be replaced and for which they were

compensated through the government’s payments of $21,000 that were part of the 1988 Redress Agreement. Or, as Asako stresses to Yano, in The Electrical Field, the abrogation of the people’s rights and the loss of all their property was not detrimental because at least the authorities “‘gave you a choice . . . even if you couldn’t go home. You could have come east like the rest of us’” (93). In this reading, the harm done to the characters in the novel and, by extension, to Japanese Canadians was not egregious because it mainly targeted objects rather than the people who owned them. Indeed, Japanese Canadians suffered in no way like Jews in Europe during WWII.20

On one hand, then, Beattie’s novel suggests that things do not have personal, complex meanings and that the internment was simply a matter of losing things for which one might receive a compensation later on. On the other hand, the fact that she wrote this fictional account suggests that Beattie felt the experience of Japanese Canadians was worthy of attention, and that it was an important event, about which readers and the general population needed to learn more. Indeed, the word ‘things’ appears in italics in Ryoko’s statement – “‘We’ve only lost things’” – which even suggests that the objects depicted in the novel require special consideration. Weighing into the debate the novel stages about the meaning of dispossession in the internment and how we should understand it, in this chapter, I will analyse the things in the novel and show that even the everyday, unexceptional objects that surround the characters and appear nearly insignificant in their lives – that seem easy to forget and to replace – are integral to the lives of the characters in the book. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s and Sara Ahmed’s ideas about things, I will suggest that the easily overlooked and background things of Strength for the Bridge provide the characters with symbolic significance and memory, allow them to make sense of their world and selves, enable them to develop their individual characters, and help them build community with others.

20 Along similar lines as considering that the internment and mass liquidation of property was not so bad, we might also conclude that the policies of the internment and massive property liquidation were simply errors in judgment, excusable because they were based on the racist norms of the time or as “a result of wartime pressures on the Canadian state” during WWII, as critics have argued. Guy Beauregard discusses such arguments in “After Obasan: Kogawa Criticism and Its Futures.” In this article, Beauregard concludes that critics who “configure the internment as an irrational aberration in Canadian history, one that can be explained as an ‘error,’ or a ‘misunderstanding,’” undermine more serious discussions about Canada’s racist history, policies, and practices (n. pag.).

In this reading, dispossessing people of their belongings comes into view as profoundly affecting the subject, both in how the characters understand themselves and how they relate to and orient themselves in the world and with others. Elucidating the complex significance things have to both subjects and communities and how objects are key to the development of the characters and to the formation of their relationships, I will demonstrate that the novel, even as sentimental and descriptive as it is, points to how devastating the loss of belongings was for Japanese Canadians. Thoroughly undoing subjects, their relationships, and the way they make sense of themselves in the world (for example, as Canadian citizens), the mass liquidation of property during the internment appears as an attack on the people themselves insofar as it deprives them of their property rights and rights as citizens, and occasions their elimination (the elimination of the whole Japanese Canadian population) from the British Columbia coast. In this way, targeting things appears as a very effective way of solving “the problem” of Japanese Canadians, for, liquidating property eradicated the population in such a way that the government’s policies and actions never appeared to be the direct attack on the people that it was. The boats and houses that were sold were, after all, “only things.”

In other words, the aim of the chapter is to reconceive of and give proper weight to the harm done during the Internment and the massive loss of property and property rights that Japanese Canadians suffered. I will ultimately suggest that, in the novel, Ryoko’s statement about her and her family having “only lost things” gestures us to understand the gravity of having one’s property taken away, and to appreciate the experience as one from which the characters do not easily recover. In this way, Ryoko’s statement rather speaks to her and her family’s impoverishment. The family have nothing left and can only defer to rather abstract values, like love, or the bare minimum of what one might expect in any human condition (life). And even though the novel seems to end with a sense of hope and anticipation for a better future, it also suggests an accumulation of losses rather than, or as part of the amassing of new things. With such losses, the novel proposes the question of how to take up life and living again without possessions, or how to live life itself beginning from a kind of negative space: when one has only the

outline of her former life – as Morishita had with his nine-page room-by-room list of household items – and only memories of what was once possible for her.

1.1 Background

Before beginning a discussion of the meaning and significance of background objects in the novel, in this section, I briefly introduce this little known novel and its author. Like Dorothy Livesay, who wrote the dramatic poem on Japanese Canadians, Call My People Home (1950), and Frances Itani, whose mother-in-law’s Internment experience inspired her novel, Requiem (2011), Jessie Louise Beattie learned about the internment of Japanese Canadians second-hand. Born in 1896 in Blair, Ontario, where she spent most of her life, Beattie wrote poetry (publishing a collection entitled Blown Leaves in 1929), plays for youth groups, newspaper columns (“I Listen In” for the Vancouver Province, Walk 284), novels, a memoir, and a biography, all of which were generally well received at the time.21 She also worked at various jobs, including as a private tutor, a teacher, a librarian, a social worker for young girls, a director of cultural recreation for the Community Welfare Council of Ontario (Walk 260), and even briefly as a fortune-teller in Vancouver (Walk 293). Feeling that the histories and experiences of certain communities needed to be more fully represented, Beattie published Black Moses about Josiah Henson, the man upon whom Harriet Beecher Stowe partly based her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and a novel about Native Canadians, before tackling Japanese Canadian history. Through her writing and work, she became, in her own words, “the defender of the underprivileged” (Walk 309). In her memoir, even though she lived in Vancouver during the war, Beattie admits to not fully realizing the extent of the injustices Japanese Canadians endured during WWII until she was commissioned by the United Church to write a short story about the experience. Beattie reflects, “In 1941, the Caucasian population of Vancouver, except for social workers and church officials, was generally

21 Beattie was nominated for a Governor-General's award in 1939. For information on Beattie’s life, see her memoir, A Walk through Yesterday. For basic biographical information see the entry for Beattie by Rodger J. Moran in The Canadian Encyclopedia, and the entries for Beattie in Simon Fraser University Library’s the Canada’s Early Canadian Writers database and the City of Cambridge Hall of Fame website. Despite her success, the end of her memoir suggests that in her later life she suffered difficult emotional turmoil (on which she does not elaborate), went through periods of poverty, and lost her sight.

unaware of the treatment of Japanese residents” (Walk 315).22 Still she remembered Japanese Canadian children no longer coming to the library where she worked and a retired British navel officer married to a Japanese woman, suddenly appearing only on his own in the dining room of the hotel where they lived because his wife was no longer allowed to accompany him (Walk 287). For Beattie, the navel officer sitting alone became a symbol of the unjust and “unforgivable behaviour” of Canadians when “Without being proved guilty, all [people of Japanese ancestry] were to live under a cloud of suspicion and to endure restrictions unfairly imposed” (Walk 287).

The compassion she expresses toward Japanese Canadians in her memoir is very much in evidence in her novel about them, and such sympathy and tolerance was apparently welcomed by the novel’s Japanese Canadian readers who may have found in the novel, their experiences being represented and recognized for one of the first times ever. Indeed, its aim to represent the Japanese Canadian experience in a sympathetic light marks a stark contrast with Hilda Glynn-Ward’s novel, The Writing on the Wall, an earlier novel on the Japanese Canadian experience, which argues against East Asian immigration by depicting Japanese immigrants as spies for the Japanese empire and Chinese immigrants as sneaky capitalists all of whom contrive to take over the country.23 Originally published in 1921 and republished in 2010, Glynn-Ward’s novel is described as a story that is “horrifying and unbelievable” for modern readers because of how obviously racist it is.24 Compared to such racist propaganda from decades before, Beattie’s novel was embraced by the Japanese Canadian community insofar as the Japanese Cultural Centre in Toronto hosted a reception (Walk 315) and Beattie was invited to visit and speak at other Japanese Canadian centres and societies. One such visit to a retirement home suggests how accurately some people in the community felt she had

22 It is not clear whether Beattie was intending to indicate the forced uprooting and internment of all Japanese Canadians here, which did not take place until early 1942. However, by the end of 1941, all people of Japanese origin were required to register as Enemy Aliens, 1,200 fishing boats were impounded and put under the control of the Japanese Fishing Vessel Disposal Committee, all insurance policies were cancelled, and Japanese language newspapers and schools were closed (see “Reference Timeline”). 23 The novel’s didactic message, in the words of one of its characters, is that the cheap labour of Chinese and Japanese immigrants “‘is going to cost you dear and cost your children their country, young man, if you let it go on. The gates have been opened wide and they are pouring in at such a rate that the country will be flooded if the white men can’t be brought to open their eyes to the danger’” (Glynn-Ward 19). 24 See “The Writing on the Wall: Chinese and Japanese Immigration to B.C., 1920. Description.”

represented their experience: Beattie recounts meeting a guest who claimed to have been on the same cattle boat crossing the Pacific Ocean in 1908 as Beattie’s protagonist, Keiichi (Walk 316). Indeed, the reception of Beattie’s novel was so positive that, from its reviews, she felt that the book had opened “a sore only partially healed,” and that “a second and fuller healing” was taking place for all Japanese Canadians and Canadians alike (Walk 315).25

To summarize the novel, which Beattie dedicates to “the Canadian Japanese,” the story opens with the “Prelude” – a legend about an ancient mayor of Osaka who sacrifices himself in order that a bridge built across a river will last for all future generations. Beattie’s subsequent story is similarly about sacrifice – the sacrifice of one generation (of immigrants) in establishing the survival and prosperity of future generations – and focuses on the life of Keiichi Wakao, a descendant of the mythical mayor of Osaka. When Keiichi’s impoverished yet principled father of the samurai class, survives a knife attack from a political foe and double agent, he resolves to travel to the United States to start a business and to take his son with him, while Keiichi’s mother remains in Japan. However, after being diverted to Hawaii and then to Canada because of resistance to Japanese immigration in the United States, Keiichi’s father dies at sea, and Kazuo Natsumi, a rough man who is travelling back to the property he owns in California, takes young Keiichi under his wing. Living with friends of Kazuo in Vancouver, Ru and Sachiko, Keiichi works in a fish store and a laundry, and witnesses the 1907 Race Riots when rioters attacked Chinatown but were stopped when they tried entering Japantown. Eventually Keiichi and Kazuo travel to California, only to find Kazuo’s property vandalized. After spending several months fixing up the property,

25 In addition to Beattie’s own opinion on the matter, we can infer that the novel was generally well received by Japanese Canadians at least insofar as Adachi includes a reference to the novel in his very important history of Japanese Canadians. The reference appears in a footnote about picture brides and arranged marriages (when young women in Japan and men in Canada exchanged pictures to decide on marriage partners). Adachi refers to the novel’s sentimental treatment of the picture bride system to suggest that there may have been other experiences of the system than F. E. La Violette’s historical account of desperate, unattractive young women in Japan and old, poor men in Canada doctoring the photographs they used for arranging their marriages, thereby duping and being duped by each other (Adachi 88). It seems that, for Adachi, although the possibility of affectionate marriages resulting from exchanging pictures was not represented in historical texts at the time, it was represented in fiction and was worth considering as a plausible representation of the experience of at least some Japanese Canadians. For Adachi, fiction might have presented a scenario that could be just as realistic as the one presented in history texts.

Kazuo sells it and the two men return to Canada where they settle on land in the Fraser Valley. It takes them years of hard work to clear the land and cultivate a prosperous fruit farm, during which time WWI takes place (when Japan was a British ally and the Japanese population gains some respect and good-feeling among white Canadians) and Keiichi marries a picture bride from Japan, Ryoko. Ryoko and Keiichi have four children, and Kazuo, now a grandfather to the children, dies of heart failure after saving the youngest son, Tommy, from drowning in the river. Subsequently, the family moves to the city because Tommy needs long-term medical care for tuberculosis. Though they have trouble selling their property and buying a new one because they are Japanese, the family finally purchase a run-down house in a comfortable, white neighbourhood of Vancouver, where they are not at first accepted by the neighbours. During the Depression, Ryoko supports the family by sewing, and Keiichi, who has a very hard time finding a job, eventually manages a store for his old school friend, Minoru, a business man who moved to Canada several years earlier.

With the tensions leading up to and during the commencement of WWII, the family contend with anti-Japanese sentiments that culminate in government policies targeting Japanese Canadians as enemies, whereby “All Japanese in the Dominion, whether nationals, naturalized Canadians, or Canadian-born” were required to report to officials to be finger-printed and photographed (Beattie 150). Alongside the social and political uncertainties they face, frictions arise between the family members, as Keiichi and Ryoko remain worried for and sympathetic toward relatives in Japan, whereas their children are very much patriotic Canadian teenagers. Junso, the son, protests against his and his siblings’ Japanese names, preferring Jimmy for himself (108), and tries to join the war, though he is refused; and Mariko and Kinny sing popular songs of patriotism and attend parades, though, at times they are treated badly by classmates and colleagues. After Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, nearly all the characters lose their jobs or cannot maintain their businesses, and they are ordered to surrender “all moving vehicles, weapons, cameras, and radios” and to submit to a curfew. Once the Canadian government begins requiring the Japanese Canadian population in British Columbia to move from their homes to internment camps in the mountains (or to work on sugar beet

farms in the Prairies), Keiichi and Junso, now a Christian minister, work at Hastings Park helping translate for and bring some comfort to the internees who stay there (in the barns normally used for animals) before being transferred to a camp. The Wakao family are eventually forced to move to Tashme camp, leaving young Tommy behind in the hospital and losing track of Minoru and other friends who had been arrested or interned elsewhere. They remain in the internment camp for five years, from 1942-1947, two years after the war ended. And jumping forward four years to 1951, the book closes with Keiichi, Ryoko, and Tommy, now in a wheel chair, expecting the arrival of Mariko, Kinny, and Junso for a holiday visit at their new home on Lake Ontario.

1.2 Things in the Novel

Whereas I am arguing that by attending to even background objects in Beattie’s novel, we gain a stronger sense of how meaningful things are for the characters, their development, and their relationships and community, I want to first elucidate how the objects in the novel appear to be taken for granted. From the very opening lines of Keiichi’s story, the narrative mentions things as matter-of-fact objects, using them merely to help produce the setting. The narrator, Keiichi, does not really relate to these things, nor does he invest them with memory or meaning: The small village of Susai was many miles from the city of Osaka. It was set on a waterway, and it too had a bridge which crossed over to a highway that led into the famous metropolis. Most of the houses in Susai were of wood with thatched roofs. They stood on the low land between a sloping hill and the river, but our house was set somewhat apart on the rise of the hill with a large pine tree beside it. The tree provided us with a cooling shade during the hot days. (3) The bridge, houses, and tree in the passage set the rural scene of Keiichi Wakao’s childhood – he lived in a house shaded by a tree on the edge of a village bounded by a river – and the passage produces the scene as a tableau with the detached narrative voice describing the landscape as though seen from afar. Keiichi, as narrator, appears separated from the village and house he describes, giving us the impression that he is positioned up on the hill and looking down on the scene (where Keiichi tells us he does go with his

father) or looking back through time to recount the scene for the reader in his present telling of the story. Besides the effect of there being no engagement with the things depicting the setting, the scene is also frozen, so that, rather than presenting a living picture or memory of the place where he grew up (a “tableau vivant”), the river does not flow under the bridge and there are no people crossing over it or entering the houses. If objects represented in fiction are unique, as Bill Brown suggests, because they are always intended to be there insofar as the author deems them necessary to include in the narrative (“The Matter of Materialism,” 66), or because the author intentionally puts them there to help indicate the psychological depths of the character and their relationships, this passage depicts objects that do not seem integral to the narrative. The things only outline a bare and inanimate setting, which recalls Purdy’s assessment of the novel as “plodding description.” Even objects deemed to have a special significance in the novel, such as the Buddha statue that Keiichi’s mother gives him before leaving Japan and the letter from his father that Keiichi receives upon his father’s death at sea, do not receive sustained meaningful attention; both items become lost or forgotten in the story. Keiichi misplaces his father’s letter shortly after his arrival in Vancouver and five pages after its introduction: “My father’s letter to me, delivered after his death – I had forgotten about it. Perhaps it had been lost” (27). And, his mother’s gift of the Buddha statue reappears a few times throughout the novel, but after he shows it to Ryoko (about half way through the novel), it is never mentioned again.

However, as much as even the opening scene appears lifeless with its background objects, these background and inconspicuous items can be regarded as already giving us an impression of the main character’s inner life and of the meaningful affective possibilities involved in Keiichi’s relationship to the world around him. For example, the location of his house “on the rise of a hill” suggests that Keiichi and his family are positioned a little differently and stand apart from others in the village. And his description of the house being shaded and protected by a large tree implies that Keiichi and his family are less exposed to the harsh circumstances the others in the village face. Indeed, Keiichi’s family have additional shelter, insofar as they are of higher class and because Keiichi’s father is a successful businessman in addition to being a farmer (5).

My suggestion that even the most banal, background objects in the novel tell us something more substantial about Keiichi evokes Heidegger’s phenomenological view that considers our being in the world in terms of our relationship to the things around us. To discuss this view further, as Heidegger points out in Being and Time, even simple, everyday, at-hand items are things with which we are already engaged on many different levels and in variously meaningful ways. Moment by moment, we are interacting with the world and dealing with the things in it, even if we are rather mechanically or absentmindedly using a piece of equipment to complete a task or, as Heidegger suggests, making a shoe “for wearing” and manufacturing a clock “for telling the time” (Being 99). Consequently, even instrumentally engaging with things in the world often expresses something unique about “the person who is to use it or to wear it” (Being 100). A thing conveys a person’s needs, desires, and circumstances because of how it was made only for that person or how it is used only in the particular way it is used by that person.26 All of these ways in which we relate to things – all of our “concernful dealings” with things in the world (Being 102) – suggest that we are always comporting ourselves toward things in an interested way. We invest ourselves in and imprint ourselves on things we find that help us or please us, or that we avoid because they appear as obstacles to us. And because a subject relates to everything around him in ways that situate and orient him in the world as the particular individual he is, we might read a subject’s relationship to things as showing us something more about his being in the world, whereby Keiichi’s childhood home would indeed suggest that he is different from the others in the village.

To elucidate the deeper, personal, and even psychological implications of Keiichi’s dealings with things (before offering a reading of them), in Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed explains how phenomenology appreciates that “consciousness is always directed ‘toward’ an object” through our daily dealings with and investment in things in the world (2). For Ahmed, we are always relating to objects in the world with some degree of interest in how they might help or hinder us, we consciously or unconsciously notice objects or fail to recognize them, and our emotions are always

26 We might also imagine that those things that are broken, unusable, or “‘stand in the way’ of our concern” (and thus which reveal something more authentic and less instrumental about being: presence-at-hand) also light up the world in a particular way for the subject who deals with them (Being 103).

moving us “toward” and “away” from the objects with which we come into contact (Ahmed 2). And because of all of these different ways of relating to material items, things in the world express our unique interests and the particular and individual ways that we are oriented to them, as well as the complex histories behind these personal, emotional orientations. For example, the table – which Ahmed discusses in the works of many philosophers and writers throughout her book, in this instance Heidegger – becomes the particular writing table it is or is brought forth in the shape that it has because it was chosen for its height or surface size and because it “allows us to do” writing (45). And a dining table is the one it is because it supports the act of eating and “collective gatherings” at which certain people share what food and conversation they do (80). The tables are the particular tables they are because the people using them engage in philosophical study or in feminist calls for claiming their own tables on which to write (see Ahmed’s discussion of Virginia Woolf’s table, 61), or because specific individuals gather around the table and cohere as a group in common through the object (they become related to each other by sharing the right to be at the table). Thus, our inner most selves and the different conscious and unconscious reasons for why we orient ourselves toward things in the ways we do – our work, desires, politics, love for and relationships with others, social ranks, and personal histories, among many other aspects – are always part of the objects around us, congealing in and shaping the object itself.

In this case, even the inanimate and uninteresting objects establishing the setting in the opening of Strength for the Bridge and Keiichi’s dealings with (relationships to) them show his more complex inner dimensions. Reading the opening scene again, with Heidegger’s and Ahmed’s ideas about how intimately subjects relate to their things, whether Keiichi’s family purchased the house on the hill or inherited it, they have chosen or acquired a position that is distanced from the others. Keiichi’s father has also acquired the additional shelter that the tree (and his business ventures) affords their home. And Keiichi, though his family is poor, has already acquired the background things and position to see and move in the world differently, even being able to travel to North America. Furthermore, not only does Keiichi’s house and its separation from the village signal his class difference as a descendant of the samurai class, but also the tableau scene

shows the different history his family inherits and that Keiichi deals with as symbolized by the bridge. Because, the bridge in the tableau scene he describes is presumably the same bridge that Keiichi’s relative, the ancient mayor of Osaka, sacrificed himself for (and thus it has remained standing), we can also read that Keiichi is furthermore orienting himself to a history of sacrifice and of heroism based on sacrifice. Additionally, by orienting himself away from the village and his home in order to accompany his father on walks up the hill, from which they look down on the bridge, houses, and tree, Keiichi moves away from the family mythology, the domestic sphere, and the history and tradition these things represent. The house and its location indicate not only Keiichi’s and his family’s difference but also the differences between the ideals of his parents that he navigates (negotiates) throughout the novel. Keiichi’s father ventures forth away from their home and up the hill, foreshadowing how he later leaves home and his traditional Japanese life venturing forth to North America. Keiichi’s mother remains at home within the domestic sphere and in the Japanese homeland of their traditional upbringing. And perhaps in this opening scene with the objects at a distance, Keiichi is attempting to gain perspective on his particular situation of being between his mother’s and father’s ideals.

1.3 Keiichi’s Things

Whereas fictional objects tell us about characters, helping to form them in our minds, what more do we learn about Keiichi from his objects? In considering all the ways things are meaningful to Keiichi, I want to suggest all the different ways in which things are significant to subjects more generally in order to begin to conceive the implications involved in the dispossession of property during the internment. And, following Heidegger’s concern for equipment, I want to explore all the different things (the possibilities and relationships) that objects allow Keiichi to do.

Firstly, we might consider that Keiichi’s objects reveal his internal, emotional world and the unique, affective circumstances of his life: the conflict he feels as a son and as an immigrant. Returning to the opening tableau scene of Keiichi’s story and the first house in the novel, Keiichi’s childhood home, we can already read the personal conflict that is part of Keiichi’s life experience, dealing with his mother and his father.

Keiichi appears split between desiring to go to America with his father, including embracing modern, enterprising values, and being relieved that his father leases “our house, so long my happy home” to a relative so that he might return to it one day, and thereby to the familiar traditions he knows (14). Indeed, the gift of the Buddha statue that his mother stows in his baggage for his journey to North America and the letter his father writes to him on his deathbed upon that journey, further express the conflict Keiichi experiences between his parents’ desires and values. The Buddha represents the traditional religion Keiichi and his mother share (unlike Keiichi’s father who is Christian) and is meant to remind him to continue practicing his devotion (15). It helps him maintain his rituals and connections to the past and Japanese culture even if he is no longer physically in Japan. The letter, on the other hand, expresses his father’s wish that Keiichi adopt a new country and its conventions in the west: “Remember your mother, but do not think too often of Japan. You have a new country – America” (22). Keiichi’s father instructs Keiichi to keep his mother, Japan, and their traditions in mind; however, when it comes to his primary mode of existing, his goals, and his future, he advises Keiichi to adopt modern American ideals and values. Thus, one object is intended to remind Keiichi of his Japanese Buddhist religion and the other expressly insists he embrace his new country. One maternal object holds and grounds him, and the other paternal object encourages him to move beyond this ground and his origin. As with the conflict expressed by the Buddha statue and the letter, Keiichi feels at home with the Japanese items in his friend Minoru’s shop (136), but he also works with tools as a pioneer, enterprising in the spirit of his father. Furthermore, the feelings Keiichi has about very different objects with their cultural baggage not only signal his personal, internal conflict of trying to live between and satisfy his mother’s and father’s differing wishes, but also signal the psychological conflict he experiences as a migrant who feels himself between cultures. Whereas he admires the silks in Minoru’s shop (136), he also admires Ryoko’s “Western dress” (83). And Keiichi remains Buddhist throughout the novel, though he sees the advantages of Christianity for his family members in Canada (90) and even considers conversion several times.27

27 Guillermo Verdecchia’s character in his play, Fronteras Americanas, similarly expresses the conflict felt by migrating to a new place through objects. Lamenting the differences between apples from his native

The second thing that material objects do for Keiichi is link him to the world. In showing the internal conflict with which Keiichi deals, of holding onto the past and traditions of his mother and beginning anew according to his father’s wishes, the things in the novel also effectively connect and hold him to the world. As my above discussions of the bridge, Buddha statue, and letter indicated, things are not just material items but appear to us as the things they are because of all the other connections they represent and contain, even beyond the immediately personal ones of a subject’s own memories of the past or needs of the present. As Heidegger elucidates, even the most useful piece of equipment has a larger history, whereby a shoe requires work and, “the work is dependent on leather, thread, needles, and the like. Leather, moreover is produced from hides. These are taken from animals, which someone else has raised” (Being 100). Common and useful material things, which are thus often overlooked, are not just shaped by our dealings with them and therefore reflect us, but also, like the shoes, are shaped by and connected to the other tools and things needed to make them, as well as the animals whose bodies afford the material, and the people involved in making the shoes and raising the cows. In this way, even shoes relate us to people, things, and a multitude of worldly connections beyond the thing itself.28

country and from his new country, Verdecchia says, “you know they have apples there in that other place but not these apples, not apples like these” (58). 28 Heidegger’s contemplation in his essay “The Thing” comes to mind here as a way of gesturing toward a conception of the many and complex meanings of things. In the essay, Heidegger describes things in terms of the “fourfold”: earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. Whereas his ideas about the “fourfold” are very obscure (not least of all because they seem to present us with poetry to read as philosophy), I gloss the elements here as representing the source of all things (earth), change and time (sky), all possibility (divinities), and death and meaning (mortals). Most importantly, for Heidegger, things appear as they are (come into being) through their unique intersection within the dynamic relationship and tension at play between the four elements. As Heidegger describes, in “staying” (177) or suspending the “round dance” (180) or interplay between earth, sky, divinities, and mortals, the thing presses into or out from, the complex web and movement of connection of the “fourfold” in its own unique way. Thus, a thing is singularly related to everything that came before it and everything that will come after it, making it the distinct thing it is. Heidegger’s discussion of things suggests that even projecting onto and fetishizing things is very much a part of the infinite meaning and unimaginable history of the thing. And, his ideas imply that, in interacting with things, we are in some way involved in all the histories that made the thing exactly as it is and that remain as traces in the object, even if we are not (cannot be) aware of all of them. The most prevalent current debate about things is between an object-oriented ontology approach, such as Graham Harman advocates, versus a speculative realism approach, such as Jane Bennett advocates. Recalling Bill Brown’s or Heidegger’s distinctions between things (as other than us) and objects (as cultural conceptions), object-oriented ontology aims to understand and preserve things as wholly other than ourselves. Speculative realism, on the other hand, appreciates the cultural and social meanings things have for us. I imagine, given his very complex conception of things, that Heidegger would situate his ideas

Similarly, for Ahmed, things connect us to the “worlds from which they emerge, and which surround them” (Ahmed 147). Expressing a conflict reminiscent of Keiichi’s family drama, as well as showing the extent of worldly knowledge and experience that one joins with through objects, Ahmed discusses “the Christmas cards from England with white snow” that she associates with her mother’s white body, whiteness, and England (147). The Christmas cards imply, not just personal memories, but colonial power and racial notions of whiteness, as well as Ahmed’s own conflict of preferring the white things – desiring to walk closer to her mother’s body as a child (Ahmed 145) – and feeling excluded from them; for, these things structured a kind of dwelling that she “did not quite inhabit” being mixed race (147). Thus, far from benign, and whether the associations are comfortable and desirable or not, things bond us to the larger world and its issues. In this way, we can consider Keiichi’s items as shaped by and containing the aspirations and the personal histories of his parents, as well as the larger cultural histories of Buddhism and the entrepreneurialism of the new world. And through his objects we can consider him as deeply linked to and caught up in ideals, expectations, and cultural connotations. Indeed, as we will see, though Keiichi, in the spirit of his father’s object, the letter, builds houses and enterprises, selling Japanese things in North American, he must also contend with the racial discrimination that is part of the world in which he and the objects reside.

In a third example of what objects do for Keiichi, because material items like the letter his father writes to him before his death and the Buddhist statue from his mother allow him to remember his parents and his past life in Japan, things also help Keiichi

somewhere between (or perhaps outside) the poles of these debates. Indeed, for Heidegger, all the many meanings that a thing might have for an individual and for all other beings that were, are, or will be in the world is what makes the thing infinitely meaningful and ungraspable or “other.” I also think of Marx here, and imagine he would similarly locate his ideas outside this debate. For, in “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof,” Marx warns against fetishizing objects and imbuing them with a power and voice of their own, as object-oriented ontology does. However, his aim is not to preserve objects away from social relations, but to understand the social life of things – the social relations involved in the production of things – better. Thus, the speculative realist approach echoes Marx in its aim to highlight the “productive power” things have in public life (Bennett 1). Interestingly, Marx and Heidegger both appear to appreciate how histories and relationships leave their traces in objects, which require deeper consideration in order for us to regard their complexity properly, as well as to understand our world and ourselves better.

orient himself in the present and make sense of his different circumstances in his new surroundings. Describing his first impressions of North America, Keiichi explains: Although I knew that I would not find similarities, although I knew that rickshaws and palanquins belonged to the Orient, I was not prepared for the horrible shrieks and sounds and the rattling wheels of Western city traffic. ... Although I was excited by the differences, I was also depressed by them. I felt myself to be what I was – an alien. (34-5) Keiichi knows that the objects and things in the new world will be different from what he is used to, but he still cannot help but rely on and defer to the things to which he is accustomed in Japanese city life, drawing comparisons between the different road vehicles, in order to make sense of his experience. Outlining the similarities and differences between the things that were part of his experience in Japan and that are part of his experience in Canada helps him chart and make sense of himself in the moment, allowing him to reflect on and label his difference. Besides helping him orient himself and reflect on cultural and social variations, things and memories of things from Japan afford Keiichi some comfort in his new and unfamiliar world, for example, when Keiichi and Minoru, his friend from his youth, discuss their homesickness and share memories of the things they loved in Japan, such as “‘Rickshaws crossing our bridge’” and “‘the cryptomeria tree by the temple gate’” (77). Like the Buddha statue and his father’s letter, these everyday items that once were part of the way in which Minoru and Keiichi made sense of themselves in the world, helping to shape the individual ways they organized and directed themselves, have become a part of the men’s memories and emotive, affective responses, and they act on Keiichi, providing him some solace against the alienating cars and streetcars, and allowing him to feel restored by the assurance and security they recall for him.29

In a forth illustration of what Keiichi’s things allow him to do, things in the novel also enable him to build a new home and place in North America, as his father had hoped he would. Keiichi and Kazuo borrow tools from their neighbour, Albert Smithkins (55),

29 Similarly, the silks, tapestries, china, ornaments, lacquered wood, and incense with which Keiichi deals later on in the novel as the shopkeeper in Minoru’s shop of Japanese things make him feel Japanese again: “In the shelter of Minoru’s curio shop on Powell Street, without resistance, I became a Japanese again. I yielded to sentimental memories, encouraged by my surroundings” (Strength 136).

and use them to fix up their house and cultivate the land in California. And in the Fraser Valley, they are able to plant thousands of berry plants on five acres, and build another room on their house (110). When Keiichi and his family finally acquire a house in the city, they again use tools to fix their house and make their home: “In the house dust and cobwebs were everywhere. The floors were deeply stained and rutted, the walls grimy. But we found actual pleasure in the defects of the place. Here was work for water and soap, hammer and saw” (118). Effectively building something for himself where there was nothing familiar or already belonging to him, Keiichi uses hammers and saws to make houses and homes, creating new items of comfort and security for himself and his family. Though the work is often very hard, for example, Keiichi describes women in the Fraser Valley working “in the fields all day, and half the night in their houses, with never a chance to see beyond the river” (104), such work is also deeply satisfying for Keiichi. The problems and deficiencies of his house in Vancouver bring him pleasure because they offer him an opportunity to apply and orient himself in a meaningful way toward the completion of a task that is very significant to him: having his own house and home.

Moreover, through engaging in the building of his own house and orienting himself to these tasks, Keiichi’s objects also allow him to construct or carve out his own place in the world, effectively between his father’s ideals for enterprise and his mother’s appreciation of tradition. For example, Keiichi and Ryoko chose “the household equipment of an average working-man’s family in Canada” for their home (123), and they build a slide in the garden to appeal to the children in the neighbourhood so that they might become playmates with their daughter and forget their racial difference (124). Additionally, they build a tokonoma – an alcove in Japanese homes used for displaying decorative objects – where they display an embroidered scroll sent from Ryoko’s mother (124). In their selection of the appliances they will use in the house and the furnishings with which they decorate it, as well as their very choice of house in a part of town with no other Japanese families, the couple signal and play out their desire for a life unencumbered by issues of race. And through the objects they chose to accumulate and add to their household, Ryoko and Keiichi create a kind of hybrid household in which they express their bi-cultural reality by combining objects of Japanese and North

American culture, and in which they perhaps feel most comfortable. Additionally, in selecting and including these objects from both cultures and in building a dwelling from these items, Keiichi and Ryoko (at least attempt to) exert mastery and control over their circumstances, whereby Keiichi’s interaction with his things allows him to sense himself as an agent in the world.

Besides linking Keiichi to the world and allowing him to build his own place in it, through which he feels a sense of mastery, in a final example of what Keiichi’s object do for him, they link him to other characters and help create communities. Like the tables Ahmed discusses that, because they are made for “collective gatherings” and are shared by other people, unite people together as a group, the objects that Keiichi remembers, the tools he uses, and the things symbolizing cultural ideals he negotiates also join him in common with the people around him. The children in the neighbourhood overcome any differences playing together on the slide, and Keiichi and Kazuo join in clearing and farming their property. And, by sharing hammers in order to build extensions on their houses to accommodate new family members, and tools in order to work the fields together to produce food for their clan, Kazuo, Keiichi, and Ryoko become bound together as a family. Similarly, the table in the Keiichi’s house brings Keiichi and Ryoko together in common despite their religious difference, when, as newlyweds, they sit around the table discussing their religions and then rest her Bible along side his Buddha statue on it (90). Even, the armchair that belongs to Kazuo that sits in a shadowy corner of the house helps gather the family together. It indicates those who cared enough about him to give him the chair as a mail-order gift for New Year’s, it provides him with a comfortable spot in the house near and around which Keiichi, Ryoko, and the children gather, and it supports him while the children sit on his knee (94). The tools, tables, and chairs gather the people together and hold them in close proximity with each other engendering sightlines or directed orientations that function like an invisible web holding them all together and in common.

1.4 The Joy of Possession

To summarize the previous section, I have shown that Keiichi’s objects express his inner self, link him to the world outside himself, help him remember his past, help him position himself and adapt to the circumstances in his present and to build a home in Canada, and connect him to others and a community. If we consider all these aspects against the novel’s most obvious claim that objects are ‘merely things’ that can be taken for granted or easily left behind, especially considering Ryoko’s claim that their house and belongings are just things that the family can do without, this reading of the novel shows the opposite. Indeed, analyzed through Heidegger’s and Ahmed’s ideas, the Strength for the Bridge rather demonstrates that things are integral to how Keiichi and the other characters orient themselves in the world. And things appear as necessary in order for the characters to have meaningful relationships with the world and other characters. Moreover, instead of being just things that can be taken or left behind, things also bring Keiichi pleasure and personal satisfaction when he works on a task that is meaningful to him in establishing his own place in the world.

Further exploring the particular aspect of pleasure associated with things and that intimately and uniquely relates to the character, in the following section, I want to take up a further dimension of the characters’ relationships to things: the issue of ownership. That is, I will analyse the stakes involved, not in general relationships to things (proximity or use), but particularly in owning things and the right of possessing items, whereby these items appear to uniquely belong to characters as their property. Moreover, I will consider how owning things in the novel is integral, not only to the characters’ orientations in the world, but also to the very being of the characters and to who they are. Elucidating just how deeply their relationships and orientations to property affect the subjects in the novel, by making and maintaining them as the unique characters they are, I will suggest that people do not just lose things when property becomes alienated but parts of themselves and relationships that are fundamental to them.

To begin this inquiry, I want to consider precisely what the personal pleasure and satisfaction is that characters get from their objects and what it does for these individuals. Contrasting the notion that things have little meaning and can easily be given up and

replaced, Strength for the Bridge also presents the idea that a particular joy is involved in possessions. Keiichi refers to what he calls “the joy of possession” in describing what Kazuo had and lost with his property in California, even though the farm remained in his possession. After restoring the vandalized property, Keiichi tells us: despite the pleasure which Kazuo obviously felt in seeing his land orderly and productive again, his buildings repaired, the joy of possession had left him. He was moody and talked very little. After sunset, he would leave me and wander up and down his fields. In the almost dark I would see him bend to pick a leaf or a blade of grass, then stand looking at it as if it were a treasure. (55, my emphasis) Even when Kazuo regains mastery over his land and cultivates it so it will produce successful crops, he does not experience the same sense of pleasure he did before finding it all damaged, suggesting there is some essential feeling or energy related to property that is necessary to the positive engagement with the thing and yet that also exists somehow beyond or outside of the object. In other words, something about his property is really about Kazuo and is essential to who he is and how he exists in the world.

One way we might read Kazuo’s heightened emotional attachment to his things – an affection for his property that seems to really be about himself – is as superficial and inappropriate. In other words, we might interpret Kazuo as having mistaken his property for having more meaning and additional significance than it does, and as having projected onto it a meaning that belongs to him rather than to the objects themselves. In this way, Kazuo’s feelings of joy and profound loss over his land, his favourite cherry tree that Keiichi observes him stroking (56), and his house suggest that Kazuo fetishizes these things, giving them subjective and personal meanings and turning them into things they are not. The items are like the fetishized commodities Marx discusses in “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof.” They are imbued with values and even a kind of voice of their own that make buyers long for them in ways they would not if the buyers saw the things as the material items they actually are. Additionally, we might consider how far Kazuo’s feelings are from a Buddhist approach that purports that people do not need material things in order to have true personal happiness and

enlightenment, but rather need to rid themselves of such material distractions in order to find contentment with themselves and with their lives. In either Marxist or Buddhist terms, Kazuo appears as the fetishizing capitalist (indeed, he came to North America as an economic migrant) caught up in mistaking his things for being parts of himself and as quintessential to who he is as a successful businessman and landowner in the new world.

Whereas Kazuo can be read as projecting meaning and value into his property, we can further consider him a subject of cruel optimism. As Lauren Berlant describes, in her book Cruel Optimism, people are often optimistic about situations and attachments even though those relationships ultimately work against them and their best interests. As much as people are hopeful about a course of action and its outcome, the cruel thing is that continuing on that course at all costs and having attachments that “remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings” (13) can ultimately hurt us and keep us trapped. In other words, Kazuo focusing his attachments onto his California property as the sole object of his desire, as what gives his life meaning and validates his existence, is cruel and harmful because the property cannot actually provide the meaning to his life that would satisfy him. In this case, we might consider Kazuo in terms of Berlant’s analysis of the characters in Charles Johnson’s story, “Exchange Value,” who engineer an inheritance of wealth to help them survive against their circumstances of extreme poverty (Berlant 41). Assuming an elderly neighbour’s hoarded collection, the brothers, Cooter and Loftis, buy clothes that shame them, eat food that makes them sick, and go psychotic trying to safe guard their new wealth (Berlant 40). And according to Berlant, hoarding “against death, deferring life, until you die” brings the characters “in proximity to plenitude without enjoyment” (41). Similarly, Kazuo’s property might afford him financial security, but it will not bring him happiness or a true and validated sense of his own meaning in the world (in the void of nothingness). And the racially motivated attacks on his property that have left it vandalized have pulled the veil from his eyes, so to speak, to reveal to him the ultimate meaninglessness of such attachments to private property within a cruel world. Private property, then, is not what Kazuo ultimately wants or needs, and perhaps, as Ryoko’s

statement about only losing things suggests, he should rather look to love, family ties, and friendship for a truer form of joy: a joy without possession.

However, as Berlant also notes about the cruel stakes involved in being so hopefully invested in inappropriate objects, such hopeless hopefulness is also what makes us who we are. As Berlant writes: What’s cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object/scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well- being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of its form provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. (24, italics in the original) The subject of cruel optimism effectively lives a mode that works against his best interests and cannot choose to make changes to his life. On one hand, the subject is attached to something that is bad for him and unhealthy for his productive survival. On the other hand, letting go of or forfeiting the object also threatens his life insofar as it ruins the orientations, paths, and positions that make the world exist as it does for the individual and that make him the person he is.30 Our attachments may be bad for us, but they also make us who we are, in which case, Kazuo’s fixation on his property may put his things and his economic prosperity before values like friendship and love, but they are also integral to the character Kazuo is.

30 As much as I, at times in this discussion, infer the similarity between melancholic attachments and Berlant’s idea of cruel attachments, Berlant notes there is a difference. The melancholic tries to delay the loss of an object by suspending a relationship to it; however, for Berlant, the objects she is interested in are ones that are “significantly problematic” for the individual (24). I very much appreciate John Berger’s articulation of the problem of being caught up in the desire to own commodities. Like Marx’s idea of commodities as fetishes, Berger writes “the publicity image steals [the spectator-buyer’s] love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product” (Ways of Seeing 134). Such attachments and the desire to own things are problematic because they lead to impossible dreams and envy, but never to changing peoples’ circumstances for the better. As Berger describes, “Publicity turns consumption into a substitute for democracy. The choice of what one eats (or wears or drives) takes the place of significant political choice. Publicity helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic within society. And it also masks what is happening in the rest of the world” (149). For Berlant, the problem of political change is further complicated because she recognizes how personally and profoundly invested people are in their attachments to the things that ultimately make them unhappy, so much so that they cannot give them up even if doing so would significantly improve their lives.

Whereas, according to Berlant, our relationships to things and our attachments are integral to who we are, even when they work against our best interests, exploring Kazuo’s joy of possession in terms of psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches further shows why and how such cruelly optimistic attachments are essential to the subject. In a psychoanalytic reading of Kazuo’s joy of possession, the significance surrounding Kazuo’s melancholic feelings toward his object – his land in California – come into view. In Freud’s conception of melancholia, a person losing a loved object fixes on the loss and has difficulty overcoming it (or, as Berlant would say, the person is compelled to delay the loss in order to maintain the relationship to the loved object). For Freud, one of the hardest losses to work through is the loss of an ideal because such a loss is harder to see and is not subject to reality-testing in the same way as one’s experience of the death of a loved one, for example (“Mourning and Melancholia” 253- 4). In this way, Kazuo’s lugubriousness relates, not to the loss of a thing (he still has his property), but to the irreparable loss of an ideal as represented by the thing: the ideal of himself as a successful businessman and landowner in the new world. Such an image of himself was especially important to him at that point in the novel because of the humiliation he had recently experienced on his return to Japan to marry, during which he had been deserted by his fiancée after he had been drunk the night before their wedding (Beattie 54). Without the prospect of another attachment or of any family, and perhaps in spite of his former fiancée’s feeling about his coarse ways, the California property becomes particularly important to him. Indeed, the property is his most significant possession and he managed to acquire it on his own merits and through his own hard work and planning, which would have contributed to Kazuo’s sense of himself as a successful, respected landowner in North America.

The vandalized land thus signifies this lost ideal (a lost image of himself). The joy of possession that Kazuo has lost is the way his innermost desires and psychical investments can no longer aim and focus themselves toward the land and house he owns; his property can no longer organize his passions and be the focus of his drives after he had been so vehemently refused by his neighbours and the California community of which he had tried to be a part. Even though he still owns the house and land, they no

longer have the same significance of accomplishment and success, nor do they contain and crystalize the sense of mastery of his own meaningfulness in the world as they previously did. And, consequently, the smallest things, like the leaf or blade of grass and the cherry tree he strokes gain immense significance as treasures that point to the ideal he once had but is now lost. Viewed in this way, things appear as not only the physical, but also the psychological supports that are necessary for subjects to be able to see and envision themselves as the whole, coherent, and masterful subjects they need to feel themselves being in the world in order to be, or at least be confident as, subjects at all. Like Jacques Lacan’s baby in the trotte-bébé and before the mirror (“The Mirror Stage” 1), the baby needs the objects supporting and reflecting it to see and understand itself as the baby it (comes to think it) is or could be. And, subsequently, these objects are precisely constitutive of the subject the baby is and becomes.

Examining the same question of how exactly attachments to things are essential to us, even when such attachments are bad for us, in a phenomenological approach, Ahmed argues that the ways in which a subject relates to things becomes integral to the formation of her character and who she is. From a phenomenological approach, as we have already observed of Keiichi, objects orient the subject to the past in a way that helps him negotiate his world and emotional life, and they help him to transition and orient himself to his new experiences and new objects. Material things also open up certain cultural, historical, and socio-economic possibilities for him while limiting others. Because things do all this, and in the process of doing all this for the subject, things also change, form, and shape his desires, self, and character. For example, even picking up and using something at-hand, like a hammer, already makes Keiichi a person who hammers and orients him in the world as such. The hammer modifies his position or character – for example, from being the child of an entrepreneur to a pioneer’s adopted son – and affirms them – for example, as a man who knows how to work with his hands even when he moves into a middle class home and neighbourhood.

Further describing the relationship between orientations to thing and one’s character, Ahmed writes:

Bodies . . . acquire orientation through the repetitions of some actions over others, as actions that have certain “objects” in view, whether they are physical objects required to do the work (the writing table, the pen, the keyboard) or the ideal objects that one identifies with. The nearness of such objects, their availability within my bodily horizon, is not casual: it is not just that I find them here, like that. Rather, the nearness of such objects is a sign of an orientation that shapes what we call, inadequately, “character.” (58, italics appear in the original) The directions the subject faces in his dealings with the world and his lines of relation to objects in the world shape who he is especially because repeatedly choosing and using the same things and tending toward certain objects over others – whether he does so consciously, unconsciously, or because there are no other things to choose from in the field of things and possibilities around him – solidifies his particular way of being in the world and establishes and maintains him as the person he is. Like Ahmed oriented toward the whiteness represented by the Christmas cards from relatives in England, we can read Keiichi as repeatedly acting on or being in a particular relationship toward certain things. And, through, for example, the Buddha statue and the culture it represents and the letter expressing his father’s entrepreneurial ideals, Keiichi acquires the habitual orientation and comportment that is part of who he is. Such relationships and attachments to things thus shape his preferences, personality, dispositions, and temperament such that he feels himself as a Japanese immigrant to Canada, conflicted and split, and identifies in that certain way. Attachments to things may not be comfortable or healthy for the subject, such as Ahmed’s attachment to a whiteness that also refuses her, or Keiichi’s attachments that make him conflicted. However, the importance of objects for the subject is not only that they allow him to do things, but also that they allow him to be, making the subject the person he or she is.

Reading Berlant’s claim – that subjects enjoy or are optimistic about their attachments to even things that are bad for them – through psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches shows that such “bad” attachments are inevitable. Regardless of their quality or how they may or may not benefit us in the long run, things

unavoidably support and structure us because of the ways in which they represent other things and ideals. Moreover, things surrounding a person will assuredly act on the subject giving her the character she has, regardless of the subject’s will or agency. In these ways, Kazuo’s affective bonds and relations with the land can be bad for him, connecting him to superficial desires and capitalistic ideals about possession that can work against him and a sense of what is truly important in life (as Berger warns and like the brothers in “Exchange Value” who are driven sick and mad by the things they desire and accumulate). But, we must also read that these connections are inevitable and essential to him, supporting, structuring, and creating him as the Japanese economic migrant and pioneer he is.

However, besides interpreting Kazuo’s joy of possession as being bad for him, even if it is inevitable and important to him, I want to further suggest the ways in which his emotional attachment to things is not at all wrongheaded but rather a good and positive attachment. Indeed, the desire to own and possess things can turn objects into commodities invested with values that forget the object and its production, but Kazuo’s joy of possession also recalls Walter Benjamin’s comments on “a very mysterious relationship to ownership” (60) that he discusses in his essay on collecting books, “Unpacking My Library.” For Benjamin, owning a book or object is not about a foray into the marketplace that will end without the sense of enlightenment and deep attachment that one is ultimately looking for because business and capital are not really the realms in which to find those things. Instead, taking ownership, for the collector, is rescuing a book from the marketplace “because he found [the object] lonely and abandoned . . . and bought it to give it its freedom” (64). In this case, objects can only be fully actualized through their being collected and owned by an owner. And what is invoked and represented through the thing or the book, rather than its “functional, utilitarian” usefulness (60), is a “chaos of memories” or the complete and unfathomable history of the object that has allowed the object to come into the world and to end up where it is in the present in the form it is in. As Benjamin describes what the collector engages with through the thing:

Everything remembered and thought, everything conscious, becomes the pedestal, the frame, the base, the lock of his property. The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership – for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object. (60) An object, because of its history and fate, engages a true collector in the chaos of this history, and through the object, the collector has these former times at his finger tips, which is how we might imagine Kazuo relates to the cherry tree he strokes and the house he purchases from a heartbroken French Canadian. For, as Marx reminds us, recalling the worldliness and infinite connections that Heidegger and Ahmed suggest are part of relating to objects, even things from nature have a social history. Indeed, taking the cherry tree as his example, Marx explains that it was “‘transplanted by commerce into our zone,’” and that it therefore exists as it does “‘only by this action of a definite society in a definite age’” (Marx and Engels, qtd. by Ahmed, 41).

In this case, what joy Kazuo loses with his property is not the misguided pleasure of mistaking his property for having more, personal value than it should, but the joy of feeling and recognizing himself as being a part of the world and history, from which the objects arise and to which they also relate. And what is at stake in losing this connection is not just a feeling of being out of place or out of sorts, but of losing life itself; for, according to Benjamin, a true collector, through collecting his objects and engaging with their histories or fates, accomplishes “the renewal of existence” (61). Drawing a comparison between collectors and children, Benjamin finds that processes like “the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals – the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names” renews the old world (61). Collecting, like holding, drawing on, cutting, naming, and employing things in one’s own non-utilitarian ways, allows the collector to come into contact with the distant past of the object and to make the thing and its history come alive in the present moment, as well as the present come alive for the subject. Thus, owning and collecting property not only puts one into or maintains one in a profound relationship to the past, it also renews the past in the present moment making one’s existence and “the

now” meaningful. And part of what makes the present moment so meaningful is that such collecting and engagement with the past also evokes an important sense of responsibility, or as Benjamin describes, “a collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property” (66). Having “the attitude of an heir” of historical things (66), the collector or owner not only has a deeper connection and sense of duty toward the past he inherits, and a revived sense of the present because of that past, but also acquires a strong sense of responsibility to the future of his property: to the item that will exist beyond him and to the world that may inherit the thing.

For Kazuo, then, the joy of possession that he loses for his property and that he laments in the leaf, the blade of grass, and the cherry tree he strokes, is the loss of his relationship to the past (his own history and the histories of his objects), which revitalizes and gives meaning to his present, and that connects him to the future. Indeed, without the land and its house or at least without a strong sense that it belongs to him, Kazuo loses an empowering image of himself as a successful landowner in America. However, he also loses touch with the history of the property: with the Quebecois former owner and his story of lost love and religious conversion, the evidence for which (faded images of Christ) Kazuo keeps and admires on his walls. Additionally, he loses his dream of bringing a Japanese wife to his farm and of being a father to his own family, and he loses the future (orientation) he had once had in which he would have continued to cultivate the land and then would have passed it on as an inheritance to his children who would have continued to maintain the property into the future. Moreover, in having his property vandalized and encountering racist sentiments that make his dream of happy possession impossible, and in losing his relationship to the past, his engagement with the present, and his responsibility to the future, Kazuo loses his position as having a duty toward these things and he loses the possibility of being able to care for them and for the world. For, without things as “property” the subject does not receive the consistent preparation or comportment to be more mindful of the world.

Indeed, without his property, Kazuo cannot create or maintain a space to house or keep his things or himself. As Benjamin suggests of the books he owns at the end of his

essay, a real collector lives in his objects. And imagining that he has created a dwelling with his books, which he calls “building stones,” Benjamin describes disappearing inside this dwelling of very personal and owned objects to live there (67). Benjamin making himself an imaginary shelter from his possessions implies not only that owning things puts people in a unique position of responsibility to the world, but also that ownership itself allows one to create an existential or imaginary shelter. Through owning things, one can feel oneself sheltered, and can gather and protect other items in the shelter, while dwelling in the world and history. Kazuo, however, does not have this possibility. He cannot take shelter in his things and he cannot build a shelter that might shade, protect, or preserve his other objects and personal property; his property will be targeted by racist neighbours. Without his objects and possessions, Kazuo is unable to feel himself shielded in his property or secure in the meaningfulness of being a part of history and toward the future that property signals, and he is unable to intervene in that historical process that is his life and world. What comes to light rather is how vulnerable the subject is who cannot control, care for, or preserve his things, as well as the heightened significance things may acquire – fixating on a leaf or stroking a tree – when the ownership of them and the possibility of being responsible for them is so precarious.

1.5 Fragile Things and Racism Before the Internment

Against Ryoko’s claim that losing all one’s property is only a matter of losing things, my reading of the novel shows us that even background things are meaningful for Keiichi and his community allowing them to orient themselves in the world and toward each other. It also shows that besides, or part of, orienting the characters, things are essential to them, shaping and structuring the characters and beings they are – providing Kazuo, for example, the image of himself through which he develops and the lines of orientation available to him that form his character. Additionally, this reading of the novel shows how things make subjects responsible to the past and the future, making the present moment of their lives exist as it does for them in the particularly meaningful way it does. However, along side all the significance that can be garnered from the background objects in the novel, the novel also suggests how vulnerable things are, especially in circumstances that include displacement and racism. For, things themselves do not fare

very well in the novel. Returning to the Buddha statue and letter that Keiichi’s mother and father give him, the effect of the narrative losing track of the figurine and of Keiichi not finding the letter once he arrives in Canada may suggest that the items were no longer deemed meaningful to the story, which may contribute to Purdy’s assessment of the novel as lacking “vivid access to life and human emotions” (1966). However, we might also read such losses as testifying to the fragility of things and as illustrating how objects can easily be damaged or lost to us. Moreover, losing one’s belongings and the extent to which such dispossession takes place in the novel, not only discloses how fragile things are, but also shows us how fragile the characters are as a consequence of losing their property. Losing their things results in harmful and impoverished circumstances and reduces the Japanese Canadian characters to “bare living.” They lose nearly everything and therefore all the connections to the world that were a fundamental part of their existence as it was (being the people they were), and that were fundamental to the maintenance of their communities. Moreover, the characters become subject to the conundrum of having their rights over their property both recognized and not recognized at the same time, in a way that utterly undermines their authority over their things and themselves.

Property and belongings may last beyond us and into the future, but they also require shelter and care in order for them to be there to support and orient the characters within the circumstances and precariousness of existing in the world. And such protection and attention are not always possible (even for people, never mind things), such as when Keiichi first arrives in Vancouver. Fearful that the death of Keiichi’s father on the voyage was disease related, the passengers are ordered to leave all their things and to takes showers in emergency houses set up on the dock. As Keiichi describes: Meanwhile the boat and the luggage were fumigated. Nude and frightened, we crowded together. . . . When we returned on board, it was to find our luggage open and its contents roughly spread around. We re-dressed as best we could and tried to identify our scattered possessions. Although some of my clothing was missing, the silk-wrapped Buddha lay safe in the corner of my basket. (23)

Keiichi cannot keep control over or safeguard his things that are ransacked by authorities and workers, and then further scattered by fellow passengers, and there is no adequate management of the items or recourse for any losses or damage; the items are just things belonging to immigrants and that may carry disease. Thus, the uncertain circumstances of migration and the way people are treated out of necessity, fear, and bureaucracy, but also because of racism, are such that things cannot be kept or cared for. When one is without a stable home in which things can dwell and be kept, and unable to exercise the care that is part of ownership, things get lost more easily, whereby, for example, the cloth in which Keiichi’s mother wrapped the Buddha does not survive the trip across the Pacific and by the time Keiichi and Kazuo make their way from Vancouver to Kazuo’s California property, Keiichi’s willow basket that had been packed full of his belongings when he left Japan is only half full (49).

Similarly, despite his ownership, Kazuo’s property is susceptible to mistreatment and vandalism; only the loss of Kazuo’s property focuses our attention on how racism was a factor in such losses. Indeed, on his journey to Japan, while Kazuo is too far away to safeguard his plot of land, white neighbours trespass on, vandalize, and steal his property. We know their crimes were particularly motivated by racist sentiments because no other farms were targeted and the perpetrators wrote messages on the door of Kazuo’s house that are so offensive Keiichi refuses to translate them for Kazuo (52). In this case, racial discrimination makes material things especially vulnerable to violence and loss, and racism can make it impossible for the characters in the novel to maintain a house to shelter their things and themselves. Indeed, the Japanese family that had been keeping an eye on Kazuo’s property, fearful for their own property and safety, sell their land and leave the area (51). And material items and property can be made so vulnerable in being subject to prevailing social sentiments that they become exempt from all protection. Kazuo dismisses Keiichi’s suggestion that he report the destruction to authorities because of the lack of will among the authorities to help them (53).31

31 Keiichi’s acquaintance, Yojiro, also endures racial violence targeting his property when people stab his horse (103), and other Japanese people experience fires, “crop damage” and “accidents to [their] equipment and livestock” in order to bully them into leaving and selling their property (104). The racism with which Yojiro deals is not only evidenced in the disrespect that the people harming his property and animals show but also in what makes the police protection ineffective for targeted minorities: Yojiro fears telling the

However, not only does property appear fragile under the rough and racist conditions depicted in the novel. The hardships the Japanese characters face, either because of the physical labour they have to do or because of the ill-will and disadvantages they endure within North American society, also reveals the fragility of the immigrant characters themselves, who are even metaphorically reduced to things through their experience. As Ahmed reminds us, people’s bodies are also material that is physically shaped by the objects around them, and the things we come across in our daily living not only connect us to the world and shape our character, but also leave their physical traces on us and “their impressions on the skin surface” (54). Using the same object repeatedly results in the object leaving an imprint on the body, shaping the body with bumps and marks, like the sore neck and shoulders that Ahmed describes she gets as a writer or the lump on her finger that she acquired from the constant use of a pen (57). Similarly, in Strength for the Bridge, the tools the characters use for their work physically affect the Japanese Canadian immigrant workers. Kazuo becomes bent, tired, and weak from all the labour, and he develops a pain and condition that contributes to his death by heart failure (113).

We might read the physical marks that things can leave on our bodies through our use of them as personally identifying markers and very much a part of who we are, whereby Kazuo is the particular pioneer he is with the history (of certain encounters with objects and others) he has.32 We might also consider that these marks reminding us of the materiality of the body invoke the novel’s main theme of sacrifice that is described in the “Prologue” and indicated in the novel’s titles: metaphorically, the issei characters are the material used to build the bridge between cultures and whose lives (their comfort and security of being) are, in a way, sacrificed for the future generations of Japanese police because he thinks the repercussions and harassment will be worse (103). In this case, property appears specifically targeted for racial violence because it can appear as an accident and be more easily overlooked by police. 32 As Ahmed explains how the regular use of tools affects who we are, she tells us that our bodies take “the shape of this repetition; we get stuck in certain alignments as an effect of [our] work” (57, verify original emphasis). We might think of, for example, Nicholas Temelcoff, the labourer in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, who recounts to Alice the story behind each of the scars he received during his work constructing the Bloor Street Viaduct (37), or of how Anil Tissera, the forensic pathologist in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, uses the markers left on Sailor’s remains to identify his occupation and construct his history, whereby the things of one’s labour have imprinted the body to such an extent that those marks become one’s unique identifiers, at the same time that they testify to the difficulty of the labour.

Canadians to be accepted in Canadian society.33 However, as much as these physical marks and scars testify to each character’s unique story and life, and indicate, according to the novel, the honourable sacrifice the characters necessarily make of their lives for others, they also highlight the violent, desperate circumstances that render these subjects objects, reducing their existence to the material nature of their bodies. For example, a young woman named Kimi, who becomes deaf after the earthquake and fires of 1919 in San Francisco (61), is so poor the woman who cares for her prostitutes her to feed them both, making her body the object of exchange. Kimi gives her body because she has no other thing left to give. Similarly, Keiichi, one evening in Vancouver, happens upon an elderly couple trying to commit suicide by throwing themselves off a bridge. When the passing swimmer that helps Keiichi save them is dumbfounded by their actions, Keiichi speculates that they were attempting to sacrifice themselves for the survival of the rest of their family members because, with the war restrictions against the Japanese and the inability to work, “Food is scarce among our people, and many are going hungry” (128).

1.6 Fragility and Bare Life in the Internment

The lack of security that the Japanese immigrant characters have throughout the novel, or that they can provide in order to shelter their belongings and property, illustrates how the Japanese Canadian characters experienced racism and insecurity before the internment itself. The way characters are reduced to things through their labour, poverty, or ill treatment suggests a history of experience that leads up to and foreshadows the internment (and that makes Strength for the Bridge unique among the novels being analysed in this discussion). And, Beattie’s plodding historical fiction shows readers how a history of racism and violence existing before the internment contributed to the social views and policies that made the incarceration of a whole population and the liquidation of all their things possible. However, the novel further indicates that the loss of property for the characters during the internment was much more meaningful and difficult than what they experienced before because of how extensive the losses were, as well as

33 Although Beattie’s novel figures characters becoming objects as a kind of honourable sacrifice, the other internment novels in this study, and even this one, as I will discuss, suggest such a transformation of subjects to objects is a detrimental effect of the internment experience.

because the political decisions implementing such dispossession were made by a government against its own citizens. In what follows, I will track different aspects of the novel’s depiction of property losses in the internment and analyse the implications of the losses. I will begin with analysing how much and how thorough the depletion of belongings is for the characters, and then move to discuss how the loss of items is also a loss of rights and agency, which ultimately leaves the characters utterly exposed and disoriented in a situation akin to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.”

First, I will quickly track the novel’s account of the character’s losing their property as part of restrictive policies against Japanese Canadians during WWII. Readers first learn that Ru, Kazuo’s and Keiichi’s old friend, has to give his son’s boat over to the government’s Japanese Fishing Vessel Disposal Committee to be sold at their discretion (164). Soon afterward, Keiichi and his son, Junso, hear an announcement regarding the impounding of their possessions on the radio: ‘A notice has been issued by the Minister of Justice under authority of the Government, ordering the immediate surrender of all moving vehicles, weapons, cameras, and radios. Such articles are to be delivered to the nearest quarters of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A Custodian of Alien Property, to be appointed, will be vested with the responsibility for dealing with all Japanese matters concerning real estate, personal effects, business, and farms.’ (166, italics are in the original) The Wakao family are forced to give up Keiichi’s large car, which is not only a mode of transportation but conducts memory for Ryoko who, in touching it, thinks of the happy times the family had had in it (167); the rifle belonging to their youngest son, Tommy, which he recently received as a birthday gift from his older brother; the camera belonging to Mariko, their youngest daughter; their radio; and a samurai sword hanging as a decoration in Keiichi’s shop among other things (167). The novel even describes how they pack most of the smaller items into the car and must wait in a long traffic line with many other Japanese Canadians forced to give up their things, after which Keiichi

and Junso have to walk home (167).34 For Keiichi, this loss of property is especially significant because, according to him, it means “‘that we have lost our freedom’” (166). Indeed, without a radio they cannot learn the news of the world, nor acquire additional information about the government policies that affect them. And, not having cars makes it much more difficult to move and associate freely. Still, the dispossession of items persists. When the family is eventually required to leave their Vancouver house and with a limit on how many pounds of their belongings they can take with them, they give their piano and “other treasured possessions” to sympathetic neighbours (189).

The families continue to be deprived of items when they leave their homes and during their displacements. For those Keiichi helps as a translator in the temporary shelters erected in Hastings Park’s barns, there are no beds or blankets; Keiichi describes a young woman with a child creeping “into an empty stall where a pile of straw had been placed” laying down with her child and covering them both with the blanket they had been given (173). For those Keiichi accompanies to the isolated camps in Kaslo in the mountains, there are no kitchens with stoves or kettles. When helping a mother with three children who had not eaten for a day find “‘a place to make a cup of tea’” (187), Keiichi discovers that there is no kitchen because it had been divided into rooms with bunks, and an officer advises that the woman should “‘take her tea dry’” (188). And, when the Wakao family is forced to relocate to Tashme camp, there are no chairs. When Keiichi, his family members, and their elderly friends walk the remaining fourteen miles to the camp where they will be interned, Keiichi and Junso must make a chair with their own bodies, gripping each other’s wrists to carry Ru who is too weak to walk on his own. The loss after loss after loss continues whereby it seems there is nearly no thing left at all. And without their things to support them and to connect them to the world, the lines of orientation that form and sustain the characters’ world and relationships collapse. The

34 Muriel Kitagawa, a Japanese Canadian writer who wrote letters to her brother, Wes, living in Toronto during WWII, similarly describes giving up their radio. In her 2 March 1942 letter, she explains that her family was compelled to give the radio up (in their case, sell it) under threat of the possibility that RCMP officers would come and forcibly take it from them as they could search their homes without warrant. For Kitagawa selling the radio or having it confiscated are the same thing because both take place against the will of the owner: “They took our beautiful radio . . . what does it matter that someone bought it off us for a song? . . . it’s the same thing because we had to do that or suffer the ignominy of having it taken forcibly from us by the RCMP. Not a single being of Japanese race in the protected area will escape. Our cameras, even Nobi’s toy one, all are confiscated. They can search our homes without warrant” (89).

characters are forced into too intimate and uncomfortable relations with each other that eclipse the subject’s privacy and dignity, and the people become things, doing the work of the things they no longer have. Thus, unlike Kazuo’s chair that was part of a constellation of meaning, security, and comfort and that held the family members together in easy proximity in their Fraser Valley home, Keiichi and Junso must be a chair and Ru must accept their bodies and arms under and holding him. Similarly, Keiichi and his company must share the cabin dwellings with which they are provided, including the intimate spaces where they sleep and eat, with others.

Besides having to live within impoverished circumstances, in which they have no separate dwellings, no beds or chairs, no kitchens, and no implements, at least not at first, the characters also lose the possibilities to own things and their rights to their property. When the Wakao family members sense they will also be sent away, Kinny, the oldest daughter, suggests to Keiichi that they sell the house: “You left the Valley for us. It breaks my heart to think of selling – but don’t you think we should?” To which, Keiichi replies, “All real estate is in the control of the Custodian of Alien Property. We can’t sell this house because it isn’t ours. Come, it’s time to go inside, now” (183). The family built it, own it, and live in it, but they are no longer the masters of their home and they cannot keep it and remain in it, caring for their possessions, nor can they sell it. Keiichi’s suggestion that he and Kinny go inside their home recalls Benjamin building a dwelling for himself from his objects and books and then disappearing inside it to live; only, whereas for Benjamin dwelling allows him to be the unique subject he is toward the past and responsible to the future, Keiichi and Kinny must deal with the complicated and intimately unsettling irony that, though they refurbished it, making it a unique expression of their histories, future hopes, and bi-cultural realities, it is not theirs. Besides not being able to make decisions over the fate of their property, they cannot protect it or the items they shelter there. Indeed, later, when Junso, with special permission to leave Tashme, returns to the house to collect Mariko’s books, he finds the house completely looted. As Junso describes, the initial pause in his description suggesting he cannot find the words to convey the extent of the plundering and the damage he has seen, “‘The house – . . . . The door had been forced and everything taken, even the bathroom fixtures, and the

window frames that couldn’t be seen from the street. The tokonoma that mother prized had been ripped form the wall’” (195). The house has been thoroughly invaded, including the parts of the house normally only seen by those who live in it and intimately know it and including those more personal and cherished aspects, such as the tokonoma alcove where they displayed the embroidered scroll sent by Ryoko’s mother (124).

However, what is devastating here is not only how the family could not protect their property as part of their being interned and forcibly alienated from it, but also how they have no means of recourse and no rights over their property even within the law. When Junso goes to the Security Commission to report the crime, the officers express regret but decline to investigate or pursue the crime: “‘Breaking and entering is a serious offence but who is to say how it occurred? Former owners have been known to sell what could be removed to their white friends, so you see our position when people ask us for restitution’” (196). Even though the officers think Junso is trustworthy, they feel it would be too hard to prove that the house had been looted, rather then the items purposefully given away, to bother investigating. Moreover, by saying that they had “plenty of such complaints coming in” (196), the officers acknowledge how common an occurrence such looting of Japanese property is. And, the prevalence of such pillaging both validates Junso’s claims while simultaneously suggesting the officer’s hands are tied because there are too many thefts to begin investigating, even though the government’s own policies against the Japanese Canadian population and lack of provisions to secure the property led to the thefts in the first place. Similarly contradictory, the officers at the security commission further advise Junso that the family quickly approve the sale of the house “‘before it is further damaged’” and loses even more value, even though, ultimately, as the officer points out, the officials do not need their consent. As Junso recounts to his father, “‘He said that of course they have the right to sell it without our permission, but that permission granted is an easier way for them’” (196).

The novel thus depicts ownership and responsibility for property in several contradictory ways. It shows how the family still owns the house though they are no longer permitted to care for and be responsible for their things and cannot make decisions about it. The novel depicts the Security Commission as charged with caring for the things

but as unable and refusing to take responsibility for the property. And, the novel illustrates the selling of the house as a decision for which the government would prefer to have the owner’s permission but does not need it, whereby the family can neither sell the house nor stop the sale. Through its depiction of the contradictions of ownership and responsibility, the novel highlights the powerlessness of those interned and how their losses also included being deprived of nearly all their authority.35 For, the contradictions to which the family members are subjected produce a suspended moment or “exceptional circumstance” in which any decision about or action on behalf of their property – any expression of their agency – is impossible. Such suspended moments of inaction for Beattie’s characters are far from being moments of hopefulness, as Berlant argues is the case for Cooter and Loftis, in Johnson’s “Exchange Value,” who momentarily escape their normal, everyday existence of desperate poverty and are able to look toward other possibilities (even if they are ultimately unhealthy for the individual). Rather, such interruption and postponement testifies to the hopelessness of their situation and the lack of rights imposed on them, through which they were denied control over the things in their lives.

As an experience of such dejection and suspension (of rights), the internment experience and experiences of loss the characters undergo are experiences of “bare life” that stand out as extraordinary and unlike the experiences of hardship and racism that the population in the novel previously underwent. The internment effected a bare life experience for the characters partly because of the extent to which they were dispossessed of everything and impoverished, even being exposed to the elements and having no food to eat. However, the characters also experience bare life in Agamben’s sense insofar as they appear within the terms of the notion of homo sacer: the subject, or rather non-subject “who may be killed and yet not sacrificed” (Agamben 8). In other words, just as Miki pointed out Japanese Canadians were even denied the right of habeas

35 These kinds of challenging contradictions also continued in the debates that took place decades after the internment and in which the treatment of Japanese Canadians during the war was discussed as being neither right nor exactly wrong because it took place under exceptional circumstances and as emergency war measures. Instead of being justified or unjustified, in which in either case responsibility remains an issue, many concluded the internment was rather a mistake, in which case no one appears to be responsible (see Beauregard’s critique).

corpus, of being able to appear before the law, the homo sacer figure can be punished, but his punishment is neither part of a legal indictment nor has the meaning of a sacrifice. And, effectively, his punishment and his life are meaningless. Similarly, Beattie’s characters are “included in the judicial order solely in the form of [their] exclusion” (Agamben 8) when they appear has having property rights only when the government wants them to sign those rights away. And, because of these contradictions in ownership, the characters are exposed to violation in a way that is never recognized as a crime deserving judicial punishment. Similarly, sent to camps in the less populated foothills and mountains of the province where the characters do not appear to the rest of the population and cannot make their appeals in person before the Custodian, the loss of property and rights never appears as a crime nor as a meaningful sacrifice, but rather as a necessary part of the war.

Considering the novel’s depiction of the internment experience in terms of Agamben’s conception of bare life, the idea of sacrifice with which the novel frames the internment experience (and that Kazuo reiterates in the middle of the novel) appears null, void, and meaningless.36 Indeed, Minoru, having lost his business and property during the war, and his family having suffered painful separations, whereby his sons (one in Japan) are forced to be enemies and his wife is left psychologically fragile, is unable to frame his suffering as an allegory of sacrifice. For Minoru, his experience is not meaningful for the next generation. Also, he severs his connection with his Canadian relations by returning to Japan to care for his wife and one son (an amputee in war-torn Japan), telling Keiichi just before leaving, “There’s nothing for me here, dear friend, and little anywhere” (214). Similarly, though Kazuo teaches sacrifice (113-14), he dies before WWII and the Internment take place in the novel, and Ru, thinking of his friend as he prepares for his internment, describes Kazuo as a “rich man now” because, being dead, he does not know how their property is being confiscated and how family members are being separated and imprisoned (190). Kazuo’s death is rewarded here, but not because

36 According to Kazuo in conversation with Keiichi, physically placing his hands in the shape of a bridge: “We old fellows got a big job to do, but you see, we get it done.” He put his hands in front of him and interlaced the clumsy fingers. “Like that,” he continued, “we stick it out, we work hard and don’t cry.” A bridge had been built recently joining the two shores of the river. “Like that,” he pointed. “One side go to the other side and nobody that come[s] after fall[s] in.” (Strength 113-14)

the legacy he has left behind means secure and easy passage for future generations, but because he is spared having to know how ineffective his sacrifice was and how much they are loosing.

1.7 Perverse Attachments

An affect, for the characters in the novel, of being subject to bare life – of never appearing as a subject with rights before the law or as offering a meaningful sacrifice – is exactly the opposite or a perversion of all the meaningful relationships that the characters had with their things as outlined earlier in the chapter. Along with and because of the immense powerlessness that arises when the characters no longer have full rights to ownership, and because the objects through which they normally understand themselves and orient themselves to the world no longer surround them, the characters in Strength for the Bridge also suffer a deep sense of disorientation. Their displacements and changing circumstances mean they cannot feel themselves reflected in or oriented to things in the world in the same way they had, and each time they are subjected to a new situation in which they are deprived of more things, the novel describes the characters as shocked and bewildered, and the whole population forced to migrate as “Numb with bewilderment” (172). When Keiichi and Junso first arrive at Hastings Park to help translate for the inmates, Keiichi describes his first view of about sixty people huddled together on boxes and parcels with “countenances expressing stunned unbelief” (173). Later that evening when they arrive home, Mariko asks them what happened but neither of them are able to talk about it, suggesting the losses – including the “collapse of faith” Keiichi experiences, the impoverishment, and the chaos – they witnessed is beyond belief and beyond words (174). The Wakao family members experience this shock and speechlessness again when in Tashme they are surprised to learn all five remaining members of the family must share one room with bunk beds. The family is so shocked they cannot appreciate the news of Junso’s marriage and silently follow Junso’s directions for unpacking and building a fire; as Keiichi describes learning of their meagre circumstances, “The shock had been too great for communication” (192).

Additionally, the disorientation arising from not being supported by and aligned toward one’s habitual or chosen objects in the world results in a lack of community and communication. Thus, whereas objects often join people together – such as Keiichi and Ryoko who gather around the table and share their bible and Buddha statue – those unable to orient themselves to (the things in) the world are also unable to talk with each other and share their experiences, becoming isolated form each other even as they, without their homes and things, are suddenly too close to each other. The disorientation the characters experience effects other distortions and reversals. Whereas things, according to Benjamin, help us relate to the past and to the future in a way that gives unique meaning and weight to the present, Keiichi describes the Japanese Canadian population as “growing old before our time” (197) and as living on their memories, suggesting that without things to preserve their memories for them, or to help them make sense of the present and to point them toward (prepare them for) the future, the people get stuck in the past.

Another effect of being disoriented and alienated from their property is a perversion of care, whereby, without their property, not only are the characters prevented from sheltering and protecting their things, but moreover, one of the only ways that remain for them to express their care or to safeguard their belongings is by destroying rather than preserving them. Mariko tries to keep her camera from the authorities by burying it, but when Keiichi and Ryoko find it, they feel compelled to smash it and burn the remains (168). And, on the final morning in their Vancouver home before being forced to relocate, Mariko cynically adopts “‘the scorched-earth policy,’” cutting down all the flowers and ruining all the buds in the garden so that the plants are not useful or beautiful for whoever takes over their house. Indeed, the only way for her to register her anger against the unjust wartime policies of the state that forces her family members and community from their homes, that makes it impossible for them to be sheltered by their things or to shelter and care for their things, and that wrecks her sense of responsibility toward the future of the objects, is to symbolically wage war on the things that she loves and that the authorities will take away. Registering that government officials are campaigning and taking action against her things, Mariko retaliates by attacking her

things first, whereby she leaves nothing left to be taken, only defiled objects and broken orientations.

Other things do remain, however: animals, which the novel portrays as abandoned or their fates are left uncertain. One final perversion in the relationship between the characters and their things that the novel presents as a consequence of such massive losses is the suggestion or reminder that the property was not just things at all, but also animals and pets that people had and that they were forced to leave behind. Animals cannot accompany the people on the massive, overcrowded, and uncertain journeys that were part of their internment; but, as living beings, even considered family members or friends, they also could not be easily left behind. According to Keiichi: Stories were told of a child who clung sobbing to a pet kitten, the pet eventually left behind; of an old man who was threatened with a beating when he refused to abandon his dog; of a woman who scratched the face of an officer when a caged bird was returned to its hook in an empty house. (172) Thinking, for example, of the dogs that David Lurie encounters at the veterinary clinic in Coetzee’s Disgrace, the bodies of which, after being euthanized, he feels compelled to accompany to the incinerator (or thinking of pretty much any children’s narrative with an animal in it), animals, unlike objects that help us find our bearings in the world and form our character, (are) often (used in narratives to) remind us of our own humanity. Their liminal status of being neither things, nor humans impels us to think more deeply about the property losses and what was at stake, and to recognize how significant and tragic those losses were, by, for example, compelling us to wonder what could have happened to the animals in such instances. What might have happened to the caged bird left alone in the abandoned house? Did it starve to death?

Similarly, we might further wonder what happened to the real birds and gold fish that Morishita listed as lost property on his room-by-room inventory of all the items he and his family left behind and never saw again (“Properties of Teiji Morishita 466 Cordova St. E Vancouver, B.C.”). Perhaps there were adopted by neighbours or looters, or rounded up by those in charge and sold or taken to the pound. In Julie Otsuka’s novel

about the Japanese American internment, When the Emperor was Divine, the mother kills the family’s old dog that they could not take with them. Here, killing your pets appears as a brutal act, but also a practical end and merciful sacrifice within a situation that, to pets, but also to property and people, is so violent: the policies indiscriminately reducing all objects and beings into alienable things and impelling people to be so ruthless.

1.8 We’ve Only Lost Things

Having taken account of many of the objects, belongings, possessions, and properties in Beattie’s novel, we find that things are not just mere material items, but objects (or even pets) with their own histories that do things for us and to us, that are very much a part of the world, but that also act on us, shaping our bodies, who we are, and our characters. The objects in the novel connect the characters to the past and help them remember, whereby “richly embroidered silks and tapestries, finest china and decorative ornaments, smooth shining lacquer, scented teakwood and incense” (136) compel Keiichi to remember Japan and relive his childhood memories of growing up there for better – providing him comfort in Canada – or for worse – making him feel conflicted about the desire to be both Japanese and Canadian. Besides containing Keiichi’s memories and revealing his (conflicting) desires, the objects and tools in the novel allow him to build furniture and homes, to make a living, and to keep and care for other objects and for others in a way that is his very own: working between cultures and within his limited circumstances of what he can get and acquire. Making objects, using them, and keeping them thus puts Keiichi in touch with the world – the worldly, historical circumstances that gave rise to the objects and in which the objects are located – and in touch with other people – he dwells with his children in his car on their way to visit relatives and friends, and he gathers with family members and men from the community around radios to listen to news reports. Moreover, by using the same tools to work on a project together, by existing together in a constellation of familiar, everyday things that comprise their homes and common spaces, or simply being part of the same world as indicated through the object, things orient Keiichi in common with others. Thus, Keiichi feels for the plight of a man from Quebec who had tried his luck in California, and joins with Kazuo and Ryoko as pioneers and as a family. Things allow Keiichi to orient himself to the world,

history, and ideals (his mother’s traditional ones and his father’s entrepreneurial ones), and engaging with and affecting things around him makes him feel a degree of mastery and agency in the world. But more than making him feel he has authority and ownership, the objects in the novel also deeply affect him, supporting and positioning him as the exact person he is in the world, and creating his character through lines of orientation to things that are habitually repeated and internalized. Such orientations and connections to things with histories that came before us and futures that exist beyond, as well as active and imaginative engagements with these objects make Keiichi respond to and responsible to the past and to the future in the unique way that is an expression of who he is and that makes him the singular being he is.

With all these multiple meanings and functions of things in mind and returning to Ryoko’s claim that “‘We’ve only lost things’” (209), the statement can only sound ironic and cynical. We can tell she cares about her Vancouver house and things because she asks about them and about the possibility of returning to them once she and Keiichi are free to leave Tashme in the first place. Additionally, she is anxious when Keiichi does not respond to her query (209), and, when Keiichi tells her about the house’s ransacked and vandalized state, she is hopeful they can repair it as they had done when they first bought it. Far from a thing, the house and her belongings constitute her home, as she explains to Keiichi, “‘Living in one room and part of another with so many people has tired me out, Keiichi. I want to go home’” (209). Without her things to orient her in the world in her habitual and comfortable ways, without the objects of her world gathering together to form a constellation of meaning or a safety net, and without the things that hold people together at a distance, living has been too hard and has depleted her, and she needs these things again. In saying she’s only lost things, then, we hear echoed not mere things at all, but the multitude of meaningful objects, the “things” in italics and thus of special importance, that make her world and that position her to the world, helping make her the character she is. And we hear Ryoko express her existential fatigue of being so worn down by their circumstances of their forced displacement and the liquidation of all their items. In this way, we might imagine that the items are only things because Ryoko does not even have the energy left to claim otherwise than what the authorities suggest.

We might also imagine that Ryoko echoes the sentiment expressed by policy makers and officials that these objects, these Japanese objects, are meaningless and ‘only things,’ except that because Ryoko says the words, the line sounds like a wry critique of their views: ‘only things is what they thought of our belongings and property, and perhaps what they thought of us.’ And perhaps her statement can even be read as a moment of empowerment and of Ryoko exercising some mastery and authority within a situation in which she has next to none and nothing left to claim ownership over: no thing she can make decisions about, shelter, or care for. Realizing that the house has already been sold and there is no possibility that they can return to it, perhaps Ryoko begins to frame this loss as something that might be tolerable, as only a thing and thus a loss they might be able to overcome. Exercising the only option she has to gain authority, she transfigures her home into a mere thing that can be given up.37

Ryoko’s statement about only losing things, in this reading, appears as a statement that paradoxically indicates how much was lost; for, she and Keiichi lost a lot: orientation, rights, community and communication. As this analysis of the objects in the novel shows, being forced to give up one’s things, to separate from them, and to neglect them is a violent requirement that leads to a fundamental loss of agency and disorientation, whereby the characters can no longer project masterful images of themselves in the world, nor can they feel themselves connected to the world and its past in meaningful ways. Moreover, we find the deprivation of things to which the Japanese Canadian community are subjected in the novel, when a woman and child must take comfort in a stall with only straw and a blanket, or Keiichi and Junso must make a chair from their own hands for Ru, not only makes keeping things impossible, even to the point where they feel compelled, on the other hand, to destroy their things, but also collapses people together in ways that make it hard for them to take comfort and to

37 We never know if Keiichi provided his unnecessary permission for the sale of the house or not. Did he authorize the sale thereby perhaps expressing his authority in this moment? Is it even possible for him to have been empowered in deciding or not deciding the fate of the house because in either case his in/action never appears, perhaps even to himself, as having control. And there is no possibility of refusal here, or at least not one that appears as such. Perhaps the only possibility for Keiichi and Ryoko is resignation that is also deeply indignant, which is perhaps what is sounded in Ryoko’s claim about only losing things: both giving up and resentment.

communicate or find community. Instead they are utterly and violently disoriented, and their lives as they knew them and their fundamental beliefs have come undone.

By the end of the novel, Ru is dead. Only $1200.00 remains for the Wakao family, which is merely a quarter of what Keiichi paid for just the house on Davie Street (211). Junso, who had kept his faith in mankind and in the Canadian government throughout the novel, at times even only as a pretence of “false optimism” (195) to exemplify and maintain moral for others, has lost his faith in the government; for, as he sees it, the sale of people’s property, especially at such low prices, was part of an expectation and hope that the Japanese Canadian population not return to the west coast (196), which worked insofar as Minoru and his wife move to Japan and the Wakao families move east.38 Also by the end of the novel, Keiichi suggests that the link to their former lives, whereby they previously imagined they could resume them, has been irreparably broken: “The old life seemed far away. How could we take it up again, with possessions scattered and property sold or pillaged?” (197). They have nothing, no money, no faith, and no future. Thus, the last page of the novel, set in 1951 (nearly 10 years after they were first interned), may suggest the possibility of happiness and community in a new beginning. Keiichi, Ryoko, Tommy, and Sachiko (Ru’s wife) have found a new home together in a white cottage on a small vineyard by Lake Ontario and are expecting all the other family members to join them there for a holiday and reunion. However, the effect of it taking so long to re-establish themselves suggests the characters are still haunted by the question of how to take up living again when nearly all your things have been taken. Indeed, how does one live without her things and without her property, the little bits that make her who she is and the belongings that allowed her to relate to history and toward the future possibilities she once had?

38 By page 210, after the atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Junso also, at least momentarily, loses faith in Christians and mankind, when he himself is a Christian minister, because so many Christians have been a part of “‘planned race destruction”’ (210).

Chapter 2 Losing Things and Losing Trust: Multiple Losses, Transitional Objects, Agoraphobia, and Hoarding in Obasan

In 1922, A. W. Neill, the independent Member of Parliament for Comox-Alberni (Vancouver Island, British Columbia), “told the [House of] Commons that he had asked the parliamentary librarian to purchase half a dozen copies” of The Writing on the Wall, the novel by Hilda Glynn-Ward originally published the year before.39 The novel, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, depicts Chinese immigrants to Canada as scheming capitalists living in crowded opium dens and Japanese immigrants as laying in wait to help invade Canada and increase the Japanese empire, and it imagines a future in which British Columbia has become a Japanese colony because “white men” had not opened “their eyes to the danger” of immigration (Glynn-Ward 19). Though a contemporary description of the novel recognizes that “it reiterates almost every anti-oriental cliché circulating in British Columbia at the time of its publication,”40 for Neill, nearly a century ago, the novel was “‘a book of truth dealing with the Asiatic question, particularly the Japanese phase of it, on our coast to-day’” (Roy xxiv), and its lesson was one everyone needed to learn.

In what one might be tempted to view as a coincidence bookending Canada’s racist history against Japanese Canadians, sixty-six years later – forty-six years after the entire population of Japanese Canadians living on the west coast had first been interned – members of parliament read sections of Joy Kogawa’s novel, Obasan, aloud in the House of Commons as part of the announcement of the Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement.41 One of them, Ed Broadbent, was even brought to tears as he read. Whereas the political efficacy of Glynn-Ward’s novel is not clear – there is very little critical

39 Patricia E. Roy, “Introduction” xxiv. Neill mistakes the title of the novel calling it The Handwriting on the Wall in his address to the parliamentary librarian. 40 This is the description of the novel on the University of Toronto Press site (“The Writing on the Wall: Chinese and Japanese Immigration to B.C., 1920. Description”). 41 Many critics refer to the 22 September 1988 Redress Announcement when politicians read Obasan in the House of Commons: Goellnicht (306), Goldman (364), Henderson and Wakeham (15), among others.

commentary on the novel – in the instance of Obasan being invoked in parliament regarding the experiences of Japanese Canadians, many critics consider Obasan as instrumental in affecting the Canadian public consciousness with respect to the history of the internment of Japanese Canadians in Canada during World War II.42 As Guy Beauregard expresses, Obasan “played a key role in mobilizing support for the 1988 Redress Settlement” (n. pag), and according to Nancy J. Peterson, “Obasan’s success in moving readers toward a sympathetic, impassioned understanding of history is clearly witnessed in its positive effects on the call for redress and reparations for Japanese Canadians” (168). More recently, Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, suggesting how the novel functioned as evidence that changed ideology and policy, describe Obasan as an example of a “Fictional expression [being] used to substantiate claims about the reality of the suffering inflicted by the Canadian state on citizens” (15). Similarly, Smaro Kamboureli describes Obasan as part of an “emergent event” because of the role it played “in animating the Canadian public” about the Japanese Canadian redress movement and in affecting the larger policy and cultural discourse of multiculturalism in the 1980s and 90s (Shifting the Ground 12).43 As these critics see it, the fictional Obasan not only brought the history of the internment to light, but also gave an imagined and particularized substance to the experiences of Japanese Canadians by depicting the forced incarceration and displacement of people and the separation of family members through very personal and touching details, and most sympathetically, through the

42 Regarding the political implications that Glynn-Ward’s novel may have had, the few critics who have written about it suggest that the novel articulated the existing and prevailing sentiments of its time. Patricia E. Roy describes the novel as “an expression of the popular racist ideas circulating in British Columbia at the time” (vi). Similarly, W. H. New claims the novel confirms the discrimination in BC at the time (“Writing Here1”). Also see Lloyd Sciban’s review of the 2010 reprint of the novel, in which he asks why reprint the novel at all, suggesting that the novel’s racist message trumps any historical insight it might offer. 43 Among the many critics who view Obasan as having a significant influence on the political decision to officially apologize for the Internment, Teruyo Ueki borrows Carol Fairbanks’s term, “political efficacy,” to consider the extent to which “the novel evokes a political consciousness among its readers, leading them to active involvement in social reformation” (7). Ueki writes, “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” (7). Additionally, Donald C. Goellnicht notes that all the reviews of the novel he had seen “go on to thank Kogawa for correcting history” (287). Christina Tourino describes, the novel “helped bring about the 1988 settlement that awarded restitution to Japanese Canadian survivors of World War II internment” and it “playing a role in winning restitution for Japanese Canadians” (150). Similarly, referring to the 1998 edition of the Canadian Who’s Who, Marlene Goldman quotes that Obasan was “‘instrumental in influencing the Canadian government’s 1988 settlement with Japanese-Canadians for their loss of liberty and property in Canada during WWII’” (qtd. in Goldman 364).

perspective of a child. The novel made the suffering of those wronged more of a living reality for readers, thereby shaping the national sense of that history as an unjust event (rather than as a political necessity as the internment has sometimes been understood), and even inspiring, or at least corroborating, the public and political will required for the state to enter into formal discussions acknowledging its past wrongs and to make official apologies.

To summarize this influential novel, Obasan depicts Naomi Nakane’s and her family’s internment experience including all their losses – both their confiscated belongings, as well as all the people from whom she is separated or who die during their internment and dispersal – through Naomi’s complex remembering of her childhood. The novel begins with the death of her uncle, Isamu, and her return to stay with and care for her aunt Ayako, whom she calls Obasan, in the immediate aftermath of his passing away.44 While she is at her aunt’s house in 1972, the present time of the novel, and before the arrival of her aunt Emily and her brother, Stephen, Obasan gives Naomi a package originally from Emily, and Naomi sifts through the letters, documents, and diary it contains. This process sends her into recollections of her past and into piecing together her experience and her family’s history before, during, and immediately after the war years. Led by photographs and documents given to her or left for her by her aunts and uncle, and by memories she has tried to stave off for years, over the course of a day in the two-day period of the novel the reader learns of the family relations and what has happened that resulted in members of the family being removed from their homes and communities, and forever split up, whereby only four family members remain to attend her uncle’s funeral. In particular, Naomi learns more about what happened to her mother who left for Japan on a family visit before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and who disappears without ever returning or being in contact with her children again.

In this chapter, I propose that Obasan presents us with a different political and social lesson in addition to the one commonly recognized by critics. Besides teaching us the wrongfulness of suspending the rights, dispossessing, and interning a whole ethnic population, I will show that Obasan teaches us about the importance of things to people

44 Obasan, means ‘aunt’ in Japanese, but is also used as a form of address for older women.

and about the psychological and social repercussions involved in being forced to leave all your things behind and in losing all your property. Obasan is obsessed with objects insofar as it mentions many items and includes lengthy descriptions of the belongings previously owned by family members and liquidated, stolen, or lost through the course of the displacements from Vancouver to Slocan to beet fields in Alberta, as well as all the things that Obasan keeps, from historical documents to useless odds and ends. With its preoccupation with things, the novel offers us a fuller sense of the family’s experience of such loss – as compared to Strength for the Bridge’s more straight-forward account of the Wakao family’s experience – and, extending my discussion of things from the previous chapter, this chapter will elucidate the particular consequences for individual characters, and how the government’s policies targeting property and things impacted the internal worlds of Naomi and Obasan and their relationships to other characters.

As with Strength for the Bridge, I will begin this discussion by tracking, in Obasan, the property losses of the family members with a view to the idea that paying attention to things in literature can help us fill in the kinds of details and contours of the experience of involuntarily losing all one’s things, even offering us a sense of how difficult the experience was for Naomi. Indeed, by having Naomi remember her childhood objects in her present, the novel consistently indicates the significance of these items, beyond any accountable (tangible or material) value, to her personal history. Analyzing a few of Naomi’s lost objects in the novel, and suggesting the depth and weight that losses such as these had for the protagonists, I will argue that the loss of things in the novel effects an experience of multiple loss, by which I mean, after losing a loved one or their former ways of living, characters are further deprived of or separated from the objects that should normally remain and remind them of their primary or more significant loss. With such losses in mind, this chapter will consider what happens when even the material objects we need to help us register the lost object and for mourning it are gone. Examining the relationships Naomi and Obasan have with objects even years after the internment, I will argue that the consequences of dispossession and suffering multiple losses for the internees portrayed in the novel is that they have disproportionate and exaggerated relationships to things and that they are rarely comfortable in the

company of others. Obasan becomes a hoarder after such dispossession, only not in the typical sense of collecting to fill a personal or existential sense of void. Naomi, on the other hand, who grows up through the internment and loses her transitional objects, is not able to develop out of her more private childhood spaces and into the more public and adult sphere, whereby she becomes agoraphobic. In either case, whether we contemplate Naomi’s fearfulness of public spaces or Obasan’s hoarding in private ones, what comes into view is that the multiple losses of such immense and purposeful dispossession engenders a fundamental distrust of the world.

2.1 The Critical Debate

Before proceeding with my analysis of things in Obasan, I want to quickly outline the prevailing critical interpretations of and main debate over the novel, and to briefly situate my own reading in terms of this debate. In locating Obasan as part of an “emergent event” or “culture of redress,” as Kamboureli, and Henderson and Wakeham respectively do, or in describing the story as presenting a “disruptive force,” as Donald C. Goellnicht does, critics affirm the transformative, political effect literature can have on society and politics.45 One reason why Obasan may have been so effective in influencing popular social sentiments and the political process for redress was that, as many critics see it, the novel itself is a story and example of reconciliation. In this way, reading about how Naomi deals with her mother’s disappearance after leaving for Japan in September 1941 to care for her great-grandmother (which is not explained until the end of the novel) and how she copes with the experience of being interned as a child, provides a workable representation and model for readers and the Canadian public to address the history of the internment. In other words, Obasan was so moving it could help engage people in action because reading about and shadowing the fictional Naomi as she uncovers documents in Emily’s package and remembers the details of her traumatic past

45 The full quote from Goellnicht: “Just as the memories stored in Obasan’s attic and the dreams of her Mother seep into Naomi’s living-room, her present, so too Kogawa’s memories and dreams seep into our living-rooms, her past affecting our present, settling on our collective furniture and into our collective upholstery. This seepage . . . not only shapes our perception of history as it happened in the 1940s, but also may shape our future history by entering the arena of conflicting discourses, where it becomes a disruptive force” (300).

simultaneously involves readers in a parallel process of learning about and coming to terms with Canada’s past.

Indeed, the dominant critical interpretation of the novel is that Obasan depicts Naomi’s personal reconciliation with her past. As Roy Miki expresses, “‘all [academics] tend to incorporate a resolutionary (not revolutionary) aesthetics in their overall critical framing of the novel. The agreement seems to be that Naomi resolves her silenced past, so establishes peace with the human rights violations that caused such havoc and grief to her, to her family, and to her community” (qtd. in Kamboureli, Scandalous Bodies, 175). Often focusing on Naomi’s relationship with her mother, these redemptive and reconciliatory interpretations consider the end of the novel as bringing closure for Naomi. For example, Gayle K. Fujita claims that when the letters explaining Naomi’s mother’s disappearance “are finally read to her, Naomi can begin to coalesce her fragmented life into a redemptive whole” (34). Similarly, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, commenting on Naomi’s address to her absent mother at the end of the novel, writes, “It is a powerfully moving, poetic passage which weaves the paradoxes of absence and presence, loss and recovery, to conclude in an emotional, internal reconciliation” (306). And Teruyo Ueki further claims Naomi realizes her mother’s love in this passage, allowing “Naomi to come to terms with the past and recover her affirmation of life in a new perspective” (17).46 In a very recent article, Rufus Cook also presents a resolutionary interpretation, arguing that Naomi completely recovers from her internment experience, whereby she knows her mother’s presence and feels “she has recaptured her sense of wholeness and ‘consubstantiality’ that she remembers as a child” (66). In addition to concluding that the end of the novel effectively cancels out the bad experiences by restoring Naomi to her childhood sense of wholeness, Cook argues that the events she endures further transform Naomi for the better, giving her a greater awareness of what exists “‘behind the field of appearances’” (66-7). Put a little differently, we might say that Naomi accepts the human rights abuses to which she was

46 Also, see Christina Tourino who concludes that at the end of the novel “Naomi senses new possibilities for communication with her lost mother” (149).

subject and becomes a better person who is in touch with a larger sense of humanity, because of her suffering.47

Along side the criticism that has largely focused on Naomi working through her difficult past, in more recent years, Obasan has conversely been interpreted as a novel with “‘revolutionary’ potential” (Kamboureli, Shifting the Ground, 176) insofar as many aspects of the novel (and of Kogawa’s subsequent novel, Itsuka, later rewritten as Aunt Emily and depicting Naomi’s foray into politics working with groups lobbying for redress) suggest ways in which Naomi and the Japanese Canadian community remain unsettled by their painful pasts. Such interpretations are critical of reading Obasan as a story of reconciliation. Leading this charge, Miki, in Broken Entries, argues that the novel and how it has predominantly been interpreted undermines “race awareness” or a more critical view of how racism and issues of inclusion are not resolved in the novel or in history (136). For example, Miki considers Kogawa’s earthly poetic imagery and her biblical references as showing the protagonist, and by extension the Japanese Canadian community, disappearing, and being assimilated and erased into the landscape (138) or of being “translat[ed] into whiteness” (139). In his evaluation of the end of the novel, Miki looks beyond the imagined exchange Naomi has with her mother to the historical document written by the Cooperative Committee on Japanese Canadians that Kogawa includes at the very end of the book. The document, while defending Japanese Canadians against the government’s mistreatment, excludes any Japanese Canadian voices suggesting, even in their defense “white liberals” speak for the Japanese Canadians who themselves are again left with “no voice or language” (Broken Entries 139). Thus, against interpretations that too simply turn Naomi’s suffering into a good thing, Miki critiques the novel for valorizing “suffering as a ‘universal’ condition” and “elide[ing] the materiality of history” and the “phenomenological edges” of the internment (Broken Entries 142). In other words, Miki is weary of the way in which the novel can easily

47 Naomi’s coming to terms also includes working through the very different and even opposing modes of dealing with the world and history embodied by her aunts. Her aunt Emily is the political activist and “word warrior,” and Obasan’s domain is silence. Critics have, for example, noticed that at the end of the novel Naomi “takes her Aunt Emily’s coat, suggesting that she is ready to embrace instead of resist her politically vocal aunt” (Tourino 150). The similarly redemptive reading finds that Naomi comes to more fully understand and appreciate the silence she receives and inherits from Obasan and her mother.

appear to give universal value to Naomi’s hardships (as Cook does) undermining any attention to those aspects of suffering that cannot be so easily abstracted or appear like a meaningful sacrifice.

Other critics sceptical of reading the novel as having a redemptive conclusion include Guy Beauregard, who argues that the critical focus on Obasan tends to view the internment as an error or wartime necessity, obscuring a fuller and more accurate understanding of the internment as a product of a history of anti-Japanese racism in Canada (“After Obasan” n. pag.). Specifically analyzing the novel and Naomi, in her chapter on Obasan, Smaro Kamboureli argues that, far from coming to terms with herself and her past experiences, Naomi becomes increasingly marked by and moulded into a racialized subject (Scandalous Bodies). And in a similar consideration of how race issues for Naomi do not begin with the internment or resolve, but precede her and continue to haunt her and the novel, in her recent book, Alien Capital, Iyko Day argues that the internment functions in Obasan to translate Japanese Canadians from appearing to have a dangerous capacity for productive labour (recalling to my mind Glynn-Ward’s argument) to being the acceptable ‘model minority,’ effectively washing the Japanese Canadian population clean. However, for Day, the ‘model minority’ myth that results still keeps Japanese Canadians trapped in a racist paradigm and in reductive stereotypes.48 In these ‘revolutionary’ interpretations – so called because they recognize that the issues of the past (racism) remain unsettled and still to be overthrown – what appears to some critics as Naomi’s apparently good outcome (acceptance and

48 In her chapter entitled “Japanese Internment and the Mutation of Labor,” Day investigates how descriptions of Japanese Canadian labour often identified it with “the abstract economism of the Jewish analogy” and “the concrete non-economism of the Native analogy,” whereby the “Japanese internment and dispersal renovated the connotation of Japanese labor from that of unnatural, excessive industry to some other, more benevolent expression of labor symbolically aligned with Native peoples” (135). Analysing examples of how the view of Japanese Canadian labour changes in Obasan, Day argues that the newspaper article about Japanese beet workers in Emily’s package celebrating their efficient labour, which was previously considered dangerous, does so because the Japanese labourers are no longer compared to white workers but are considered “in relation to ‘transient workers’”: “Japanese Canadian laborers are reconstituted as superior figures of transient labor, which is possible only after their relocation and confinement” (140). Laura K. Davis’s “Joy Kogawa’s Obasan: Canadian multiculturalism and Japanese- Canadian internment” also, as the author states, “foregrounds the modes of resistance in which the novel engages” (74). Davis argues, for example, that silence in the novel is not just a position of acceptance but of resistance, and that though “Obasan might be thought to move toward a union with the mother, that union is not a ‘resolutionary’ one, but is clearly ambiguous” (73-4).

reconciliation) is really her past suffering being extended or repeated in the present. Julie McGonegal similarly sees Obasan and Itsuka as novels that do not offer any simple or settled version of reconciliation. However, for McGonegal, Kogawa is very much aware of straddling the complicated line between appearing to come to terms with the past and being unresolved and haunted by it: that is, between the possibility and impossibility of forgiveness. Like Miki, she reads the historical document at the very end of the novel as suggesting the perpetual exclusion of Naomi and Japanese Canadians, and how coming to terms with the past remains incomplete for them. On the other hand, she also concludes that beyond forgiveness in the political realm (which will always fail to contain the complexity and painfulness of the internment), Obasan “[brings] into view the possibility of a future that enables new forms of utterances, other kinds of relationships” (McGonegal, “The Future of Racial Memory” 146). For Miki, McGonegal, and others, the novel’s significance to the Canadian social consciousness is how it continues to challenge us and any notions of closure as inadequate, rather than suggest these issues are resolved.

Situating my discussion along similar terms as those critics who do not find Naomi “[resolves] the political and moral crisis at the heart of the novel’s historical narrative” (Kamboureli, Scandalous Bodies 175) or that the novel provides us with a model of reconciliation with the past, I extend my investigation beyond the debate over whether or not Obasan presents a settled or unsettled relationship to the past, or whether it suggest that forgiveness and reconciliation have been achieved or are yet to come. Taking up Miki’s call and focusing particularly on a kind of “materiality of history,” as well as the “phenomenological edges” or issues related to the internment, this discussion assumes that the traumatic import of Naomi’s WWII experience and her loss of her mother are never exactly overcome but remain a secreted part of Naomi, as well as a significant part of the character she is. If, for example and as I will discuss further in the chapter, Naomi suffers from a melancholic or unresolved attachment to her mother and the past, it is an attachment that also becomes an intimate and foundational part of who she is. Like Ahmed’s idea of orientations making up one’s character and Berlant’s idea that one’s attachments make her who she is, as discussed in chapter one, or as Derrida

describes in The Gift of Death, whereby the gift involves the incorporation of the incomprehensible or undesirable into the system that replaces and succeeds it, Naomi has incorporated and is a product of her experiences for better or for worse. However, focusing on the objects that abound in Kogawa’s fictional world and on the characters’ relationships to them allows us to consider the possible effects of these more tangible or material losses on characters and communities, less to figure out whether characters recover or not, but more to bring into view the different ways one might be affected by such material losses, and how we might rethink the depth of our relationship to things through this consideration of the internment experience.

2.2 Multiple Losses

What primarily appears in examining the loss of things in Obasan is that the losses are of a secondary nature or effect a kind of second loss. By this I mean that the objects that are lost or taken are significant to the protagonists, not only for themselves (as material, matter-of-fact entities), but moreover because they point to and act as placeholders for other more significant losses: Naomi’s loss of her mother who disappears in Japan; of her father who dies; of the close, loving relationship she had with her extended family members (Emily and her grandparents) before the government’s policies separated Japanese Canadians and removed them from the west coast; and of the comfortable life the four family members had together in their house. Because objects can remind us of those people or ways of being we have lost by keeping us oriented and attached toward the space or meaning they used to inhabit, they are necessary for us to make sense of the disappearance of and separation from loved ones. But, whereas the material items are the things that should remain and help Naomi work through her more significant losses, in her internment experience they have themselves been taken away.

As Nina Fischer describes the relationship between material things and experiences of loss, drawing on Brown’s “thing theory” to discuss the significance of objects in Holocaust literature, “Family heirlooms are meaningful beyond their legibility as carriers of memory, almost as though by association they have soaked up traces of the former owner’s being. They provide intimate knowledge about their former owners and

the choices they made when they created, chose, or kept a particular object” (30). One’s objects can remind us and keep us connected to a person, her character, and her tastes, whereby they even come to be “a stand-in for an absent third-party and can evoke the former owner in the present moment” (Fischer 30). And here, we might think, for example, of Freud’s grandson’s fort-da game in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in which the boy takes up a spool and thread (probably things belonging to his mother) as replacements for his mother who is away. The things index his mother, point him toward her, and keep him relating to her even though she is not there. Moreover, the boy uses the objects – plays a game of sending the spool away and retrieving it using the string to which it is tied – as a means of making sense of and of even trying to master his mother’s absence. Whereas objects help us maintain a relationship to the people who are no longer with us or to a way of being we can no longer access, and if by interacting with them they also help us work through such loss, what we find in Obasan is that the objects that would help the characters remember the past are taken, stolen, and disappear.

Consider, for example, the first item that the novel refers to as having been confiscated during the war: the boat designed by Naomi’s father. Naomi remembers a snapshot of it: One of Uncle’s hands rested on the hull of an exquisitely detailed craft. It wasn’t a fishing vessel or an ordinary yacht, but a sleek boat designed by Father, made over many years and many winter evenings. A work of art. “What a beauty,” the RCMP officer said in 1941, when he saw it. He shouted as he sliced back through the wake. . . . That was the last Uncle saw of the boat. And shortly thereafter, Uncle too was taken away . . . . (22) The boat that the RCMP officer takes over and takes away is significant because of its symbolic meaning and the people, relationships, and personal feelings or status it represents. Described as a “work of art,” rather than a boat used for working, the boat is the unique expression of these men and of their larger community at the time, as well as of what truly mattered to them. And through this work, they implicitly understood and

could reflect on themselves (the disclosed truth of their being).49 In another way, the boat represents Uncle’s professional history and life as a boat builder of a long-line of boat builders from Japan, whereby even after the internment and without his boat Uncle never even returns to the coast or sees boats in the ocean again, and the grasses undulating on the prairie appear as pale and inadequate substitutes for the real sea of Uncle’s former life (Obasan 1). The boat also represents the relationship between Naomi’s father and uncle as being close and productive, and the fruits of their labour as an admirable achievement contributing to a sense of agency and self-worth. We might imagine, however, that with the boat forcibly taken, the sense of accomplishment and dignity, and their particular connections to their profession, to their history, with the sea, and with each other were strongly affected, wounding the uncle’s sense of himself and his world. Thus, during his experiences of separation, internment, and displacement, Uncle loses his old way of life and his brother (Naomi’s father, Mark, dies), and he also loses the boat that might have continued to represent these things for him or help him retain a more vivid memory of them, and through which he might have still been able to reflect on and more strongly connect to the things of his past. In addition to the loss of the boat, however, Naomi in this passage is remembering a snapshot of the scene with the boat, which is a photo she no longer has. In this case, the things, like the photographs and the boat, that should help orient her are no longer present, but were part of what was lost during the mass uprooting and dispersal of Japanese Canadians, marking an experience of multiple loss: the loss of all the other secondary things and mementos that surrounded the first significant thing and helped to mark its place and value or that helped give the loss a shape of sorts.

Miki recounts a similar personal experience of losing these secondary things in his own life growing up in Winnipeg where his family finally settled, which, like in

49 I am thinking of Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” here, in which, for Heidegger, “Art is the setting-into-work of the truth” and “Art lets truth originate” (77). Art is a kind of crystallization of history into a thing (the work) through which we can see the truth of history. The boat thus shows the aspirations of the community and that what they hold dear to them is a connection to the ocean and fishing, as well as to Japanese building traditions, all of which appear as worthy of much attention and care. Also see, Iain Thomson’s entry “Heidegger's Aesthetics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Naomi’s life, do not point toward something lost so much as suggest many and accumulated losses. Describing his childhood, Miki writes: [A]lways there was the overwhelming immediacy of absences in lives so utterly altered by the “exile” from the west coast. These absences turned into gaps in family memory, signified most tangibly in the loss of photo albums that had been stored in a trunk to be kept safe by neighbours but then were sold at one of many auctions. (Redress 13-14) For Miki, the loss of family photos – the material of history – symbolizes the gaps in family memory, and the loss of familiar or family associations that were part of his family’s former life in Vancouver. Without the photographs, it is harder to remember and piece back together the lives and relationships that formerly existed for the Miki family. And, the trunk containing the photo albums that would have held the photographs of relatives from whom his family had been separated and snapshots of the lives they used to lead is itself taken and lost. Being dispossessed of the commonplace, familiar, and personal items that would help Miki’s family maintain its family memory and provide more tangible connections to the other lost things or people, turns the absences into large gaps that are much harder to fill-in or overlook. The loss upon loss upon loss – of the people, of the photographs of the people, of the albums containing the photos, and of the trunks containing the albums – compounds the loss, magnifying it and contributing to an overall sense of living with immense depletion or even in the negative, which recalls Morishita’s house on Cordova Street that exists only through type organized as a list on nine sheets of paper. Or, as Fischer describes the experience of losing things, “forced migration . . . prevents the generational transmission of family possessions” and effects an “‘annihilation of the past’” because of how few remnants remain (41).50

50 Commenting on the ideas Helen Epstein expresses in her memoir, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History, Fischer quotes Epstein: “A person whose family has remained in place inherits possessions – a hat, a cupboard, old diaries, a prayer or recipe book – that transmits personal history from one generation to the next. The objects that would normally have been passed down to me – my grandmother’s tea set, my mother’s piano – had been confiscated and crammed into warehouses by the Nazis along with hundreds of thousands of pieces of property belonging to Czech Jews.” (41) The forced displacement of Japanese Canadians similarly got rid of all material items that would have functioned as nodes of memory for Miki and Naomi, annihilating their pasts. The family heirloom that “could have served as a tangible reassurance of continuity at such a precarious time,” rather becomes a missing object that “act[s] as [a] reminder of the destruction experienced in this family” (Fischer 41).

Moreover, Miki describes the lost photos as becoming “part of my childhood mythos” (Redress 14). Unlike the ideas of Berlant and Ahmed, for example, in which attachments to things and orientations to objects structure and orient us, as well as form our characters, in this case, the loss of things or absences, and the attachment to these losses, make Miki who he is. The absence of things becomes ‘the thing’ to which he attaches, that is part of how he orients himself or is oriented to the world, and that structures his life. Likewise, we gain a sense of the larger, more overwhelming loss that is brought about by the accumulation of smaller, secondary losses when Naomi, in 1972, reads Emily’s diary entry from 2 March 1942, in which she lists a number of things she would lose: “It breaks my heart to think of leaving this house and the little things that we’ve gathered through the years – all those irreplaceable mementoes – our books and paintings – the azalea plants, my white iris” (Obasan 92). These tokens and items on bookshelves, along walls, and in corners or windows effectively produce a kind of ghostly outline of her house: they indicate the wall, windows, and structure of the house without showing or describing them for us. And, though the objects connote the personal aspects that make the house Emily’s home, relating to her history and way of life and implying Emily is a bookish person who likes plants, the effect of listing the items she will lose impresses less a sense of what she has and more a sense of being depleted of these items one at a time and one thing after another.51

Besides signalling loss instead of memory and assurance, I will further argue here that such loss or annihilation of the past becomes constitutive of the individual in very particular ways that help us rethink how detrimental dispossession can be. 51 Kogawa based this passage and the complete section of the novel that constitutes Emily’s diary on the actual letters of Muriel Kitagawa that were collected and published as This Is My Own. See Kogawa’s introduction to the novel. Kitagawa’s original passage drives home the point that the accumulation of smaller material losses creates a larger sense of loss that is a kind of living in the negative (without material presence and the assurance about oneself and future that comes with it). In a letter to her brother dated 2 March 1942, Kitagawa writes: It breaks my heart to think of leaving this house and the little things around it that we have gathered through the years, all those numerous gadgets that have no material value but are irreplaceable. My papers, letters, books and things . . . that azalea plants, my white iris, the lilac that is just beginning to flower . . . so many things. (This Is My Own 89-90) Kitagawa’s description of her home as the gadgets and the “little things” that the family has “gathered” around recalls the image of the home (and the language of Heidegger and Benjamin as discussed in the previous chapter) as a dwelling in which things gather or that results from the gathering of things, thus making it a home. Another point to consider here is that Kogawa’s narrative itself implies a kind of multiple or secondary loss insofar as it references (secrets within itself) Kitagawa’s real letter, which in turn points to the real house and her belongings that were lost. As much as the novel preserves and presents

Analysing some of the other lost things in Obasan – the cherished figures and dolls, that Naomi loses during her many moves from her Vancouver home to the internment camp at Slocan to the beet farm where they try to reunite and freely proceed with their lives – we find a similar experience for Naomi as a child, in which she experiences loss upon loss. Stephen, Naomi’s brother, gives her three streamers he retrieved from the sending-off celebration at the harbour when the family sees Naomi’s mother and Grandma Kato off on their trip to visit relatives in Japan. Naomi puts them in the drawer of her mother’s sewing-machine cabinet with the fluffy Easter chicks she found in a basket the Easter before, as a surprise for her mother when she returns from her trip. The chicks are tangible connections to her mother insofar as they are a gift for her (and the chicks were likely a gift from her mother in the first place), but also insofar as they allow Naomi to imagine herself as her mother returned. Pretending she is her mother, Naomi describes: My hand is poised at the round wooden knob carved into the ornate drawer, my fingers feeling around the smooth curves. With my eyes averted, I am my mother pulling the drawer open to look for the black darning knob, or a spool of thread, or scissors. To my mother’s surprise, she finds the colourful paper streamer rolls and her fingers touch the soft fluff of the Easter chicks. She lifts them up one at a time. “Ah,” I say in my mother’s voice. Two small Easter chicks. (72-3)

for the reader an impression of Kitagawa’s real gadgets, plants, “books and things,” this fictional representation also repeats the loss, distancing us further from Kitagawa’s original experience, and not only are the things lost once again in Kogawa’s fictional rendering, but also more is lost insofar as the passage in Obasan leaves out the gadgets without any value and the things Kitagawa produced – her papers and letters. One final point to note is how plants factor as things of special significance here and in the other novels in this dissertation. Kazuo strokes the cherry tree on his farm and Mariko destroys the garden in Strength for the Bridge. Also, Asako’s keeps flowers and a garden in The Electrical Field. Additionally, in Naomi’s Tree, a children’s story by Kogawa, Naomi cannot take the cheery tree in her yard with her when she is displaced, but she returns many decades later to find it still there. The plants suggest that Kitagawa and the characters have an attachment to the land and nature, which contrasts with the forced displacement that severs that connection (and which may also serve as a means of reintegrating and naturalizing the Japanese Canadian population, as Miki and Day argue). Indeed, plants (like pets discussed in chapter one, challenge the notion of property as mere things because they) are alive and often hard to transplant given their size or the conditions of travel and of the place to which they would be moved.

This scene Naomi remembers depicts the innocent expectation that Naomi had about her mother’s return, as there was no reason to doubt her return because the trip was a normal and usual enough occurrence. Through the chicks and her play with them, Naomi deals with her mother’s leaving and anticipates her return, in a similar way to Freud’s grandson throwing away a spool of thread and making it return in order to make sense of his mother’s leaving and perhaps to master it by imagining himself in the role of the one sending her or the spool away (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 285). Naomi also anticipates the happy surprise her thoughtfulness and the care her gift signals would produce for her mother, which makes the scene especially poignant and tragic because we already know that Naomi’s mother never returns from her trip and the child’s expectation is never fulfilled. Moreover, in interacting with these things, Naomi practices being a kind of adult version of herself (her mother) and begins playing out and structuring herself as a caring person who thinks about doing things to please others.

However, the chicks, we later learn, are lost sometime after Naomi, her brother, and Obasan leave Vancouver (they were on the train with her, Obasan 124) and before they leave Slocan – Naomi remembers “the yellow chicks I lost somewhere” while in the hospital in Slocan after nearly drowning (Obasan 165). Naomi thus loses the figures that were once tangible connections to her mother and that were even the means for her to act out and become her mother; and she loses the expectation and certainty that her mother was there for her and would indeed return that she felt with the objects. Even the imprecise knowledge about what happened to the chicks – where and when they were lost – suggests a further loss of any control over the objects, and her consecutive displacements mean she cannot help but fail to know what happened to them.

Naomi has a similar relationship with her dolls. She recalls that she misses them the most and that they are “the representatives of the ones I loved” (57), whereby the one her mother gave her before leaving is Naomi’s favourite, functioning as a substitute for her mother, only to be itself lost. Naomi describes the doll as a “Japanese child doll” (123) that has an elegant face and was meant to be ornamental, but that she dresses up in other dolls’ clothes, carries with her, and talks to (123). In her journal entries addressed to her sister, Emily recounts in the days after Naomi’s mother left for Japan and before

the rest of the family is interned, that Naomi “is always carrying the doll you gave her and sleeps with it every night” (109), and that, one night Mark “woke up to find Nomi sitting on his pillow, hitting the Japanese doll” her mother gave her (87). Again, like Freud’s grandson’s fort-da game, Naomi’s dolls play a similar function of allowing Naomi as a child to maintain her connections to her mother, even while her mother is away. Moreover, the doll allows her to express her feelings about and to her mother when her mother is not present. Naomi can love and cuddle the doll her mother gave her in place of being able to love and cuddle her mother, and she can be angry with, and blame and hit her doll, expressing her feelings of anger and frustration to her mother (perhaps because her mother left and is not returning, because of the confusion of the war and the frightening blackouts she and her family undergo, or because of her abuse by old man Gower) when she cannot do so directly.

However, like the Easter chicks, Naomi loses her doll unexpectedly and in a way whereby she fails to see what happened to it (fails to be the master of its fate), making the loss, because it was completely out of her perception and control, harder to take and more poignant. What remains to her is only the sad feeling imbued in the bridge by their hut where she first realized the doll was gone and that she feels after that when she passes over the bridge. Recounting the family’s arrival in Slocan, Naomi tells us: Perhaps it is because I first missed my doll while standing on this bridge that often in the evenings, when I cross it, I feel a certain sadness. . . . “Where is my doll?” I ask, calling to her. I am not carrying anything since putting the bag of food and the furoshiki I was given onto Ojisan’s pile. (128) Having somehow lost the doll on the train to Slocan or on the way to the hut in which they would live, Naomi loses the item that acts as a substitute for her mother and that allows her to maintain and reflect on her connection to her mother. Signalled through the lost doll then, is how the missing mother becomes for Naomi even further removed from her – the mother, her doll, the bridge – and the lines of things that might hold them together and in relation to each other stretch, pushing the original lost items further and further away. No longer able to role-play and possibly work through her loss, Naomi has,

instead of her doll, a bridge that makes her feel sad and that she later has to leave behind, too, when they move again. And, the memory of the doll becomes, for Naomi, much less certain, becoming a question she asks herself as she, Stephen, Obasan, and Uncle leave Slocan: “Remember my doll?” (198). Without being able to adjust to the loss of things in her life – the things that help her connect to her mother and orient herself – before being subjected to the loss of even more things, Naomi’s world is one of perpetual instability in which the things she might use to help ground her are constantly falling away, making it very difficult for her to get her bearings.

2.3 Massive Losses

Tracing the idea of the experience of the internment as an accumulation of losses, and of the ground being perpetually pulled out from under her feet, I want to consider more of these losses in order to show their significance to Naomi and the Japanese Canadian community depicted in the novel. Echoing the discussion of lost things in Strength for the Bridge in the previous chapter, I will suggest the losses destabilize the characters to the point of reducing them to objects themselves and robbing them of their agency, whereby, though there are things that remain, they do not remain intact and rather signal all that was lost.

One toy that is not lost during all the family’s moves is a ball that was a gift from her father’s friend, Dan. Naomi rediscovers the ball under a cot in their house in Vancouver where Naomi hides to hear the conversation between Emily and her father about her grandparents being rounded up and imprisoned in Hastings Park. Though, she cradles the rubber ball against her cheek as a child and tells us that it “was never lost again,” we later learn that in the present tense of the novel it is cracked and scored (82- 3), and what resounds in the claim that the ball was never lost again is rather how much and how many other things were lost, or at least damaged. We learn, for example, that Naomi must leave behind or loses “many, many dolls, and stuffed animals. Baby dolls with breakable hard heads and straw-filled bodies, children dolls, grown-up dolls, a rabbit, a bear, a furry mouse [with] tea sets and doll shoes and socks and dresses” (Obasan 67).

Along with her childhood things and toys, Naomi loses her house and everything in it. Called on by Emily to remember the past, even if doing so is painful, Naomi forces herself to remember her house in Vancouver, effectively taking the reader on a tour of it through her memory and description. Naomi recalls the complex design on the rug in the living room where she and Stephen used to play with their toy soldiers (54). She tells us about the music room filled with plants and several different instruments her father plays, the piano stool with eagle-claw feet clutching glass globes where Stephen sits learning the piano, a fish bowl with two fish that Naomi watches from her wicker chair eating biscuits and listening to her mother sing along a kindergarten song meant to entice Naomi to join in the music making (55-6). She remembers the statue of Ninomiya Kinjiro whose story of hard work and success her father had told her and Stephen often (56), as well as her father’s own study where he sat at his roll-top desk and her and Stephen’s toys in their playroom both of which were near the furnace (56-7). Moving back upstairs, she remembers her bedroom with a quilt with a picture of a girl reading books under a tree above her bed (57). The details of the house and the household objects Naomi mentions suggest how intimately and thoroughly Naomi knows the house and everything in it. Additionally, the way the narrative fluidly moves between descriptions of the household objects and descriptions of the people living in the house and using the things, effectively joining them together, suggests how much the things are a part of the people (extensions of them) and their relationships. The many items in the house characterize the young Naomi and her family as privileging arts, education, and work, and the description of the things in the house that blends into memories of her family members also suggest the comfortable familiarity among the four of them. If the items contain the character’s images of themselves and their values, and help hold the characters in relation to each other through common lines of orientation or by sharing common objects (as Ahmed would suggest), these self-images and relationships to others also become much more fragile and even undone when the objects are no longer there.

Remembering the items in each room of the house (as Morishita does in his nine- page list of household things), as well as their significance for her and how they were used by her loved ones, is an exercise of association in which one memory begets

another; however, the overall sense of these memories of the way things were is how much has been lost and how drastically the family’s circumstances have changed. Even with the things she is able to take with her and even surrounded by her memories, Naomi’s experience is one in which she lacks orientation because so much has been taken from her and she does not have enough items left to which she can orient herself. Commencing her account of leaving Vancouver to be interned in Slocan, Naomi tells us: I am sometimes not certain whether it is a cluttered attic in which I sit, a waiting room, a tunnel, a train. There is no beginning and no end to the forest, or the dust storm, no edge from which to know where the clearing begins. . . . 1942. We are leaving the B.C. coast – rain, cloud, mist – an air overladen with weeping. Behind us lies a salty sea within which swim our drowning specks of memory – our small water logged eulogies. . . . We are hammers and chisels in the hands of would-be sculptors, battering the spirit of the sleeping mountain. We are the chips and sand, the fragments of fragments that fly like arrows from the heart of the rock. 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. (119) The experience of being dispossessed of nearly all of one’s belongings and of being displaced from one’s home has initiated, for Naomi, an experience of existentially never knowing where she is, even long after being interned in Slocan itself. From the train ride to Slocan to Obasan’s cluttered attic and all the waiting rooms or waylay places between them, Naomi has not had or been able to identify the markers and items that would help her figure out her position, whereby her experience is like an infinite and indistinguishable void – a forest or a dust-storm without end. She has been deprived of the objects she needs to communicate and join with others (cars and radios), as well as of the objects that may have buoyed her memories from drowning in the overwhelming sea of the past. The change of subject and time in the passage, from the “I” of the present telling to the “we” of the past suggests that the subject, Naomi, becomes

indistinguishable in the massive abstraction and generalization that lumped all Japanese Canadians together as the same and as enemy aliens. This community is not a grouping of individuals but is framed through a universalizing lens that threatens the individual. And, worn out by the experience of living a void-like, un-oriented, and overly generalized existence, and hammered down by unjustified deprivation, the people have become muddied animal-like beings that do not need personal belongings, or they have become things themselves: the hammers, the chisels, and the fragments of stone without any living labourer.

The novel reiterates the experience of having nothing left and of the profoundness of what was lost when, continuing her account of her internment experience and her train ride from Vancouver to Slocan, Naomi recalls a young mother with a premature baby born in Hastings Park, who has no basic supplies, “‘Not even diapers’” (121, i.e. rags for excrement). All the older women offer what they can afford to give the young mother for supplies, only the fellow train passengers and internees have so little left to give that one old woman proffers her own recently washed undergarment to be ripped up and used as diapers for the baby, repeating “There is nothing to offer” as she takes it off and neatly folds the flannel underskirt (122). The women lack basic supplies and lack so much there is nearly nothing to give, and offering up the last thing left leaves the women exposed: missing her underskirt.52 Naomi is also left exposed as a consequence of losing her things and home, and in the inadequate shelters in Slocan and on the Barker’s beet farm. The latter is a “chicken coop ‘house’” (214) that is smaller than the hut they lived in in Slocan

52 The idea of giving what you do not have – giving that which is impossible – recalls to my mind Derrida’s formulation of the problem of the gift in the opening of Given Time, in which he describes the paradox of Madame de Maintenon giving all her time to the king and the rest she gives to charity, when there is no time left to give (2). In material terms, if we imagine one giving everything she has away, what little she might have left to give to charity might be something like her underwear, in which case such a gift appears as an impoverished and even inappropriate one, and not at all like the aporia that Derrida suggests of giving the gift of time when one does not have time to give. On the other hand, I also think of the expression “to give the shirt off your back” or of Saint Martin giving his cloak to a beggar, who Lacan, for example, discusses in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis (186). The case of Saint Martin, who appears to give something he can afford to lose, is not the same as giving your one and only shirt that covers and protects your body. So, what happens when Kogawa writes not about shirts or cloaks but about underwear? Unlike shirts and cloaks, underwear is particularly close to the body and personal, it covers the parts of the body that are not supposed to be exposed, and it is not normally for sharing. Underwear here implies the indignity to which these bodies are subjected and the distortion or even debasement (of moral order) brought about by such dispossession.

and that does not keep out the wind and dust that settles over everything (211-12) even when Obasan packs the cracks with rags (215), and the only protection Naomi has from the nightly attack of bedbugs that leaves welts on their bodies is sleeping on the table rather than the floor (215). Here, the table is used for basic survival, rather than for gathering people together. Like Keiichi, whose body becomes a chair for Ru and Naomi’s previous description of Japanese Canadians as hammers and chisels, the lack of adequate things, such as shelters, sunhats, and effective tools, and the exposure to the hardening sun, drying winds, and dirty water of the prairie beet fields turn the remaining members of the Nakane family into things themselves: “obedient as machines” working the field and who are so overwhelmed by their exposure and impoverishment they never even unpack the boxes they bring from Slocan (217).

Being subjected to such bare living additionally prevents Naomi and her family from being able to keep and maintain any belongings they do have, because, so deprived, they are dispossessed of the possibility of (capacity for) some degree of control over maintaining, caring for, and managing what little remains. Thus, Stephen’s flutes crack (215) and Obasan’s sweater is torn and remains unmended (217) because they cannot protect these items from the dry elements or their hard labour, and they have no time, tools, or materials for repairing them. Similarly, the Nakanes, denied the rights and means to stay in or keep an eye on their property, cannot maintain and protect the house that Obasan and Uncle owned and lived in before the war. In her 4 May diary entry, Emily describes: Aya’s house was looted. I haven’t told her. . . . Almost all the handcarved furnishings were gone – all the ornaments – just the dead plants left and some broken china on the floor. I saw one of the soup bowls from the set I gave them. The looting was thorough. The collection of old instruments Mark talked about was gone too . . . . No one will understand the value of these things. (112-3) In Obasan’s house, the pillaging was so complete that only what is broken or dead (plants) remains. These broken and disused items do not initiate an awareness within the user of a larger world in which she lives, as Heidegger suggests happens when one has to

search for a replacement object when one’s hammer breaks, for example (“The Worldhood of the World,” Being and Time). Nor, do the damaged goods similarly indicate an awareness of another kind of thing reality that may inspire an openness and new ethical engagement with the world, as Bill Brown suggests (“Thing Theory”).53 Even if Emily and the reader recognize another value of these things – one that is more sentimental and historical insofar as the bowl was a gift from Emily, indicating the close relationship between the aunts and between the Kato and Nakane families – the lost and broken objects here contribute rather to an impression of how much was lost, including the characters’ rights to and possibility of agency over their property, and their abilities to positively engage with (to maintain and protect) things in the world.

As in Strength for the Bridge, the characters are unable to care for their things not only because they are subjected to harsh conditions and are so impoverished they lack the means to do so or at least to keep what remains, but also because the government denied their rights to their property. As the novel comments, the policies around dispossession, besides impoverishing the people and reducing them to things whereby they do not need and cannot keep their things, also effectively denied the peoples’ full rights to their things and signalled their diminishment (as citizens and people not having these basic rights) to a level at which they could be taken advantage of. Indeed, the government forcing Obasan and Uncle from their home allows their home and things to be looted. And even after losing everything they had in Vancouver, when Naomi, Stephen, Obasan, and Uncle leave Slocan the government denies them the possibility of taking what things they acquired during their internment; according to the letter Uncle receives from the British Columbia Security Commission, “Beds, tables, stoves, stools, and all fixtures must be left in the house or rooms you are now occupying” (Obasan 190). The furniture must remain even though the family procured it or Uncle made it, and even though they are not provided with any furniture in the shack in Alberta to which they move. Similarly indicating how the internees were deprived of their right to own property and to control what happens to it, the Custodian is given the legal right to all Naomi’s grandmother

53 If there is any greater awareness of the world or other people in it, it belongs to the readers learning of Naomi’s family’s fate. The characters themselves are not afforded this luxury, but are rather described as closing down and closing off from the world and other people in it.

Kato’s property because she is deemed a Japanese National living in Japan when the war escalates during her visit. And whereas the Japanese Canadian population was told that all property was “being kept safe for us” (38-9), assuming its right to the control and ownership of Naomi’s grandfather’s Cadillac, the government sells the car, keeping most of the sale money ($30.00), as though it were the rightful owner, and giving only three dollars to Grandpa Kato (39-40).

Again as in Strength for the Bridge, the government’s relinquishing of characters’ rights to their property does not appear in a straight forward way, but rather the characters are subjected to the conundrum in which they are similarly recognized and not recognized as the owners. However, what Obasan indicates more than Beattie’s novel does, is how the government simultaneously recognizing and denying ownership, or liquidating the property after claiming to keep it safe, absolves the government’s position while reducing Japanese Canadians to a position of powerlessness, even framing and fixing the people as children. Naomi’s family members are recognized as the owners of their house, as holding the title, but they cannot intervene to stop its sale. As the government states in a letter Naomi finds in Emily’s package, “‘ . . . While it is not necessary that this title be available in order to complete the sale it is preferred that it be surrendered to the Registrar of Land Titles. Will you be good enough therefore. . . .’” (38). The ambiguity of appearing as the rightful owners and yet being denied the owners’ rights to manage their property leaves them in an impossible position from which they cannot adequately address the government or make a claim against it. The government recognizes the Nakanes as the rightful owners of the property, and therefore is not guilty of stealing like the looters, nor can its representatives really be charged with failing to protect the property (it was not theirs to protect even if they claimed to be taking care of it), while it simultaneously allows officials to disregard the rightful owners and their wishes.54 The effect of the government both recognizing the claim to property and

54 In “A Series of Three Letters on the Property Issue,” published with her letters to her brother, Muriel Kitagawa writes to the Custodian of Japanese Properties to appeal to the final authority that the government had apparently vested to the Custodian (Kitagawa 184). Expressing her and her husband’s “absolute opposition” to the liquidation of their house (182), they write, “We cannot understand the official claim that it is necessary to sell over our heads the home from which we were forcibly ejected” (183). The response from F. G. Shears is that the federal government’s policy of “proposed liquidation is of course a general one and not only applies to your particular property” (184). Using a condescending tone (the words

simultaneously undermining it subjects the owners to a condescending relationship in which the owner is being both called upon as the proprietor but denied any effective action as one. Being neither allowed to take charge of her property, nor able to withhold it and resist the claim the Custodian is making on the home, traps the characters in a mode of helplessness.55 As Kogawa drives home the point of how the government policies patronized the people by giving the custodian the name “B. Good,” Naomi parodies the Custodian by imagining B. Good as an omniscient god telling his undesirable and illegitimate Japanese Canadian children to “‘Be good’” (39). Without full rights as adult citizens and autonomy over themselves and their property, the people, according to Naomi, are forced into appearing as unwanted children. The novel thereby implies that, within the taking of one’s property, the greater violence is the loss of one’s self as an individual who is respected as having sovereignty over her things, life, and choices to the same degree as everyone else before the law.

The novel further registers dispossession as a deep violence against the individual (as affecting people in particularly violent ways) by aligning Old Man Gower with the Custodian. As Kamboureli reminds us, Gower, the Nakane’s white neighbour who sexually abuses Naomi as a child, takes over Naomi’s family’s home in Vancouver and all the things they leave in it (Scandalous Bodies 203). Waking frightened in the night, Naomi, following voices, comes upon her father and Gower in mid-conversation: “‘I’ll keep them for you, Mark, Sure thing.’ Old man Gower’s voice is unlike the low gurgling sound I am used to when he talks to me alone. ‘The piano. Books. Garden tools. What else?’” (Obasan 74). Like the custodian having control over the property of Japanese

“of course” suggesting Kitagawa should already know), Shears implies that the sale of the house is justified because every Japanese person is being treated the same and that it is not his problem anyway because the policy was a federal decision. Kitagawa’s response is eloquent and angry: “You, who deal in lifeless figures, files, and statistics could never measure the depth of hurt and outrage dealt out to those of us who love this land” (184-5). And she goes on to ask, “Can you, with a clear conscience, commit this breach of justice, and face the accusing eyes of all the bereft and absent owners?” (185). Kitagawa implies that if Shears had to look people in the eye and deal with them directly rather than through figures and abstractions he would not be able to dispossess the people and would realize it was unjust to do so. 55 One way to consider the relation between the government and the Japanese Canadian population is like a perversion of Jean Laplanche’s seduction theory. Whereas a carer, for Laplanche, stimulates the child in many unintended ways and that a child develops through these stimuli – through trying to make sense of them and to respond to them – the government subjects the Japanese Canadian population to perpetual losses and impossible situations that are intended to manage and restrict the population and that make responses impossible.

Canadians, Gower gains control of the Nakane house through the government’s policies that “forcibly ejected” them from their homes. And also like the custodian, he is condescending and belittling; Naomi describes Gower as seeming “more powerful than Father” and “more at home even though this is our house,” and Gower, even when he sounds “as if he is trying to comfort my father . . . [has] a falseness in the tone. The voice is too sure” (74). Drawing a comparison between Gower and the custodian the novel thus suggests that the custodian commits a similar violence of abusing his position and violating others’ rights of ownership over their most private areas. Here, an assault on property or against one’s right over their property is like an assault on the individual and one’s rights over one’s body. In this way, the novel suggests that the assault on people’s belongings was not just taking people’s things away, things that one could afford to lose and that could presumably be replaced, but an assault against the most intimate aspects of oneself and one’s life, and an attack on one’s being as a person deserving and entitled to basic rights and protections.

Moreover, dispossession was a means of overpowering a population and eradicating it from the west coast, for, as Emily tells Naomi: “The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn’t liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We’ve never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government’s whole idea – to make sure we’d never be visible again.” (35) If, as Emily claims, the government purposefully liquidated property as part of its dispersal policy and to get rid of the Japanese Canadians, then it was aware of the symbolic, psychological, and social (community) damage it was doing through property. That is, without having their things or being able to return to them, communities could never form again and the people themselves would never recover from the violence of such dramatic (massive and significant) loss: the loss of some of the most intimate aspects of themselves, of much of what oriented them in the world, and of their rights as

citizens and people, particularly the rights to private property and to keeping some aspects of themselves and their things away from prying hands.

2.4 The Repercussions of Lost Things in the Lives of the Characters

According to the novel, the extent of the damage done to the Japanese Canadian population through dispossessing them of their property was very deep and psychological. So far I have argued that the accumulation of secondary losses means that Naomi cannot orient herself and work through the disappearances and deaths of family members and the passing of her former life and circumstances because there is no thing left to help her to do so. And, more than impoverishing the characters, compromising their rights to their property, and reducing them to circumstances in which they cannot care for property, as similarly appears in Beattie’s novel, Obasan also suggests that the government taking the peoples’ belongings fixed the people in a position of helplessness (one in which, for example, the characters could never have the voice or recognition required to adequately contest their treatment) and effected a very personal violation.

However, whereas the accumulation of personal property losses and one’s loss of rights are traumatic for the individuals and families that suffered them, insofar as they leave large gaps in their lives that are hard to make sense of or overcome, such experiences do not destroy those involved and make memory or recovery impossible. Like Freud’s grandson who recovers his mother through his fictional play with a spool, or the mind suffering trauma that cannot bind and make sense of the material to which it has been subjected but that nevertheless retains it through the shape of the impression or gap that is left, Naomi, for example, can remember her father’s boat and the family’s history when they did prosper and could be masters of their own property. She can remember the photograph in which this family history and their close relationships is signalled even when she does not have the picture itself to study its details or her father’s image. Naomi’s memory retains traces of the figures and can fill-in for some of what was lost, just as Kogawa’s fictional repetition of Kitagawa’s letter about her things embodies a reference to those things and Kitagawa’s real life losses. Similarly, Miki’s lost trunk of family photos and the irrecoverable gaps in family history and memory which it

symbolizes become part of his mythos; these losses become part of his history and they structure him, orienting him in the world in a particular way. The effect of the internment losses upon material losses is not that Miki does not inherit a tradition and sense of identity, but that the one he does receive is born of very particular historical conditions and includes traumatic loss in very specific ways.

In the following sections, I will consider how the experience of dispossession – of orienting themselves toward no thing, toward gaps and loss instead of objects – affects and imprints Obasan and Naomi. I will argue that the immense loss of things and the loss of her rights to property during her internment and her second even more impoverished displacement to the prairies dispose Obasan to becoming a hoarder who keeps all things, from significant items from the past to useless bits of used string. And I will argue that because of her experience of forced dispossession, Naomi is agoraphobic, feeling uncomfortable and exposed in public spaces, and unable to exchange with others or accept and accumulate things from the outside world. Though one character keeps too much and the other one keeps nothing, both Obasan and Naomi suffer from a fundamental distrust of the world outside of them, including other people in it. And, as I will show, this deep distrust of the world is precisely an effect of losing one’s things.

2.5 Hoarding

Like the old woman on the train to Slocan who has only the underskirt she wears to offer a young mother for diapers for her premature baby, years later, in 1972, Obasan’s layers of underclothes are themselves like diapers: “rags held together with safety pins” (84). Naomi notes this as she helps Obasan take a bath, and we might read into this scene that Obasan, over the years of hard work and deprivation, has herself been reduced to rags. However, Naomi also notes that Obasan has plenty of other new underclothes, but “The new ones I’ve bought for her are left unused in boxes under her bed” (84). Obasan does not wear tattered clothes out of necessity and because there are no others; rather, she chooses to keep her rags and accumulate the new garments under her bed. So, why keep the new ones in storage rather than use them and continue to keep and wear the old tattered ones? Why keep everything that she has and that she is given or that ends up in

her house, regardless of how worn or useless it is or how insignificant it is? Indeed, Obasan keeps every order of thing. She keeps sentimental and meaningful things like old documents, family photographs, and heirlooms, or what remains of them, such as Naomi’s childhood blanket made by her mother and now moth eaten (26). But, like the rags and extra, unopened underclothes, she also keeps both useless and very practical things, like empty mandarin boxes and used twine wound up in a ball. As Naomi describes, “Obasan never discards anything. Besides the twine ball, there’s a ball of string full of knots, a number of balls of wool bits, and even short bits of thread twirled around popsicle sticks that are stacked up like soldiers in a black woven box” (47). She is such a keeper and collector of all things that Naomi remarks that Obasan even keeps very unlikely things, such as perishable bits and stains: a “half a piece of left-over toast” in her packed refrigerator (48) and remnants of previous meals as dried bits of food stuck onto plates (47).

As compared to other examples of fictional hoarders, Obasan does not appear to hoard and keep things for the same reasons as other characters whose hoarding is often understood as having to do with attaining possessions for wealth or attempting to satisfy one’s elusive desire or existential sense of lack, precisely because her collecting seems to indicate much more practical concerns. If we think, for example, of Cooter and Loftis in Berlant’s discussion of Johnson’s short story “Exchange Value,” which I discussed in chapter one, Obasan’s hoarding does not seem to stem from a similar root desire of trying to overcome the circumstances of poverty and desperation in order to acquire wealth. Keeping rags and knotted string and all the useless bits suggests she is not invested in a dream of becoming rich, nor does it indicate a deep sense of inferiority that is the impetus for massive accumulation, as Renee M. Winters suggests in The Hoarding Impulse: the Suffocation of the Soul (2).

In Mari Ruti’s articulation of hoarding, though everyone has an existential void or a “sense of lack (emptiness or inner dissatisfaction),” a person who hoards attempts to fill the void of her being with stuff in order “to alleviate the anxiety this void tends to generate,” whereby the person’s “desperate quest for meaning (or self-fulfillment) can sometimes drive [her] to accumulate heaps of irrelevant things that [she does] not need

and that burden [her] by their sheer excess” (The Call of Character 41). However, Obasan does not appear to actively acquire things “in order to ward off the nothingness that threatens to engulf” her (Ruti 41), to fill a void, or to give meaning to her life, so much as she rather seems to passively keep whatever stuff happens to come into her space, and no matter how meagre.56 In slightly different terms, we might imagine that hoarders collect and keep things not only to fill an emptiness within themselves, but also because the objects they gather evoke special feelings or because the items seem to have a power or magic about them (or rather that as a consequence of a sense of emptiness the subject invests additional meanings into the objects she hoards). We might think, for example, of John in Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects,” who fills his rooms with found pieces of glass, china, and iron because the discarded objects that appeal to him seem to him to mix “so profoundly with the stuff of thought” that they recompose themselves “in an ideal shape which haunts the brain,” whereby he glimpses in each object “a dying flame deep sunk in its mass” (Woolf). However, Obasan’s collection does not resonate with an unexplainable feeling that somehow reflects or exposes a special aspect or even deficiency in the soul or self. Indeed, Obasan’s objects do not appear to have a symbolic meaning, as Winters describes can be the case for hoarders (The Hoarding Impulse xiii). Rather, for Obasan, hoarding appears more like a reactive response to the government policies that forced Japanese Canadians into positions of such destitution and poverty, whereby she indiscriminately keeps all things, putting the articles in reserve in case she may need them another time. Her case is rather one of behavioural conditioning – to save what she could – and paralysis – getting stuck that way.

Having endured such dispossession and scarcity in Slocan and then again in the beet fields, keeping and storing things for later, for when they may be needed and when

56 Like Berlant and articulating her point about cruel optimism, Ruti describes that hoarding and trying to acquire an excess of things in order to ameliorate one’s situation or with the idea in mind that doing so would later pay off, is cruel and misguided insofar as doing so will never manage to address the underlying factors, such as “liberal capitalism . . . that oppresses them in the first place” (Ruti 42). Indeed, it can further be said that the idea “that amassing an enormous pile of material resources will somehow shield” us, on the contrary, very effectively supports and maintains liberal capitalism. Again, I also think of John Berger’s account of the commodity in Ways of Seeing that steals the buyer’s love of herself – her image of herself as complete and satisfied – and sells it back to her (134). The product can never deliver because it is empty and never was “the thing” the buyer wanted or that was stolen from her in the first place.

there may be another time of such unanticipated destitution as she already experienced, is a necessary attitude for survival. She keeps all things, like string balls and Emily’s package because they may not be available later on and no one else will keep these things for her. Her completely indiscriminate and open attitude toward keeping all things is evidenced in Naomi’s description of Obasan’s full house during a visit by the Barkers, the owners of the beet farm where Naomi and her family formerly worked and lived: There is barely room to stand. Cloth on cloth on cloth covers the chesterfield and armchair and footstool and shelves. Everything is protected. The patterns and colours all clash. A bright purple maple-leaf-fringed cushion rests on a green and gold throw. The footstool is covered with a blue wool crochet. The two window ledges are covered in plants . . . . (244) The repetition of words (“cloth on cloth . . .”) and sounds (alliteration and assonance) make the items mentioned run together in a list that suggests an accumulation of a lot of things, and Obasan keeps everything regardless of whether or not she already has one like it or whether the object clashes with things she has, and regardless of whether she has the space for the things. Being receptive to all things is an attitude for self- preservation against impoverishment and loss – her accumulation of things is a mode that counters the accumulation of losses in the experience of dispossession and displacement – but it is also a means of protecting the things. By possessing and keeping things, she protects them, whereby the way the objects are piled on each other or contained within each other successively conserves other items below or within. Thus, whereas Obasan is not concerned with selecting objects or coordinating them with each other, she always gives everything a place that is sheltered and secure.

And, such protecting is important because objects are not just objects to Obasan but also, to some extent (at least linguistically in Japanese), living items that are susceptible to death and need to be preserved against such death. While looking for Emily’s package including her grandmother Kato’s letter explaining what happened to Naomi’s mother and their survival of and utter devastation by the bombing of Nagasaki, Obasan occasionally says, “lost,” which Naomi tells us “also means ‘dead’” in Japanese (24). The package is lost, but being lost, it is also dead (or perhaps Obasan and the

narrative are referring to Naomi’s mother as both lost and dead), suggesting that objects need us, need our care to exist. Keeping the objects, then, is preserving them from irrecoverable oblivion. Put a slightly different way, if we consider that objects point us toward more fundamental losses, like loved ones and former lives, and by which we can better remember and work through our losses, then Obasan’s keeping of objects is also a means of keeping the memory and engagement with lost loved ones alive: of keeping our lines of orientation toward what we no longer have and in a way preserving a stronger more workable connection to the loss.57 By maintaining objects and maintaining the character’s connections to the lost items and lost ways of being in the past, Obasan’s attitude of openness to keeping all things does the exact opposite of the mass dispossession that the government had forced the Japanese Canadian population to do, and, as such, even appears as an attitude of resistance against dispossession and against forgetting. Whereas the government’s aggressive actions purposefully targeted people’s things, as I have suggested, then Obasan’s work to keep and care for everything regardless of whether the object clashes with her decor, is a duplicate, or is small and useless, opposes the government’s aims.

However, no matter how positive Obasan’s hoarding or indiscriminate acceptance of things appears to be – whereby she acquires things and protects herself against dispossession, protects things, and refuses and resists the government’s policies that led to immense property losses – Obasan’s tendency toward collecting and accumulating also indicates that keeping is an illness. Such accumulation is also a reactive mode testifying to how traumatic the experience was and in which Obasan becomes stuck. Thus, against the more positive view of Obasan’s keeping, another way to read her hoarding is that the loss of all her possessions that maintained or contained her personal history, along with the loss of many of her loved ones (whose deaths and disappearances makes maintaining personal history through objects all that more significant) has left a gap or wound that she tries to fill by collecting things. However, rather than indicating an existential emptiness or profound sense of dissatisfaction, as Ruti suggests hoarding

57 Obasan’s bond with the dead is evidenced in her appearance. Her “cheeks sink into the cavity of her mouth making her face resemble a skull,” yet her pulse remains a “steady ripple” (14). Her skin and hair are “almost translucent” (26), she is deaf, and her sight is failing her. She appears to have become a living dead tied exactly between the present and the pull of the unsettled past.

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does, the gap or void with which Obasan contends is a trauma. And the traumatic gap remains or is even exacerbated over time and over several involuntary displacements during which it was impossible to keep family possessions or any symbolic or habitual markers or even useless items. Through these experiences, Obasan became frozen in an attitude of being open to keeping and preserving whatever things possible against the effect of the government policies and scarcity. Thus, instead of distinguishing what is more useful and meaningful for safeguarding for the future, like family heirlooms, versus what can be discarded, like bits of used string, Obasan’s experience of dispossession engenders a posture of complete possession that lacks moderation.

Moreover, the comportment of taking everything into herself and her space not only threatens to overwhelm her house, but also threatens Obasan’s own destruction. In this way, the pieces that have come into her possession and the way she collects and orders them become so much a part of herself and a reflection of her being that Obasan becomes indistinguishable from her things and from the process of collecting them. “‘This house . . . . This body. Everything old’” (15), Obasan tells us, equating herself with her house, whereby she appears to lose her subjectivity and fade away in the things. As Naomi goes on to describe, The house is indeed old, as she is also old. Every home-made piece of furniture, each pot holder and paper doily is a link in her lifeline. She has preserved in shelves, in cupboards, under beds – a box of marbles, half-filled colouring books, a red, white, and blue rubber ball. The items are endless. Every short stub pencil, every cornflakes box stuffed with paper bags and old letters is of her ordering. They rest in the corners like parts of her body, hair cells, skin tissues, tiny specks of memory. This house is now her blood and bones. (15-16) Instead of being oriented by things in the world toward certain horizons, Obasan is indistinguishable from the things she keeps. They are her lifeline and her life. And by preserving them, Obasan herself is preserved in the objects. Her skin cells and her memories – the material of her body and mind or past experiences – rest in the crevices of the objects and in the corners of the house. Without any distance or difference between

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her and the items in her house, and without having some perspective on them because she is them (or annihilated by them), she cannot position herself to the world or in relationship to others.

Suspended in attention and openness to things, Obasan hardens into a very isolated character whose perception of and ability to communicate with the world deteriorate. Her “‘Eyes can no longer see’” (24), she is deaf, and she seems incapable of making sounds and responding to Naomi’s appeals, at least in a way that is always intelligible to Naomi. Asking Obasan about Uncle’s last moments, Naomi describes, “Such an old woman she is. She opens her mouth to say more, but there is no further sound from her dry lips” (14).58 Her sorrow over the loss of her husband, as well as all the other losses she has suffered over the years, is such that there are no adequate words, whereby “The language of her grief is silence” (14). As Freud describes in “Mourning and Melancholia,” the subject experiencing an excessive loss remains attentive toward that lost object, but that the posture organized toward the lost object should change and relax as the person works through her experience of loss and by attaching to other objects. However, for Obasan, the experience of loss has hardened her into a melancholic position, whereby she “has turned to stone” (219). Whereas Obasan’s attentiveness toward and gathering of things served to stave off poverty and preserve personal family history, the perpetual displacements and involuntary dispossessions cause collecting itself to become the only means of ordering and defining her ‘silent territory’ (248).59

58 The effect of the hardship and paralysis of attention is evidenced in Emily’s reaction upon meeting Obasan again after 12 years of separation. In front of Obasan, even Emily is silenced: Emily “nods her head slowly as she looks at Obasan, then looks away” (239), unable to maintain contact and to offer a response to the grief that had already come to be marked in Obasan’s body and gestures, whereby even a hug would send a shock breaking the stone that has become her very being (27). 59 Similarly, Uncle’s repetition of ‘some day’ and the position of hopeful waiting he adopts become almost mechanically habitual as he hardens to stone in the prairie: a sphinx statue (210) against the prairie wind and the hardship of a life in which he loses his loved ones and is forced to be estranged from the sea. The novel also pictures the interned Japanese Canadian population in a similar mode of melancholic arrest: There’s something called an order-in-council that sails like a giant hawk across a chicken yard, and after the first shock there’s a flapping squawking lunge for safety. . . . The paper battles rage through the mails onto the desks of busy politicians, while back in the chicken yard one hawk after another circles overhead till the chicks are unable to come out of hiding and their neck feathers moult from the permanent crick. The seasons pass and the leghorns no longer lay eggs. The nests are fouled and crawl with lice. (208) The threat posed by the government has caused the people to hide and await its departure only it does not leave and the people who continue waiting slowly assume and harden in the posture of hiding, preserving,

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She does not communicate with others or leave her house, and the space she can control and in which she can take comfort is reduced to the space of her reach, and perhaps to her relationship with Naomi. When the Barkers come to express their condolences, Obasan greets them with a startled “‘O’” (243) and spends most of the visit in her kitchen preparing to serve stale snacks in stained dishes and politely evading the questions that Naomi thinks must seem to Obasan like startling outbursts (246).60 Obasan’s “O” suggests a kind of openness – an open mouth – but as far as relating to others is concerned, the “O” is insufficient and is not enough to communicate; it is the beginning of a word or sentence without the rest, and thus without any clear meaning. Similarly, Obasan’s holding on to everything from the past, particularly in keeping in reserve her knowledge of what happened to Naomi’s mother and the letter from her grandmother Kato explaining their experience of the bombing of Nagasaki, produces gaps and heavy silences that overwhelm and alienate even her family members.61 Though Obasan dwells on Stephen, looking after him at the train station long after his train has left (235) and, when he is home, mending and re-mending “his old socks and shirts which he never wears and [setting] the table with food which he often does not eat” (236), Stephen “seems irritable and is almost completely non-communicative with Obasan” (236). He also has recurring nightmares of having “‘to get out of here’” (241). Like with the Barkers, there is no communication between Stephen and Obasan and no possibility for responding or gaining perspective.62

and protecting themselves. Still waiting for the time when it will be safe for them outside and when they will be able to return home the population become stuck and sickly in the attitude of attendance. 60 “O” is also how Obasan greets Naomi when she arrives to stay with her after Isamu’s death (11). 61 Uncle often says “Kodomo no tame” – “for the sake of the children” – in reference to the silence he and Obasan keep regarding what happened to Naomi’s mother. For example, when Emily comes for a visit and Naomi wakes in the middle of the night to hear her and uncle discussing what we later learn to be the letters explaining what happened to Naomi’s mother (240, also see 22). 62 Even during the discussion between Uncle and Emily about telling Stephen and Naomi what happened to their mother (discussed in the note above), Obasan does not speak or provide her opinion on the situation, at least not in any way that is clear and understandable to the others: “She neither looks up nor seems to be listening but her lips are pursed in concentration as her fingertips unbead the black bean necklets from their cracking pods” (240). Her mode of being in the world is direct material interaction, not speech. When she does stop shelling, she commences a prayer that Naomi sees her doing but cannot hear or fully understand; as Naomi describes Obasan praying, “Her lips are moving slowly, deliberately. The expression on her face is as soft as a child’s” (241). And we might think here of a child as being before language – as not quite able to share and communicate yet – whereby Obasan might be articulating what comes before language: a fuller and deeper emotive communication. Or, we may think of how the Japanese Canadians in the novel are reduced to and framed as helpless children.

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2.6 Agoraphobia

Like Obasan, frozen in a mode of accepting and keeping things, Naomi also suffers from a kind of paralysis: of being stuck and unable to reach out to and communicate with others. “I lack communication skills” (246), she admits when she, too, feels awkward and uncertain about how to behave during the Barkers’ visit. Naomi also describes herself as an old maid with “the social graces of a common housefly” (7). Naomi is like Emily, whose old-maid and single status at fifty-six years old prompts her student, Sigmund, to ask, “‘Your aunt is an old maid too? How come?’” (8).63 She has no friends, lovers, or children: no community, no love, and no continuity. And the effect of her sharing the same status with Emily suggests they suffer from the same root cause. Thus, the novel suggests that the lack of connection with others is part of the emotional fallout from the internment. Or, as I will argue, Naomi’s discomfort with communication and community and what is effectively her distrust of others relates to her loss of things during her and her family’s forced dispossession and displacements. Drawing on D. W. Winnicott’s ideas about transitional objects, which foreground material objects as necessary for a child to learn about the world and to trust it in order to enter into a relationship with the world and other people in a positive way, and returning to Naomi’s dolls and chicks, the question arises of what happens when a child is forced to separate from her transitional objects or loses them in the midst of being forcibly displaced.

Besides the losses being secondary so that they make it harder for Naomi to maintain her relationship to and memories of her mother, the loss of her toys also imprints in her an experience that makes it impossible for Naomi to learn to deal with the ambiguity and frustration that the world presents, compelling her to assume an isolated and thus safe position away from others. As Winnicott explains the significance of objects to the child’s development, a child does not learn about the reality of the world outside of its relationship with its mother (whom at first it experiences as indistinguishable from itself) by experiencing this reality directly – when the mother has to leave or when the father gets in the way of the complete gratification that the child

63 In her chapter on Obasan, Kamboureli discusses the significance of the name Sigmund as Naomi’s student and the echo to Sigmund Freud (Scandalous Bodies 213-216).

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might otherwise experience with its mother. Rather the child needs objects, what Winnicott calls the first “not-me” or transitional objects, to begin to understand and negotiate the world outside of itself. Because transitional objects – stuffed toys, dolls, blankets – “are not part of the infant’s body yet are not fully recognized as belonging to external reality” (Winnicott 3), they open up “an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute” (3). This intermediate area allows the child to perceive the reality outside of itself as a kind of non-threatening extension of its illusionary world at the same time as the child begins to accept the more difficult reality that the outside world is wholly other and indifferent to it. As Barbara Johnson explains Winnicott’s ideas, in her discussion of ethical engagement and using people as things, “the transitional object is that through which the baby gains experience of a state between the illusion of the mother’s total adaptation to [its] needs and reality’s total indifference to them” (98), and in this ambiguous realm, the infant experiences power over the object at the same time as the control the infant previously experienced over its internal, illusory objects (the idea of its mother as part of itself) falls away. Because the baby can experience itself as all-powerful and powerless in the “domain of play and illusion” engendered through the transitional object, the infant interpreter in this middle world begins “to accept and tolerate frustration” (Johnson 97).

The transitional object is the child’s means into the world, as well as its means for understanding how to tolerate it, which involves, moreover, learning how to trust the outside world. The transitional object teaches the infant that it can be frustrated with the world, that it can even love objects in the world too much or hate them, and that these objects will continue to be there and to be available to it. As Johnson explains Winnicott’s ideas about using objects (versus object relating), The properly used object is one that survives destruction. The survival of the object demonstrates that the baby is not omnipotent, that the object is not destroyed by destruction, that the object will not retaliate in kind if the baby attacks, that the object will not leave if the baby leaves. . . . The baby cannot use the object for growth if the baby cannot separate from it for fear of

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destroying it or losing it – . . . object use involves trust that separation can occur without damage. (101) On one hand, the baby learns about its own power and limits through learning that the transitional object and the world beyond it and to which it relates will assuredly endure the infant’s frustration and feelings of anger and destruction or of excited love.64 For Winnicott and Johnson, the transitional object allows individuals to move out into the world and into relationships with other objects and people with confidence, trying out their feelings of love, hate, omnipotence, and powerlessness in a way that allows them a more realistic understanding of and creative relation to the world and their positions in it (see Johnson 102).65 Moreover, the baby learns to trust and live in the world beyond her through the experience that she and the object can be separated from each other and that they will survive the separation. The object (and by extension, the baby herself) will not be damaged, destroyed, or lost in the world, and the baby does not have to fear for her objects, that the world is a dangerous place, or that she does not have the power to protect her things or survive the world herself.

However, having involuntarily lost the doll her mother gave her, the fluffy chicks, and nearly all her toys and belongings, including the house in which she lived, during her forced displacements (which, moreover, was based on racist policies), Naomi never learns to trust the world. Indeed, her lack of communication skills and difficulty relating to other characters – not only her student, Sigmund, and the Barkers, but also her own aunts, uncle, and brother who fail to communicate with her or are distant from her – suggest she does not fully trust entering into relationships and into the outside world she shares with them. Without her familiar and meaningful things that would, on one hand, help her orient toward and remember her mother and father, and that are simultaneously necessary for her to trust the world and others in it, Naomi has become agoraphobic:

64 By gaining confidence in and experience with the world around it via the transitional object, the baby can let go or relax out of its primarily narcissistic mode of focusing most of its attention and concern inward as a means of protecting it from a world that it feels it cannot trust because it will not persist intact. For more, see Winnicott’s discussion on trust (Winnicott 138). 65 The social dimension of the transitional object includes the effect that that object is also part of the child’s first contract with other people – its parents – insofar as, through the object, the parents and the child enter into an unsaid agreement about the nature of the transitional object as neither coming from the child’s fantasy nor being an inanimate object from the outside world.

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afraid of public or crowded spaces. Indeed, like the domestic cat in William James’s description of agoraphobia, Naomi with her own “animal-like shyness” (Obasan 2) hesitates when approaching “‘large open spaces’” (Phillips 6). As Adam Phillips explains in his reading of James’s ideas: The agoraphobic is the figure of the compromised pragmatist. [. . .] He wants to go somewhere – or, in James’s more suggestive terms, be led somewhere – but he is unable to find out whether it is as worthwhile as he thinks. The terror, or the inability to hold the terror, pre-empts possible future states of mind, and so precludes their evaluation. A phobia, in other words, protects a person from his own curiosity. ‘Agoraphobia,’ Freud wrote [. . .], ‘seems to depend on a romance of prostitution.’ [. . .] The agora, after all, was that ancient place where words and goods and money were exchanged. Confronted with an open space, as James and Freud both agree, the agoraphobic fears that something nasty is going to be exchanged: one state of mind for another, one desire for another. (7-8) Agoraphobia derives from the word agora or marketplace – the place where things are exchanged. No matter how curious about and interested in others and the outside world she may be, the agoraphobic person cannot venture into shared spaces or into relationships with others because she is deeply distrustful and uncertain about what she will find in the world or with other people, especially concerning what others may demand of her or give her in return.

Revealing her hesitation and distrust in relating to others, Naomi recounts a date she once went on with a widower father during which she was nervous walking into the Cecil Inn with him and felt as though she were being interrogated by his racial questions about her origins, by which she “half expected him to ask for an identity card” (7). Naomi is uncomfortable revealing herself to others, but this is because she is already very much aware of how others cannot be trusted because exchanges with others can be loaded with meanings and feelings that are hard to decipher and possibly threatening, such that the question “‘Where do you come from?’” (7), which indicates the man’s

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complete misunderstanding of her and her history, as well as his desire and expectation for her to be from somewhere else. Like her dream of The Grand Inquisitor, entering into spaces and relations with others will always involve their demand to know certain things about her, which will also always already be “a judgement and a refusal to hear” (250). Similarly, like Obasan, Naomi is uncertain and uncomfortable during the Barkers’ social visit: she is reluctant about asking the Barkers into the house and feels unable to read Mrs. Barker. She wonders whether Mrs. Barker’s cupped hands indicate a gesture of giving or receiving (243), and because Naomi senses that xenophobia and racism are also being signalled through the visit intended to express sympathy – Naomi imagines Mrs. Barker is offended by everything she sees and smells in the house – she wonders whether Mrs. Barker’s “glance at Obasan is one of condescension” or solicitude (245). The world is much more uncertain, and exchanging within it is much more difficult than simply appearing to others and giving and receiving without consequences; for, as Naomi learns early on, one can indeed be separated from her objects (and parents) and the objects will not endure, but be lost forever. As Naomi describes her experience of exchange, regarding the lessons she learned from her elders about not being “selfish and inconsiderate” and about politely refusing gifts when they are offered, “It is such a tangle trying to decipher the needs and intents of others” (138) along with all the ways others elicit responses from her at the same time as refusing or threatening her (as Gower does). And in this world that demands exchanges and accounting that Naomi and her experience just cannot fit and in which she has no assurance, Naomi suffers and loses as she cannot ever help but feel is the case with the mother who abandoned her and whom she could not help but abandon in return; for, as Naomi sees it, in the “market-place of the universe” bargains have already been “made that have traded my need for my great- grandmother’s” (72).

In another example of how difficult it is for Naomi to enter into exchanges in the world because such interactions cause her to feel prompted to respond and simultaneously betrayed, when Naomi finally receives the package of documents from Emily, which propel her to into remembering her experience of dispossession and

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displacement, she responds to Emily’s gift and her insistence on memory with a description of how painful recalling the experience of the internment is: Aunt Emily, are you a surgeon cutting at my scalp with your folders and your filing cards and your insistence on knowing all? The memory drains down the sides of my face, but it isn’t enough, is it? It’s your hands in my abdomen, pulling the growth from the lining of my walls, but bring back the anaesthetist turn on the ether clamp down the gas mask bring on the chloroform when will this operation be over Aunt Em? (214) Naomi resists this gift strongly linked and oriented to the past because she recognizes that, in this case, it is not just a gift but also a poison; that is, in immersing herself in memories of the past through the documents in the package, these meagre remains, Naomi may be able to better remember and attach to some of the things she lost. However, doing so, especially in the wake of her experience of forced dispossession and displacement, will not bring her understanding and relief, or at least not without also repeating painful memories of an experience that still retains its traumatic weight for her.

Thinking of Derrida’s conception of the gift in Given Time as an impossible thing that both implies exchange (something given that requires a return) but exists only in the instant of a break with the economy of exchange, Emily seems to think that communication and remembering are pure gifts that put Naomi in direct interaction with the past, restore the individual, and heal the community (“You have to remember . . . . You are your history,” 54, and without doing so, Japanese Canadians will “pass our anger down in our genes,” 38).66 Naomi, however, is conscious of how such gifts – gifts of a traumatic past – elicit painfully complex and overwhelming feelings, and an endless economy of approximations and uncertainties about what exactly happened to her mother, her family, and her community without any complete or satisfying understanding

66 Derrida writes, “there could be a gift only at the instant an effraction in the circle will have taken place, at the instant all circulation will have been interrupted and on the condition of this instant. What is more, this instant of effraction must no longer be part of time” (9). The gift must have at its core, as a condition of its existence as gift, a break that is so drastic that it arrests time, progression, and exchange. However, because a gift is that which is given, it is also already initiated into the economy of giving and receiving, the “cycle of restitution,” where it becomes rather a symbol and consequence of this system of loaning, credit, and return. Without a fundamental interruption of the system of giving and exchange the gift is annulled as a gift and, instead of appearing as an exception to the economy, the gift is mistaken as an exchangeable good.

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of the event and its legacy. Whereas Emily acknowledges that history is a part of one’s very being and body, Naomi reminds us “The body will not tell” (217). The body and the experience to which it is subject can never find its proper fit or be made present in the word, and whereas history is part of our bodily being (part of our objects and our orientations to them, or part of the way we are connected to the past and responsible to the future, making us who we are), Emily’s resolve to excavate the past with decisive words and language becomes a painful surgery of cutting and cropping.

Even silence, which might appear as a lack of communication with the world or as withholding what is necessary for exchange, and which aligns with Obasan’s attitude to history and the world, fails to make the agoraphobic comfortable. Many critics interpreting Obasan as a novel of reconciliation have valorized silence as a mode of attentive communion in the novel, which hoards and maintains all the details of history by delaying or resisting the narrative process and respecting the limitless possibilities for telling the past without allowing any singular comprehensible version. However, remaining silent with others or silently attending to others also betrays Naomi, namely through her sexual abuse by Old Man Gower when, because of the silent mode of attention that Naomi learned as a child, she does not call out against his sexual violations.67 Similarly significant and painful is Naomi’s mother’s silence, whereby Naomi perpetually circles around “Mother’s total lack of communication with Stephen and me” (234) – her disappearance during the war – and does not learn what happened to her mother for over 30 years. In the end, there is no resolution and no limit to the demands and refusals about knowing the past and about knowing the (m)other. For, as much as Naomi addresses her mother and imagines she was there with her in Nagasaki, Naomi’s communion is only imaginary and their shared silence has infinitely separated them: “Gentle Mother, we are lost together in our silences. Our wordlessness was our

67 Naomi describes the mode of silently attending to others’ needs that she learned as a child and even practices on her grandmother in the following: “When I am hungry, and before I can ask, there is food. If I am weary, every place is a bed. . . . A sweater covers me before there is any chill and if there is pain there is care simultaneously. If Grandma shifts uncomfortably, I bring her a cushion” (Obasan 60). Regarding Gower’s abuse, Naomi describes one occasion when Stephen comes looking for her at Gower’s, but ashamed and not wishing her brother to see her half undressed, she does not call out to him (69). In this case, her silence (and her secret desire) permits the abuse to continue, effecting a split (“a tremor” and separation) between her and her mother (69). In this case, such silent attention as associated with her mother is not adequate or attentive enough.

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mutual destruction” (267). In silence they may be joined together but they are also destroyed, and its not clear that Naomi, though she admits feeling her mother’s presence (267), understands or accepts how her mother could remain “voiceless” and never try to contact her children to let them know of her whereabouts or to tell them she loved them. Indeed, rather than presenting us with images of love, Naomi likens her mother to a tide, almost a tsunami, that pulls Naomi out to sea and threatens to drown her.68

Naomi’s anti-social behaviour and trepidation result from knowing that the gifts she will receive and the exchange she will enter into in the world – either in receiving material things, words, or silence – is going to be fundamentally lacking or excessive, in either case dangerous, and so perhaps it is better to partake in giving and receiving with others as little as possible. If she is stuck on the edge of the market place of community and communication, being so serves her by allowing her to keep to some degree a relation (an imaginary one) with the lost object of the past: to keep everything of her past and self (including her mother and her childhood life) sacred and safe from those who pry, have wandering hands, steal, and may take this precious experience and replace it with others. Hesitating in social situations, not exchanging words, and not acquiring new objects become her defenses against a world that she recognizes too early as being untrustworthy. For Naomi as a child, and before she has established mechanisms allowing her to navigate and transition with a necessary degree of agency and safety, the outside world is revealed as full of people who invade her and her private spaces taking anything they want, including the things that may help her orient and prepare herself for such a reality, and in which their desires and needs always trump her own. And suspended before the agora, she cannot share in the movement (communication and community) that would give her respite and refresh her from the hardening of her being, so that she might even be able to recommence her silent attending and stance in the present in a better way. Instead, the lost objects of the past gain the significance and weight of an infinite depth in which she may drown.

68 Naomi’s mother’s silence is both utterly gratifying and infinitely stifling. A similar contradictory image of mothers arises when Naomi, as a child, places chicks in a cage with a hen. When the hen begins pecking the chicks to death, Naomi’s mother swiftly and efficiently protects them without invading Naomi with questions or betraying that Naomi was responsible for having put them in danger in the first place. Whereas, in the scene, her own mother protects Naomi, the mother hen brutally kills her young (63).

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Whereas I have argued that Naomi is distrustful of the world as a consequence of having involuntarily lost all her belongings including the transitional objects she had as a child, her distrust of the world begins before the government’s policies that displaced the Japanese Canadian population into internment camps and dispossessed them of their possessions. As I acknowledged above, before the internment, Naomi had already experienced Old Man Gower’s elicitations and abuse, to which, in response, she explains, “To be whole and safe I must hide in the foliage” (68). Similarly, Naomi is invaded by the direct stares of a small boy on the street and a man on the streetcar. Naomi is “mortified by the attention” and “startled into discomfort again by eyes” (51). For Naomi, even a look in the common place of the street can evoke a sense of shame and humiliation. As a trait or issue Naomi already had before being subjected to the internment, some might argue that distrust is something already particular to Naomi or perhaps to her culture. Indeed, Naomi speculates that she learned “a stare is an invasion and a reproach” from her family members who were raised in Japan. In this case, Naomi hesitating before exposing herself in the public sphere is perhaps less an effect of a traumatic loss and more of an effect of enculturation. However, we might also consider that her disposition before public spaces, one she has inherited from her elders, is also an effect of the racism and dispossession that she and her family members have already endured as first and second generation immigrants to a predominantly white Canada, where, as Beattie’s novel showed, rules would be changed (fishing licences) and laws would be interpreted against their favour. In this case, what Naomi has a hard time dealing with is not only the stares that are always present and always invasive (because she is Japanese), but also the betrayal that she might feel at being taught lessons that are inappropriate and unhelpful for her circumstances (her mother’s silent attention and that “a stare is an invasion and a reproach,” 51) and with the complexity of being “visually bilingual,” whereby she needs to be at ease with stares and weary of them at the same time. In another way, insofar as, according to Winnicott’s ideas, the problem of negotiating the marketplace is one that every child undergoes and hopefully masters in their development – learning to navigate the pressures they feel from the outside world and peers while maintaining a sense of coherence and comfort – Naomi has a particularly hard time doing so because the objects and circumstances necessary for her to work

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through such feeling of exposure (any predictability about and survival of her loved objects, whether they be family members, her house and home, or her dolls) were taken from her leaving her ever more and irreparably vulnerable.69

2.7 Final Thing

Naomi’s experience of losing her transitional objects underscores how significant the losses of nearly all familiar objects in her home and daily life were, including showing us the extent to which the community’s agency was taken away, whereby they no longer had the rights to keep their property and, subsequently so impoverished, they no longer had the means to shelter what little remained. The loss of personal property and everyday items in Obasan creates an effect of multiple secondary losses insofar as the things that trouble Naomi most are the loss of her mother and father, and the loss of her childhood life of a close-knit family living in a comfortable home, but in also losing all the things that oriented her toward and retained traces of these lost loved objects, Naomi’s wounds become even deeper. Moreover, without her objects, belongings, and mementos there are even fewer possibilities for her to work through her trauma or melancholic fixations precisely because she lacks the material to do so. Thus, in Obasan, things are not just things and they cannot simply be accounted for and listed. They are part of the very house and home, part of the family relationships and dynamic, as Naomi’s tour through her Vancouver home in her memory indicates by moving between the (lives of the) characters and the (lives of the) items and (fluidly) joining them together. As such, the objects are also carriers of memories of people from the past, of former relationships, and of previous experiences, even becoming substitutes for these things – a kind of metonymic stand-in for what no longer remains. Naomi’s doll and the chicks she

69 In Aunt Emily, the book that follows Naomi and Emily after Obasan dies, Naomi moves to Toronto with Emily and after some consideration, ends up joining the movement and campaigns for redress. In this novel, Naomi builds relationships with others, even gaining a lover, though is self-conscious and has a hard time doing so. Also, unlike Obasan, and whereby gaining objects requires entering into the marketplace, she never accumulates any objects, taking the bare minimum with her from Alberta and having nearly no furniture in her room in Emily’s house. Naomi’s distrust of the world is also apparent in her dream of the fog in which she joins a woman with a face “harsh . . . and angular as quartz” and man like a “British martinet” working to clear land or gather food (28). When a lion dog appears out of the forest, Naomi notices, “that the inside of the mouth is plastic. The animal is a robot!” (29). Even in her dreams, the world cannot be trusted but will be revealed as false.

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intended to be a present for her mother also serve as proxies for her mother, and the loss of these items and tangible connections to the past indicates a dwindling and ever weaker orientation toward her mother, or even an “‘annihilation of the past’” (Fischer 41). However, such material losses and on such a massive scale also indicate an annihilation of the self insofar as Naomi and her family members, cut off from their roots and denied any agency or power as individuals or property owners, are reduced to poverty and to racialized, bureaucratic objects.

Moreover, such deep losses (and mistreatment) become internalized in and part of the characters in the novel. For Obasan, the massive scale of the loss of nearly all the items that could stand-in for lost loved ones and repeatedly losing one such thing after another from displacement to displacement leads her to keeping and caring for all things in order that the items, and the people and the past they represent, never get lost or die. Obasan’s collecting and hoarding accepts and preserves all this because, up against forced dispossession and scarcity, keeping everything was a mode of survival, one she adopted (had to adopt) because she could not trust the government, her world, or that things would be different in the future. She comports herself so strongly to letting everything in and to giving it a place that she never manages to relax out of the position, only harden further into it and into a silent, busy keeping and caring. However, Obasan’s almost obsessive collecting and silent caring isolate her and overwhelm those around her, whereby she does not speak or communicate much with others. With her mouth frozen in an accepting “O,” her body takes everything in but it cannot respond in ways that are immediately intelligible, at least not for those who are impatient or who are unwilling (or unable) to understand her. Such massive keeping and overbearing caring, without words or explanations, are alienating for Stephen and transform Obasan into almost a caricature – a frumpy, poor, deaf, old Japanese woman – in front of the Barkers.

Obasan’s pointless and overbearing collecting of useless and decaying items and her inability to communicate or join in community with others appears symptomatic of how devastating the internment was for her, whereby her dispossession and displacement leave her fixated on storing, maintaining, and protecting as a consequence of her losses. However, we might note an ethical component to Obasan’s hoarding. If, as Naomi

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describes, our memories always turn to dust and seep into the materials around us in which state they are irretrievable and yet also forever maintained (“Everything, I suppose, turns to dust eventually. A man’s memories end up in some attic or in a Salvation Army bin . . . . [M]emories and dreams seep and mingle through cracks, settling on furniture and into upholstery” 25), Obasan, as a keeper of even dust, is also the one who preserves the traces of history for posterity. Because our things relate to us in such intimate ways, our lives and histories might be traced even in the dust that gathers on them or that is left in their destruction. And, like artist and forensic anthropologist researcher, Susan Schuppli, who analysed the dust that remained from the destruction of the World Trade Center in order to return some humanity to the victims who otherwise do not appear, Obasan understands that dust ultimately comes from and relates back to people and their stories.70 Moreover, Obasan’s small and useless gesture of attending to the material that remains suggests that caring for the smallest items is a means to caring for the people, their histories, and their stories.

For Naomi, the massive and thorough dispossession that she experienced during the internment, losing both loved ones and all their things and one’s own things, means she is never able to feel grounded or comfortable in the world or to make sense of where she is, and, like Obasan, she acquires a deep sense of distrust that inhibits her capacity to be social and communicate with others. Without her things, Naomi cannot work through her experience and the loss of her mother, nor can she transition into any meaningful and trusting relationship with the outside world and others, because she has never been in a

70 In a very materialist approach to dust, in her article “Impure Matter: A Forensics of WTC Dust” (Savage Objects), Schuppli describes analysing dust samples from what remained of the destruction of the Twin Towers for their components. Finding some unexpected percentages of different materials, Schuppli highlights these unforeseen substances in an attempt to return some fraction of a living (vital, unpredictable) narrative and illusive human dimension to the people who died there and of whom only trace physical material (from their bodies, their desks, their family pictures and mementos in their work spaces) remains. In a similarly optimistic view, we might regard the document listing all the things that had been in Teiji Morishita’s East Cordova Street house as not only symbolizing the immense loss the family suffered, but also, through the dolls, canaries, and film developer, we might sense and feel an interest in the lives of the Morishita family members – their tastes, cares, concerns, status, circumstances, connections, interests. We might wonder why they had canaries, and moreover, what happened to them. Though I have stayed with the approach that stresses how much was lost in the dispossession and displacements of the internment in order to suggest the significance and harm of losing all one’s things, I will return in the conclusion to consider how things, even the smallest remains, can preserve and gesture us toward receiving the past and help us respect difference for a better, more ethical comportment and future.

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position of having enough, adequate mastery over her entry into it or of learning to trust the world and that she will survive the encounter with it. If, indeed, we need our objects in order to make sense of our pasts and our losses, as well as to enter into the world outside of ourselves, into the public sphere, and into relationships of exchange and communication with others, as this discussion of Naomi’s transitional objects suggests, then we need to rethink the stakes involved in experiences of forced dispossession like the Japanese Canadian internment. Indeed, we might envision that the loss of objects and forced dispossession during the internment, as well as the perpetual displacements and the loss of rights including property rights the experience entailed, struck so deeply that the trust of others and the outside world was significantly undone for a large population of people and for the second generation.

Far from viewing the treatment of Japanese Canadians during the internment as an issue of people just losing their things, which might be accounted for and for which they can be recompensed later on, Naomi’s fear of open spaces and relationships (and Obasan’s protective hoarding) suggests what is also at stake for all those others who are forced to be alienated from all their things is a profound distrust from which it is very hard to recover. If we imagine Naomi’s fictional experience as a viable representation, and whereby the world, relationships, and society can only come about and be sustained when people have a modicum of trust in these things, the mass dispossession of the internment comes into view as a violence that targeted and damaged people’s necessary belief in the reliability and truth of the world and others in it. Similarly, we might also refocus our thinking to consider how people in all kinds of different circumstances of migration and subsequent massive property loss have lost not only their former lives and livelihoods and their property and connections to their histories, but also, and more significantly, the ability to trust the world and others, and to comfortably and confidently engage in it and with them. If such fundamental trust in the world and with others is so intimately a part of issues surrounding property and ownership, a question for communities that include exiles, migrants, and people who are displaced or for whom refugees continue to arrive on their shores or in their airports, might be how to accommodate such distrust. And, in another way, how might a society build a

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community and continue or recreate ideals for citizenship when it must also deal with such a fundamental distrust? Indeed, meeting distrust with distrust, as maybe the case in Canada detaining potential refugees in immigration detention centres (Friesen) or in the recent calls to stem people crossing the border from the United States (Zimonjic), does not seem appropriate.

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Chapter 3 The Material Wounds of Internment: The Broken Things and Damaged Bodies in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field and Frances Itani’s Requiem

In March 2014, Samantha Bee, the comedian and television personality, argued on national radio and Internet coverage that the novel, Cockroach, by Rawi Hage, was the “One Novel to Change Our Nation.” Bee was one of the panellists participating in CBC’s Canada Reads competition in which five celebrities champion five different books, debate about the merits of the books, and vote to remove one title from the competition at the end of each episode. The show promotes the remaining novel as the one that all Canadians should read, and that year, the theme of the competition suggested that the winning novel would teach Canadians about their nation in such a way that their perceptions and attitudes about Canada and about other Canadians would fundamentally change. In a contest that one can imagine Obasan might have won had it been held in 1988, Bee argued that the story about an immigrant man who turns into a cockroach and, in the end, disappears down a drain on a leaf, was a book that makes readers more sensitive to the complex, hard, and even “ugly” experience of displacement (Bee, “Canada Reads 2014: Panelist”). For Bee, the novel challenges the common assumption that immigrants can and should be infinitely grateful and happy because they were able to make new lives in Canada, and rather shows how immigrants can be profoundly affected by trauma, significant economic challenges, isolation, and madness. Indicating what readers need to learn about and respect of the protagonist, Bee describes him as, “literally Other. He sees himself as Other. He cannot connect with the place where he is” (Bee, “Canada Reads 2014: One Novel”).

Hage’s narrator-protagonist shows us the difficult and even destructive or hopeless aspects of displacement in a way similar to that which I have been arguing we could read the experience of displacement, dispossession, and internment for Japanese Canadians in the novels by Beattie and Kogawa. So far, in the case of Beattie’s novel, I

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argued that in losing their things Keiichi and his family members and friends become fundamentally disoriented, whereby their material losses make it difficult for them to make sense of themselves and their world, and make it difficult for them to care for and shelter other things in the world. And, in Obasan, I explored how, forced from her familiar surroundings and objects, Naomi suffers a double loss of, first, her former life and, secondly, all the things that anchored her to that life – those objects that contained her memories – whereby her orientation toward a future and toward others changes: she appears detached from others and a community, and has difficulty trusting the other people and the objects in the world around her. Similarly, Cockroach’s unnamed protagonist shows us how being displaced in the world because of political trauma is painful enough to thoroughly affect the characters’ orientations and can lead to being profoundly disconnected from the world, from both the objects and other people in it. Thus, Hage’s protagonist is often unable to relate to items, either because they appear to him as soiled and broken – such as the Playboy magazines with “the pages stuck together like glue” that the protagonist nearly steals from his friend (151) – or because they appear as meaningless – such as the “happy meals” and “dead plants” that he claims are some of the only things that exist in Canada (250). And, similar to Obasan’s and Naomi’s inability to trust others in the public sphere, whereby they cannot have meaningful relationships with others or even be comfortable venturing into exchanges, the protagonist of Hage’s novel has only unfulfilling, antagonistic, or inappropriate relationships with others, such as his relationship with his boss’ young daughter whom he tries to seduce so he can watch her pleasuring herself.

However, unlike Keiichi or Naomi who suffer political trauma but whose bodies stay intact, Hage’s narrator is not only materially destitute and emotionally scared by his experience of displacement, he is, moreover, physically transformed by his experience into a bug. What I have been arguing up until now is that examining material items and the characters’ relationships to them tells us something more about the meaning of the traumatic experience or the devastation of the disastrous experience that otherwise fails to appear in public discourse or that appears to us in too simple terms. In other words, by analysing representations of characters’ relationships to objects and material things we

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can appreciate new ways of thinking and think more deeply about the harm done during the internment. In the case of Hage’s unnamed immigrant, on the other hand, the experience of being forcibly removed from one’s home, being alienated from the things, habits, and culture to which one was habituated, and being subject to racism is so ruinous that it leads to physical transformations in the protagonist’s body. In other words, the protagonist’s body itself appears as a material object, the shape and perception of which is physically affected by the emotional, psychological, and existential trauma of displacement, dispossession, and racism. Such a physical wound and transformation seems counterintuitive to what Freud suggested of trauma in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in which he was concerned with the emotional shattering that did not physically show in patients like survivors of train crashes or of WWI who had all their limbs intact and no manifest scarring. And, indeed, the traumatic transformation of Hage’s character is not like someone physically wounded in an accident. Rather the character’s physical change suggests that emotional pain can be so powerful it can induce changes and marks in the flesh. If such physical damage can be produced from displacement, dispossession, and racism, and whereas this project aims to better understand the internment experience by looking at the material involved, we might ask whether the experience of Japanese Canadians during WWII similarly affected physical scars when it turned its subjects into material objects. We might inquire as to whether the Japanese Canadian experience of being uprooted and of losing everything was emotionally powerful and painful enough for those who experienced it that, though few physical remains testify to the event – there are few objects, buildings, or traces in the landscape – and the characters often appear to be able to carry on with their lives (without obvious scars), it still left “physical” damage in the bodies of the characters.

Requiem by Itani and The Electrical Field by Sakamoto effectively stage the question of material evidence or witnessing as what can be “seen” and perceived and what cannot appear or only appear in other ways. Of all the novels under discussion in the dissertation, Requiem presents us with the most vivid portrayals of characters being forcibly displaced from their homes and of having their things looted and lost, as well as

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the long lasting implications of these material losses.71 Binosuke, the protagonist, is an artist with a knack for retaining images of the past as “tableaux vivants” in his mind and, upon his wife’s death, he travels across Canada and back to the internment camp where his family was interned, spending the time along the way recounting his exceptional experiences as a child internee, as well as his later life with his wife. Though Bin dwells on his memories of these objects and their confiscation during the time of the novel, he ultimately appears as a relatively well-adjusted and coherent character. And, by the end of the novel, he even appears to come to terms with his painful past, finally visiting the internment camp after leaving it more than fifty years before, reconciling with his father, and opening the package of historical documents about his family’s internment that his wife, Lena, left for him.

On the other hand, of all the novels under discussion in this dissertation, The Electrical Field depicts the experience of the forced displacement and dispossession of Japanese Canadians the least. However, at the same time that the novel does not represent many of the protagonist’s experiences in internment, it conveys the internment in the darkest and most damaging terms. The internment appears as a kind of blind-spot in the novel insofar as so many of the characters seem so highly affected by their or their families’ experiences of the internment, but the novel only represents the experience in passing or in short accounts of the past that are hard to distinguish from stories of the past that are pre-internment. Indeed, unlike all the other novels, this novel effectively depicts no objects from before or during the internment, only post-internment objects: items that the protagonist, Asako Saito, has collected and keeps in her house since she, her brother, Stum, and their father moved to the edge of a suburban development from the city years before. However, Asako’s more recently acquired objects and her relationships to them, as well as to other people and the world, are very much inflected by her traumatic experience. And, indeed, all the Japanese Canadian characters are damaged by their experiences of being uprooted and dispossessed: a man murders his family and commits suicide; a girl resorts to cutting herself; Asako suffers from madness; and family members are painfully and violently disengaged from each other.

71 Itani’s mother-in-law and husband were interned, and she used her mother-in-law’s stories to inform her writing.

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Taking the two novels together, we could read that both Bin and Asako appear to us as haunted by their internment experiences in their relationships to their objects: Bin’s remembered ones and Asako’s more recently acquired ones. Yet, however troubled they are, they appear to carry on in acceptable ways. Bin becomes a successful painter, even if his wife is frustrated by his depression at times, and Asako seems to be regarded by many of her neighbours as strong and stable, at least insofar as her neighbour, Yano, wants Asako to befriend his wife and be a good influence for her, and several others, besides Yano, confide in her. On the other hand, as much as Requiem suggests that Bin comes to terms with this painful past at the end of the novel, and we might even find some ways that The Electrical Field formulates what might appear as Asako overcoming her painful past to build new relationships and bonds in the world, arguably both protagonists and their relationships to the world continue to be damaged. Indeed, at times, their emotional injury is so significant we can even read it as signalling a deep, even “physical” wound, even if other characters or we as readers cannot always readily perceive or recognize it as such.

Having looked at how relating to objects helps characters develop their personalities, their communities, and their futures (chapter one) and helps characters trust the world in order to enter into meaningful relationships with others and civic engagement (chapter two), in this final chapter, I further investigate what characters’ relationships to their belongings show us about their emotional and internal worlds. More precisely, I analyse what objects tell us about how the characters have internalized their difficult experiences of displacement and dispossession. This analysis of the very personal and emotional difficulties faced by those who have lost so much contributes to further sensing the contours and weight of the disaster of the internment. Thus, this study of Bin and Asako extends the idea I have been developing about analysing the significance of material objects in order to fill-in the contours of the trauma of the internment so that it appears as more than an enumeration of lost items or as a “blessing in disguise.” Moreover, analyzing the emotional wounds represented in the novels helps us appreciate the different and even disastrous ways in which such an experience of forced displacement and dispossession might become part of a character. Along with

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appreciating the outline and form of the internment as an historical phenomenon, here I aim to also outline the contours of the disaster or trauma as it exists within the characters. Indeed, the internment haunts Bin and especially Asako, and has adverse effects for them, just as the emphasis of my argument thus far has similarly highlighted difficulties for the characters in the other novels. However, because these characters also appear to others as having overcome their traumas, and they appear to return to and repeat their traumas at the ends of the novels, suggesting that they are working through them, these two more recent internment novels further evoke the question of how exactly to discern a trauma when there are no signs of it. If, for example, the Japanese Canadian community moves on from the experience and prospers, or Miki is able to incorporate his loss as part of his personal mythos, then we might ask how we even know to pause and give a second thought to what does not appear or seems long past.

To elucidate these issues, this chapter begins, as I have begun all the chapters, with an examination of the objects and the protagonists’ relationships to the objects in each of the novels in order to outline the specific meanings material things have in the novels. Providing us with a sense of the nature and shape of their suffering, Bin’s memories of things from the past suggest all that was lost for him and his family, how emotionally significant the losses were, and how the dispossession continues to haunt his family more than fifty years later. Asako’s contemporary objects, on the other hand, appear tainted, and such decay, which is an effect of Asako’s first person and very personal perspective, relates to Asako’s experience of the internment and the racism she experienced and has internalized. However, as I subsequently consider, as much as these objects suggest how difficult the internment was for these characters, each of the novels also contains material objects that provide Bin and even Asako with different ways of understanding and perceiving their traumatic experiences, and through their relationships to these objects it might be possible to read the characters as managing and working through their difficult pasts. Although their traumas are profoundly integral to each character, Bin and Asako also carry on with their lives, re-establish themselves and their communal attachments with others, and acquire new homes, property, and things. Indeed, they persist as they do, arriving at new relationships, new stories, new histories, and new

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life (Bin meets Lena and they have a son, Gregory72) precisely because their traumas have structured who they are and their lives, for better or for worse.

Finally, I contemplate that, whereby the aftermath of the internment can appear as part of the lives of the characters, and their lives can even seem successful (Bin as an artist), how do we still mark, symbolize, represent, and understand the event so as to give it its weight and meaning, or at least aim to understand the lives of the people and their hardships better. Or, in slightly different terms, I ask how we might be able to read the lives of the characters after the internment as carrying on, while simultaneously holding in view how they are devastated by a disaster. Turning the line of thinking so far pursued in this project to consider the effect of the characters themselves as objects and material manipulated and acted on by the internment experience and the psychological strains that it entailed, in this instance, I invoke Catherine Malabou’s idea of the “new wounded.” This subject experiences such an emotional wounding that, though she appears similar and in no way diminished from how she was before, she has been fundamentally transformed and physically altered. And, I examine the characters that experienced the internment in Requiem and The Electrical Field to consider whether and how they might appear to undergo such profound material transformations.

3.1 Material Impoverishment and Existential Dislocation: Things in Requiem

To begin, I want to briefly outline the novels while examining the objects they depict and the significance of these artefacts to the characters. Though Requiem is the most recent novel of the two (published in 2011, 13 years after The Electrical Field), I begin my analysis with it because the narrative depicts the characters’ experiences of internment – as Beattie’s and Kogawa’s novels do. Like Naomi excavating her memories in Obasan, Bin recounts his memories of the past, depicting the fictional objects and the impoverished circumstances of his internment most vividly. Set in 1997, the story opens with Bin deciding on a whim, after his wife dies suddenly of a stroke, to drive from his home in Ottawa to British Columbia to see his biological father and to visit his sister,

72 And, in another example, as Mark Ikeda, a sansei or third generation Japanese Canadian, states: “‘If the Japanese Internment didn’t happen, I wouldn’t be alive today’” (“The Langham”).

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Keiko or Kay, and brother, Hiroshi or Henry, on the way.73 As he travels with his dog, Basil, through the Canadian Shield and the Prairies, often tracing routes his wife, Lena, and he had driven in the past, Bin remembers his family’s forced displacements, their dispossession, their internment, and his life afterwards, including episodes from his life with Lena and their son, Greg. Moving between the present, the more recent past, and his childhood – as things, places, and songs during his long drive trigger Bin’s memories toward introspective reflection on his life – the now relatively successful artist in the latter part of his career, recounts being rounded up and leaving his home; the maggots, mould, and noise of living in Hastings Park (84); his family’s trip to the internment camp; and their life there. The central mystery of the story is the circumstances of Bin having two fathers – his quick-tempered biological father, First father, and the gentle Okuma, Second father – which, for Bin, is part of the traumatic aspect of his life in the camp with its rough conditions.

Because the novel spends a lot of time representing Bin’s experiences of internment, invoking the many and significant material losses that were a part of the event, Requiem produces a sense of how much was lost by the families, the poverty of the situation in the camps, and how devastating the experience was for those involved. The novel tells us about all the things that were taken away from the family members and the other Japanese Canadian families living on their west coast island community before they were interned: “radios, camera, binoculars” (42), and the boats the men had “already been forced to turn in” under naval escort” (43) and that are later sold “without the owners’ consent” (44, emphasis in the original). The novel understands and depicts that such liquidation was a purposeful act intended to eradicate the Japanese Canadian population because it “ensur[ed] that no one would be coming back, that there would be nothing to come back to” (44). The novel also stresses the great emotional and deeply personal significance of these forced losses because the family, living in a relatively

73 Kay and Henry are the English and “more acceptable” versions of Bin’s siblings’ names, which Anglo- Canadian teachers give them during their internment. Bin also becomes Ben, but choses Bin after moving east as a teenager. Keiko and Hiroshi are referred to using both their real names and the English names throughout the novel depending on time period: up until and during part of their internment they are called by their Japanese names, but after going to school there and in all the years after their internment, they are referred to as Kay and Henry.

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isolated coastal community, has only two hours to pack and is allowed to bring only what each member could carry (45). For Bin, as a child unable to make sense of what is happening, these moments are marked with quick decisions, confusion, and painful emotions. Many occurrences that should never happen or are normally not allowed to happen, involving a kind of misuse of things, take place. Bin’s father shouts amidst music the neighbour plays on her piano for the last time, and his father throws water on their stove to cool and dismantle it to carry it with them, causing soot and mud to fill and dirty the inside of their house (48). Additionally, in the confusion, objects gain an unusual, heightened meaning as anchors promising stability: Bin is fearful that he will be lost, disappearing “into the unforgiving mist,” if he does not keep an eye on “the pleat of Mother’s coat” (45). Recalling Brown’s idea that when things are broken we get a sense of their other, deeper, and more unfathomable possibilities, in these moments, things appear broken or are being broken insofar as they are being used and treated in ways that are exceptional and normally inappropriate. Invested with intensified meanings – the stove means survival in the cold mountains and the coat’s pleat will save Bin from being utterly lost – or forcibly disconnected from their regular spaces and uses, these things suggest for readers how painful, desperate, and unsettling the experience was for the characters.

Moreover, the treatment of things during the family’s uprooting also affords a glimpse of how distressing and painful the experience was insofar as the family and community witness what remains of their homes and things being stripped and robbed by looters. On the mail boat taking them to the mainland and to the detention centre at Hastings Park, the family members watch as “everything left behind is dragged from our home” (51): The grandfather clock, tables, chairs, linens, pillows, cutlery, china, sets of dishes, photograph albums, wedding gifts and heirlooms my parents had been given at the time of their marriage. Even the toy boats Hiroshi and Keiko and I had banged together from boards and nails. (51) The family’s dispossession is so thorough that everything is taken regardless of how little value it had, including items made by the children from scraps. Moreover, like in Obasan

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the taking of things in this episode appears as a violation. On one hand, neighbours and members of their extended community, who should not be there and normally cannot enter without an invitation, invade the private space of the home, assuming it and the things it contains for themselves in a way that is reminiscent of Mr. Gower taking possession of Naomi’s family’s home and of Naomi’s body for his own needs and pleasure. On the other hand, but in a related way, the looters violate and desecrate not only by taking the family’s objects, but also by mistaking the meaning of these objects for their material value and perhaps for their status as stolen objects from enemy aliens.74 The looters misrecognize the meaning of the objects that are gifts, heirlooms, and expressions of the children’s imaginations, and that connect the family members to their pasts and orient them toward each other and the world. Instead, they bracket out the history and personal value, seeing only the value of the objects as it suits the looters’ own personal gain.

Two particular items that stand out for Bin in images frozen in his memory are a woman “bearing in her arms the prize of my mother’s portable Singer sewing machine” and four men pushing, pulling, shouting, and swearing as they squeeze the neighbour’s, Missisu’s, piano out of the door of her house and onto the cart they brought with them for the purpose of carrying the piano away (52).75 The sewing machine and the piano are now the “prizes” and personal burdens (the “troublesome loads”) for these others. And the looters are disrespectful of the Japanese Canadians, waiting just beyond their homes and fully prepared to take their things. Whereas Bin watches these scenes and retains them in his mind’s eye, “the looters do not look out towards the families crowded on

74 I wonder how many people stole household items from Japanese Canadians not only out of their own desperate circumstances but also because they felt it was okay to do so when the people were considered “enemy aliens.” In other words, how much did the government’s actions, policies, and language against Japanese Canadians contribute to the looting by, to some degree, vindicating it (as an acceptable action against an enemy)? 75 Missisu (Mrs.), whose real name Bin never learns (46), was a next-door neighbour who gave piano lessons to children and who played Beethoven’s Minuet in G during the hours of packing before they are forced to leave their homes. Her abrupt cessation of playing when the authorities come, the definitive and final cut in the sound of the instrument, helps signal how terrible and severing the moment is for Bin the child. Recalling the piano, Bin wonders what happened to it and imagines that it was either constantly shoved around by faceless people or ended up standing still, collecting dust and forever unwelcome in some home (58). For Bin, at least, the item in his memory retains a residual power that connects him to his past, though in this case, as with Morishita’s document or Naomi’s recollection of items in her family’s Vancouver house, it represents all that was lost.

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board” the boat, not even bothering “to glance our way” (52), suggesting just how meaningless the people and their lives are to those who would steal from them. The insignificance of the Japanese Canadian property owners to the looters recalls Naomi’s description of the Japanese Canadians being shipped on trains like animals, their eyes covered with spittle (119), and suggests they are on the threshold of “bare life” insofar as they are beginning to no longer appear as citizens or sovereign agents. Similarly, when the official ban on access to government documents about the internment is lifted and Lena, a history professor, researches “the fate of homes that had once belonged to [Bin’s] parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins” (38), she finds Bin’s father was paid $18.85 after “the disappearance and disposal of household goods that we were forced to leave behind in our family home” (38). The cruel irony is that they had no choice in the alienation of their belongings, which, for Bin, are so integral to him that he refers to them as “the parts of our lives that we had to leave behind” (39), and then receive nothing for the loss. Stressing the incompatible values of the government’s assessment of their house versus Bin’s own appraisal of his home, he remarks, “Eighteen dollars and eighty-five cents. A figure not easy to forget. . . . For an entire house. A house full of goods” (38- 9).76

The loss of things in the novel reveals how chaotic and painful being uprooted from their homes and dispossessed of their property was for the characters, leaving Bin feeling utterly disoriented and threatened as a child. And it shows to what extent the characters were denied the possibility of keeping their property and the normal rights to protect it. Their belongings even become coveted prizes through which (or as a consequence of which) the lives of the people involved are erased for the looters. Moreover, as in Beattie’s and Kogawa’s novels, the loss of things also speaks to the impoverished circumstances that the family was forced to endure during their internment

76 The use of short, punctuating sentences here draws our attention to the point of incompatible values and the significance of this issue. Indeed, the novel includes pages of description about Bin’s family’s house on stilts by the water, but we only have four short lines explaining the fate of the house and its liquidation. Many of the things from before the internment in the novel gain mythical proportions in the minds and stories of the characters. Just as Bin remembers the sewing machine and piano, an elderly woman they meet in the camp, Ba (as in obasan – aunt or older lady), tells the children “‘the story of the two-dresser set,’” a furniture piece she had always dreamed of owning, but shortly after buying it, she has to sell it because she knows it will likely otherwise be stolen or lost during their displacement (111-116).

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and that, in many respects, they are never able to overcome. In Hastings Park, Bin describes there being “no seats, no partitions, no privacy” (83), and Bin remembers children’s bums lined up in a row near the sheet-metal troughs used for toilets and Keiko holding towels together for their mother to undress and change. Forced out of their private dwellings and into barns, and without their things and property, the people suffer the dehumanization and humiliation of not having any separation between their private and public spaces, nor any control over their privacy.

Without the familiar things of his home that would normally help him orient himself in the world, and under perpetually changing circumstances of strangers moving in and out of Hastings Park and of his family’s displacement again to an internment camp, Bin only has the most fleeting or barest of things to grasp at in order to make sense of his situation and find familiar comforts. Trying to memorize and retain the things around him on their train ride into the interior of the province, Bin describes: “Abruptly, on the third day, we were ordered to leave the train. Once more, we gathered our bundles and left behind a place that had become familiar. A place where I had memorized every anxious face, every seat in the coach, every paint chip, every streak in the glass” (91). Along with suggesting just how long and confined their trip to their internment camp was, as well as how much he and his family had lost so that he has only these insufficient things for building attachments, Bin’s attention to objects like train seats and walls with chips in the paint evoke how meaningful the smallest, insignificant things become when one loses so much. Indeed, at the camp, they effectively arrive at nothing: “a more or less flat, narrow field at the base of a mountain on the other side” (92).

Although the family and the camps’ inhabitants make do with the items that they have brought with them, that they are given by the government, or that they can find and make themselves, such as pooling their skills and tools to make furniture (106), throughout their time in the camp, there is never enough, signalling the poverty of their situation. Unable to keep warm with the stove their father brought or with their clothing, Keiko has frostbitten hands (107). Bin never has the tools he needs for drawing, which is his passion, and can only create pictures “in the dirt with a stick” (111). And similarly, Okuma, without a piano, fashions himself a plank of wood with keys drawn on it that he

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uses to practice playing pieces by Beethoven, and that only makes a tapping sound as Okuma’s finger tips slap against the wood (198-200). Indeed, the community’s circumstances are so diminished that when Okuma’s finger splits from playing during the cold, dry winter months, he sews it himself with his own needle and thread, for there are no specialized tools, medical personnel, or services for the community.77 And the conditions in which Bin lives get worse after the war and when he and Okuma leave the camp because they are sent to live in an old chicken coop that is smaller and less clean than their former shack (255).

As in Obasan, the material poverty to which the population is reduced, as well as the social and psychological wounds caused by losing so much – and by being either forgotten or deemed a population deserving of such diminishment and ill treatment – has lasting implications in the Japanese Canadian community as represented by Bin’s extended family in the novel. In this case, Bin and his family have difficulty finding financial stability or settling again. Because being dispossessed of everything made returning to their former places of habitation and work unfeasible and impossible, even after the Japanese Canadian population was finally allowed to return to the west coast in 1949, Bin’s family is left perpetually unsure about what to do and where to go. They weigh the many different, often conflicting factors like the possibility of returning to the coast and to the fishing profession, economic necessities and where they might find jobs in the meantime, and where to go that most of the members of a family might best stick together. As Bin describes, “the places people moved to were mainly chosen by chance. Someone had heard that a job might be found. Two rooms were offered in a city in Manitoba or Ontario. A housekeeper was wanted here or there” (246). The effect of being displaced, of being denied the right of free movement, of losing everything, and of the resulting impoverishment, whereby out of economic necessity they have to take whatever jobs were offered to them, leads Bin to reflect on how different his family was

77 The novel suggests that the lack of resources and services in the camps, which reduced the population to “bare life” and animal-like circumstances (similar to what we have seen in the other novels), was an effect of racism against the Japanese Canadian population. When Bin’s aunt, Aya, haemorrhages after childbirth and the community sends word to the white community across the bridge, after many hours, not a doctor, but a veterinarian arrives to administer an injection (160-61). Aya survives but her son, Baby Taro, dies shortly afterward.

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from Lena’s: “my family was scattered forever: uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, sister, nieces, nephews, anywhere and everywhere in the country, unseen and no longer really known” (276). Indeed, Bin’s father is not financially able to own a house again (to financial and materially recover) until nearly fifty years later when, after the Redress Agreement and compensation payment, he buys “the bungalow he and Mother had rented for years” near Kamloops (279). Only, dying years before, Bin’s mother never gets “to enjoy the fact of ownership” again, nor does she hear the apology (279).

Having no thing to return to or nothing of significance to ground and orient them as their former property, homes, and communities once did, many of Bin’s family members remain perpetually on the move. Henry moves “from job to job for many years” until he finally buys a truck stop feeding other wayfarers before retiring to travel (277). Bin describes his father and uncle as drifting for years, “making repeated and thwarted attempts to search for what would never be recovered” (251-2). And Kay describes Bin as a rootless traveller when he calls her to tell her he has changed his plans and will only be stopping to visit her on his way back from British Columbia. “‘What is it that you’re looking for?’” she asks him, “‘Searching, searching, you travel around the world, but for what? You don’t light long enough to find whatever it is’” (288). We might read that these family members move, not only because they are subject to precarious work and no financial stability, but also because they intimately know that devastating losses are possible at any moment. As Bin describes, “There could be sudden losses – every Japanese Canadian knew that” (276). And if they can lose so much so quickly, perhaps they feel they should not venture making claims or laying roots (as Naomi does not venture into the marketplace). However, this knowledge does not make these exiles virtuous and perfect, as Edward Said suggests can happen (“Reflections on Exile” 185). Rather, for Bin, these arbitrary and meaningful losses leave him anxious about keeping Lena, Greg, and Miss Carrie – their close neighbour and friend – “safe and close” and worried about “always trying to protect everyone” (276). Besides deep worry and a sense of insecurity about one’s circumstances, Bin describes that, as a consequence of their treatment during the war, “Most of my relatives kept their heads down, stayed below the radar . . . . Whole lives spent with their heads down” (277). Such feelings of

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necessary withdrawal, deep anxiety, rootlessness, and being uncomfortable staying in one place or in making claims, haunt the characters years after their experiences of being uprooted and impoverishment. Indeed, as Bin describes, “It’s always there, the camp, close beneath the surface. For all of us” (34, italics in the original).

Some things, however, do remain for the characters, only they are not tangible and useful pieces of property. In his experience of the profound and devastating loss of things, Bin retains the impressions of lost things on his body and in his mind, such as his mother’s sewing machine, Missisu’s piano, and the pleat of his mother’s coat, the one he also remembers her wearing upon leaving the camp five years later (251). Bin also recalls the pain on his legs of the rice pot that he was charged with carrying during his family’s forced displacement bumping against him as he dragged it trying to keep up with his mother: “My skin remembers the cruel curve of the lid as it clipped the side of first one leg and then the other” (45). And Bin retains the memory of his mother’s yellow cotton dress, “with a raised pattern around its bottom edge that reminded [Bin] of delicate rows of puffed corn” (250), that she wears on their last walk together before they are separated, when Bin’s mother says they will see each other whenever they can, only they do not do so for years because they do not have the means. Carrying this image of his mother around with him, “scarcely altered with time,” it becomes the basis of the “one canvas [he] had never put in a show or offered for sale:” an abstract work of art with deep colours and a single fine edge of a palest yellow along one side (278). The loss of the object itself, while the body or mind retains the memory of that object, testifies to a kind of secondary loss at play for Bin as I discussed was the case for Naomi in Obasan. As much as the memories recall Bin’s experiences and point to how significant material items are for him to orient himself and to remember the past, the memories or “tableaux vivants,” as Bin refers to them (47), simultaneously signal how much was lost. The “living pictures” do not depict anything living or that continues to be present, including many people he loved – his mother, Baby Taro and his aunt Aya among others – and the material items that would have afforded him some stability and sense of protection amidst all the loss.

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3.2 Tainted Objects: Things in The Electrical Field

Unlike Requiem, which depicts a lot of objects from before and during the internment through Bin’s memories, in Sakamoto’s novel, the items primarily belong to 1975, the present day of the narrative. However, the internment and its legacy affects and infects everything and every aspect of the lives of the characters – their relationships and their belongings – whereby the protagonist appears haunted by her unresolved past, especially in her interactions with objects. The novel is a first person narrative account of Asako Saito’s life, which normally consists of her caring for her old, ailing father (confined to his bedroom) and keeping the old farm house in which she, her father, and her younger brother (who works on a nearby farm sexing chicks) live, which is located across the street from a newer subdivision. At times, her housekeeping routine is punctuated by her visits from and dealings with her neighbours. However, the novel takes place in the weeks following the news that her neighbour and friend, Chisako, was found murdered along side her lover in Lover’s Lane, and when Chisako’s husband, Yano, and two children, Tam and Kimi, are missing. In the wake of this news, besides caring for her family and house, we follow Asako as she searches newspapers for clues and accompanies Sachi, a young girl from across the street, on her attempts to find her missing friend. Trying to get to the bottom of what has happened, her daily routine is now also interrupted by discussions with her brother, Stum, about the murder, and visits from a detective conducting interviews. In the midst of the uncertainty surrounding what has happened and where Yano and his children are, Asako is moved to recount and remember some of her previous encounters with her neighbours. Along with these memories, she also recalls her own past when she was a child and when her older brother, Eiji, was still alive, including during their internment, and moving east after the internment and Eiji’s death. Often slipping between the present and the past and the even deeper past, the narrative presents a double mystery about the death of Chisako and what has happened to her family, as well as about the death of Eiji. But the movements also suggest that Asako increasingly confuses and misremembers her experiences, to the point that the novel hints at her knowing more about both Chisako’s and Eiji’s deaths and being guilty of forgetting the specifics of the events and her role in them.

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As a housekeeper for her family, Asako, very much like Obasan, is a keeper of things, only what she collects, or what gathers in her house, appears to be mostly post- war things. Also, unlike Obasan, her house is not overflowing and cluttered with objects. Rather, the novel often depicts Asako cleaning and ordering the things in her house, whereby she appears to have, not only her house, but also her modest life under respectable control. Indeed, the very first sentence of the book introduces Asako in the process of dusting: “I happened to be dusting the front window-ledge when I saw her running across the grassy strip of the electrical field” (1). Asako is perpetually dusting things in her house, as well as “plumping up [cushions] on the chesterfield” (4) or “smoothing out the creases” (20), trimming the flowers in her garden, or washing dishes and putting them away, whereby her neighbours at times remark how well she keeps her house. Compared to Chisako’s house that Asako sees as having “shabby furniture” covered with dust and littered surfaces (95), we might imagine that Asako’s house with all her care is particularly well-kept. On the other hand, as much as her interaction with things defines her as a house and family keeper, taking care of her father’s and brother’s clothing, bedding, and dishes is, for Asako, work that is never done. Only, in this case, the endless work does not result from having so much to do. Things in Asako’s house always seem to be dusty and dirty, flat, wrinkly, and deteriorating or dead, and even after dusting the area the day before, Asako notices that “a lawn of silvery fine dust had already appeared on the ledge” (11). Despite her best efforts and continued attention, and though Asako may want everything to be “stripped clean; everything done step by careful step” (87), like the clear water and polished grains she ends up with when she cleans rice really well, the items in the house are always layered with dirty particles, marked with folds, or stained. Similarly, she cannot get rid of the smell of her father’s declining body that permeates the sheets even when she’s just changed them (4). And “through all the chores of washing and wiping and dusting” she does, newsprint remains smeared on her fingertips (16). Likewise, Asako’s tidy appearance seems to be perpetually coming apart. She wears her mother’s old clothes including stockings she snags (6), a mohair sweater the sleeves of which she stuffs with crusty tissues (10), soiled shoes (45), and a shabby coat (92). And among her objects are her car, which she

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describes as “an eyesore, with rust spots that scabbed the fender” (38), and her room that, regardless of all her cleaning, is dowdy and smells of “musty lifelessness” (78).

Although Asako imagines (and our first impressions might be) that she keeps her house better than other characters in the novel do, all Asako’s dusty, old, and deteriorating objects imply that her home and moreover her world are themselves rather disorderly, unsettled, and chaotic. The shabby, stained, and unpleasant objects of her world to some degree reflect her family’s poverty, in a similar way that Bin’s family is plagued with poverty after their internment and the loss of all their things. However, the novel attributes the stain and decay in this case to something uncanny about Asako herself, as the narrative and its things are focalized through her perspective. Thus, even when Asako’s garden is in its prime and she is surrounded by beautiful things she has helped grow, we learn that the scene makes Asako feel “a little sick at heart, all the lush pink and purple and pure white coming up around me, because in no time they’d be brown and curling, ruined” (31).

However, Asako’s view of her world appears particularly chaotic insofar as the novel further presents her ability to perceive things clearly as questionable, making her narrative unreliable and her psychological state appear uncertain. She sees a muddied mark on her carpet that she left from earlier in the day, but when she comes close to it, it disappears (56). When the blooms in her garden have faded, she cuts all the flowers, leaving “the garden suddenly bare” (217), and mistaking them for being vivid and beautiful, she displays the dying blossoms in her living room. Unlike Keiichi’s daughter who intentionally destroys their garden as part of her scorched earth policy, Asako cuts everything down because she misrecognizes the flowers and absentmindedly proceeds. She has only the smallest awareness of what she is doing and acts without agency or intention.78 Moreover, Asako’s unreliability relates not only to her faulty perception, but also to her tendency to forget things, and not just small things like her handbag she misplaces (45-6) or the task she was just doing – Asako describes that she “kept coming

78 During the episode of cutting all the flowers, indiscriminately, out of the garden, Asako describes herself as having “found” herself in her garden and then she “found [her] hands clutching two thick bunches” of flowers. “Finding” herself suggests how unaware she is of what she is doing and how little control she has over her actions.

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upon things I’d left behind: half-chopped vegetables on the cutting board, dishes standing in water, my dustrag abandoned on the ledge” (185). Asako even forgets very significant things, like her father, whom she accidently neglects for a whole day, never tuning into and hearing his wails for help, and leaving him cold and “soaked in his day-old shikko [urine]” and crusted with his own vomit (191). In yet other examples suggesting her unreliability, Asako misremembers, often repeating the same stories to Sachi, forgetting details in her retellings – “leaving parts out again,” as Sachi accuses (165) – or confusedly moving between different memories of the past and her conversations in the present. Indeed, Asako gets her memories of the past so confused during an interview with the detective – remembering Sachi trying to track her friend, Tam, and an encounter she had with Yano – she cannot understand her thoughts nor orient herself in the present: “my head was a hive swarming with voices, none of them mine. Making no sense, no sense at all. Growing louder, above my own thoughts, which I could hardly sort out as mine” (225). By this point in the novel, we see Asako as far from orderly and in control of herself and her home, but alienated from her things and herself, and mad. Among the decaying things in her house is their collector herself. Indeed, during the interview with the detective, Asako looks down at herself and sees “the body of someone else. Someone sloppy, forgetful, unrecognizable. Perhaps a little crazy. Even criminal” (224).

The novel further implies that Asako’s past experiences of her and her family’s internment are the root causes of Asako’s objects appearing as perpetually falling apart and never clean enough, as well as her unhomely and alienated relationship to her home and her own body. The novel signals the internment and its significance for Asako in its very opening when she is dusting the window-ledge and spies Sachi running across the field. Sachi (like Asako later in the novel) is dishevelled and unkempt with dirt and crumbs on her chin, and appears to Asako as sweaty when, according to Asako, nihonjin or Japanese people “hardly perspire at all” (1). Sachi’s appearance reminds Asako “of a scraggly urchin we’d passed on the road leaving the internment camp after the war” who had lost eyes and was left behind (2-3). The analogy that Asako makes between Sachi and the child separated from its family and lost in the political shuffle suggests that, for Asako, the experiences she had during the internment remain close by and significant

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enough in her mind, to be recalled for this reference. The trauma of the internment (and particularly of being lost because of it – a fear Bin also experiences in Requiem) also remains close by for Asako insofar as Sachi herself is a child of that history, and, neglected by her parents, she spends time with Asako eliciting stories about the past.79 The objects, like the window-ledge and the other things around her home she dusts and cleans, as well as the people with whom Asako contends, perpetually echo the past for Asako, in a way similar to how objects for Mr. Tulliver in the Mill on the Floss or John in Woolf’s “Solid Objects” intimately relate to them, appearing as extensions of these characters in the world or as containing some inner kernel of who these characters are and their histories. However, for Asako, because of her history of internment and trauma, the everyday items in her home that intimately relate to who she is and contain her history, also conduct and constantly remind her on some level of her displacement, her loss, and her inadequacy as a racialized subject.80 Her objects thus appear tainted by memories and sentiments that make her feel not at home in the place where she dwells or in her own skin.

Additionally, she is reminded of her traumatic past through her objects insofar as Asako wears her mother’s old clothes, in order not to be wasteful, and adopts what would have been her mother’s habitual actions of using household things in caring for Stum and her ailing father. Because her mother was alive during the internment and even blames Asako for Eiji’s death during their internment (220), covering her body with her mother’s items and adopting her mother’s daily house-work comportments toward things in the home suggests the extent to which Asako is always dealing with her difficult history. Indeed, Asako even deals with the debris and decayed remains of the past through the act of dusting insofar as, like the dust in Obasan and in Schuppli’s World Trade Center project, dust is not just dust in The Electric Field, but represents lives lived

79 The young neighbour is the daughter of Japanese Canadian parents who were uprooted and exiled, and the novel depicts her as alienated from them and as not having a sense of belonging within that family history. Sachi recalls the internment for Asako when she asks for stories about the past, and complying with her request, Asako recalls her childhood with her brother, including episodes from their lives in internment, even mentioning Hastings Park when she’s not sure where to begin her story to Sachi (79). 80 Another comparison that might be useful here is with the jade peony-shaped token in Choy’s novel, The Jade Peony, which channels the family’s history and even seems to be alive with it. If one’s things channel their intimate selves and histories, then, for Asako, her objects also reveal and keep her connected to the internment.

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and characters for whom Asako is and feels somewhat responsible. Whereas, in Obasan, dust refers to bits of oneself and one’s life that may have deteriorated but remain in the corners of the house and on the furniture, in Sakamoto’s novel, dust is the dried blood – the “rust-coloured stain” – Asako and Sachi find in the dirt in Lover’s Lane after the murder and the investigation, through which Sachi drags her fingers, and that later comes back to haunt Asako as a smudge she imagines on a dog’s nose (162). Asako’s things, and items even as small as particles of dust, and her continued attempts at dusting and caring for the things in her house is a means of contending with her past, including her history of displacement, dispossession, and death. In dusting the ledges and cleaning the stains, Asako is also engaged in ridding her intimate spaces of the debris of history, but she is consistently and obsessively driven to do so because the dust does not go away; the dirt and taint have become integral to the object.

However, the item that has the strongest and most difficult connection to her experience of internment – the thing to which she is most obsessively and inappropriately attached – is Asako’s framed photograph of her dead brother, Eiji. Asako often turns to the object for comfort and even talks to it, imagining that through it her brother is still present and a comfort to her. After a disagreement, when Stum derisively asks if Asako talked to her pictures yet that day, Asako remarks that Stum’s comment “did not upset me so much. For they did answer me back sometimes, my pictures. In their way” (87). Granting the photograph the agency, power, and life to speak back to her, Asako appears profoundly oriented toward the past, finding solace in her imaginary discourse with her dead brother as represented by the picture rather than speaking with the living one who craves her attention and stories.81 Indeed, the object is so meaningful and alive for her and provides her with such comfort that she even sleeps holding it – holding “Eiji clutched to my breast, as always” (138) – and one morning wakes to find herself covered with broken bits of glass from having held it too tight.

81 The syntax of the sentence, “For they did answer me back sometimes, my pictures,” withholds the subject of the sentence, so that we do not realize until the end that the pronoun “they” refers to pictures, rather than people. By doing so, the structure of the sentence underscores how the pictures (things) are not inanimate but animate for Asako. Their thingness is added at the end and perhaps is something she tries to leave out altogether.

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The reason why Asako fixates so strongly on the picture is that it acquires the weight and power of exceptionally difficult and confused aspects from Asako’s past with her dead brother. Firstly, the fetishized object that (melancholically) keeps her brother alive in her imagination and maintains her close attachment to him, reminds Asako of the guilt she feels over her role in Eiji’s death. Although the novel ultimately reveals that Eiji’s death was caused by pneumonia that would have had more to do with the impoverished conditions of the camp rather than with Asako, she feels guilty about her part in Eiji’s death, for, she had orchestrated the event that probably led to his pneumonia by going into the river at night in order to get Eiji’s attention.82 However, the power of this object also derives from Asako’s confused and incestuous love for Eiji that, because of his early death, never is sorted out, rather becoming a point of particular fixation. For example, Asako remembers being held between Eiji’s legs and feeling “the small lumpy bundle inside his left leg, warming my thigh, pulsing through me with a tiny rhythm” (166).83 She also loved and admired her older brother. However, Asako is never able to manage and make sense of their childish feelings of intense attachment or of their relationship – sorting out appropriate and inappropriate love – or witness and get used to Eiji’s turn toward more appropriate love objects, like Sumi Yamashiro (a girl he meets in the camps), because of Eiji’s premature death. His death does not end Asako’s attachment so much as freeze it for Asako, and the material object representing her brother maintains and channels these feelings of confusion and frozen adoration.

82 As Asako describes: “I went out to the river, not knowing why then, as I knew now: it was so Eiji would come for me, for me and no one else. I was a child, wanting his attention when it was slipping away, grasping for it any way I could” (300). However, the point in the novel is that Asako is not guilty of her brother’s death. As Asako remembers Yano saying, if the Japanese Canadian community had not been interned, “‘Your brother would be alive today, Saito-san!’” (299-300). The real guilt lies with the government that interned children in a treacherous place – where the only venue for recreation and swimming was the powerful Fraser River – without adequate medical services or supplies nearby that may have helped Eiji’s survive pneumonia. Or, as Marlene Goldman states, “Asako's brother died of pneumonia triggered by the debilitating experience of internment in uninsulated shacks and crowded, unsanitary conditions” (370). 83 Asako remembers this moment while telling Sachi a story about accidently farting while trying to collect payments from newspaper subscribers with Eiji on his route. To Sachi, Asako describes herself as “‘disgusting’” and “‘bad’” for farting, and that emitting gas was reason enough to be left behind by her brother on the neighbour’s porch, though Sachi cannot believe that Eiji “‘left you for that?’” (166). Although Asako does not manage to see it this way, the narrative implies that the feelings of “disgust” are rather linked to the sexual feelings being played out.

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As the significance of Eiji’s photograph and Asako’s other household objects shows, the things in Asako’s house and world are tainted by and invested with unsettling meanings because of the way they are perceived through and represented for us through her traumatised perspective and point-of-view. These post-internment personal belongings exist, for Asako, as part of a complex network of overlapping and compounding experiences related to the internment. These include witnessing the lost urchin child and remembering her own fear at the time that she, too, would be lost; her brother’s death and her guilt over her role in it; losing her mother’s love; the shame of her inappropriate attachment to Eiji; the shame of being deemed an enemy alien who was outlawed to uninhabited parts of the country; and the lack of career options and poverty they endure (whereby Asako must wear her dead mother’s clothes).84 Asako’s complex network of compounding traumas is a lens through which everything in the novel appears tainted and perverted, and the objects in turn function as nodal points concentrating this disquiet.

3.3 Bin’s Collection of Smalls and the River of History

Having shown how both the remembered objects in Requiem and the more recently acquired objects in The Electrical Field indicate how devastating the internment was for the characters, even leaving them with a legacy of impoverishment and pain, there are a few other objects in the novels to consider that effectively point toward how the protagonists might overcome their traumatic pasts. For, not all the objects in these two novels are bad, and objects in the novels do not only represent the impoverishment of the characters or reveal the trauma of being displaced, of being forced to lose things, and of feeling shamefully and inappropriately guilty for what was not one’s fault. For example, other artefacts in Requiem suggest a very different, less haunted and maladjusted, relationship to the past than the impoverished and absent items of Bin’s internment experience or the dirty and deteriorating objects in The Electrical Field imply. Bin is himself a collector, and he gathers and assembles things that he calls “smalls,” which he

84 Asako remembers her neighbour Yano saying that if it had not been for the internment, “‘[He]’d be educated’” (299).

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keeps (perhaps with his own dust) along the windowsill of his studio. Bin describes his artefacts in the following: From Long River in Prince Edward Island, a sandstone quill holder . . . . A tiny glass whale with jagged flukes from the Saguenay. A palm-sized burl picked up on a trail near the Saco River in Maine. A delicate Bourgault carving of a man in a green toque, from the Saint-Jean-Port-Joli on the St. Lawrence. I had settled on a small rock behind the auberge in that place and was watching the tide push back the great river . . . . Here, too, is my tiny clay seaman, his left leg snapped below the knee. . . . Lena and Greg chose him in a pottery shop in Cornwall while I was sketching outcrops on the lower banks of the Helford Estuary. (21) Bin’s collected items are related to episodes and experiences in his life that took place long after his internment and during his life with Lena and Greg. And by looking at and contemplating them, even in passing as he packs for his road-trip, Bin can recall where each of the items came from and the circumstances of his obtaining these objects, for example, that he was so busy admiring a river that he forgot to meet Lena, or the five days he spent crossing the ocean by boat with Lena and Greg in order to sketch geological formations for work. These artefacts thus function to recall happier experiences in Bin’s life of his family with Lena and Greg being together and of loving each other. However, the objects he collects are also all broken. And, indeed, because of his predilection for collecting damaged items, Lena gives Bin the title of “protector of fractured and broken goods” (22), suggesting how Bin not only keeps these things, but also takes care of them and casting him as a kind of hero of the smaller, broken, and uncared for things. Similar to how Asako’s items suggest deeper, less apparent aspects of herself and her history, Bin’s collection of small, broken items reflects his experience of dispossession and displacement, and his subsequently deep appreciation for how there could always be “sudden losses” (Requiem 276) and of the fragility of things in one’s life. Rather than serving any useful purpose or being a good with an exchange or market value, these items connect him to the past – to the unique moments of the objects’ production, to the circumstances of them breaking, and to his life with them – and they

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bind him to a recognition of the fragility of things: that they can break or disappear. His gesture of keeping the broken items is, in this way, a small gesture or stance interceding against the loss of memory and the loss of the things that contain and hold memories for us. This gesture to hold and contain the fragility of the object is also an attempt to contain the fragility of life. For, through the objects, Bin also protects the memories of others and of their lives, even when he cannot resist death itself, whereby, when he thinks of his broken items, he also thinks of Lena, “when she herself was fractured and broken” (22). The analogy linking the collection of things with Lena also expresses the Bin’s desire to stay death and the forgetting that comes with it.

In Requiem, objects represent the fragility of things and of life, and by appreciating their delicate natures, objects, even as they represent loss, can teach us better modes of caring. Moreover, material items in the novel also appear to evoke modes of care and understanding that even lead to recovery insofar as they also relate to the larger motif of the river in the novel as a kind of movement or force of life towards death. Indeed, another aspect, besides being broken, that Bin’s small artefacts have in common is that they come from rivers. To briefly outline the significance of the river motif in the novel, on one hand, rivers represent Bin’s life, or as Lena describes the connection, Bin is “‘a man who is obsessed with rivers’” (224), and they are a source of power and inspiration for him in his life and his work (all the works he is painting for his upcoming solo exhibition are of rivers, 16). On the other hand, rivers represent not just Bin’s life and trauma but all life. Indeed, the most significant river, for Bin, is the Fraser River located below the camp where Bin and his family were interned, which is where Bin spends what he later realizes is his last day with his family before he goes to live with Okuma. However, besides being specifically associated with Bin’s life and trauma, the Fraser is also the place where the men fished for food, where families went for leisure outings, and where a small boy drowns (241). As Okuma describes the immense and inconsistent (arbitrary) power of the River, “‘Rivers sustain and nourish . . . but they can also take life away’” (241). Similarly, rivers represent both Bin’s story and all stories. Bin learns that he can paint his own story through studying a picture of a river in a children’s tale (Momotaro, the boy who floats down a river in a giant peach), and he

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draws his own story of the Fraser (197), later returning to the river theme as a means of keeping, repeating, and making sense of his life and painful experiences. However, even as a child, Bin realizes that such river stories are never about one character but are associated with many other stories and stories of others, such the old man and woman who adopt Momotaro (197), or how the names of rivers refer to stories and histories that are traced in the landscape and part of the river, even if it is not seen or remembered. As Bin responds to young Greg’s question about whether the river has voices, “‘I do hear the river . . . . I listen because it has a story to tell. Sometimes many stories’” (167).

Because rivers in the novel represent both Bin’s life and story and the lives and stories of all others, the effect of Bin’s collected artefacts coming from rivers suggests that things, in a way, are the material items that come from and intimately relate to the current of Bin’s life and that, at the same time, arise from and connect to the river as representing all life, all stories, and the larger force of history. In this way, things not only connect the characters to their pasts, but also connect all the characters to each other and to all of history, as Heidegger argues is the case for shoes (“The Thing”). Indeed, Bin is not the only collector in the novel whose items represent his deep connection to history, nor is he the only one with memories of looting. Their elderly neighbour, Miss Carrie, also keeps old and damaged objects from the past. Her house is a museum of artefacts from her parents: “an ancient jacket shortened in the left sleeve, . . . a muskrat stole with hard eyes and snout that had once belonged to Mommy” (55), and her father’s “humidor adorns the walnut buffet, cigars inside” (57). Because her lack of mobility means she cannot carry her items up and down the stairs, Miss Carrie often throws objects in what she calls the “hellhole, the floor space at the bottom of the curved staircase” in her house, where Lena often finds her surveying her “heap of goods” (55). No longer exchangeable goods in this accumulated pile, the objects rather engender a sense of Miss Carrie’s particular story, which includes being a child in England during WWI – when she witnessed rescuers, unable to save a baker killed by a bomb, rummaging for what could be salvaged (56-7) – and living through the jazz scene of the thirties. The items also evoke a sense of many other histories, such as those of her parents and the many different experiences of the people who experienced WWI, for

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example. Additionally, Lena herself has her own collection of historical things: “her smalls” are the rocks and fossils that she finds, often with Greg, that she washes and displays in her home office (62). According to Bin, for Lena, “physical landscape was one more dimension of history” (61), and these fossils connect her to a sense of time before human life.

By including all these versions of history and all the objects that come from different stories and moments of the past, the novel, with its river motif, reminds us of all the other stories and lives, including the losses, during WWI or WWII and even going back to prehistory, that are part of the current of a larger conception of history or of the movement of time. Against this backdrop or this conception of experience as a vast current of all lives moving toward death, Bin’s objects, which belong both to his life and to this larger historical movement, allow him to reflect on his experience as not just being about his own personal pain and losses. Because his objects connect to all histories, Bin’s experience becomes refracted, whereby his own personal stories appear as part of this larger force of history. In this way, the novel suggests that the trauma of the internment is not lost or forgotten, but is joined with, implied through, and preserved with other histories of war, looting, internment and dispossession, alienation, angry fathers, eruptions, fixations, and sedimentation. And recognizing that his personal experience of pain is part of a larger movement toward death might allow Bin to not be so stuck in and by his experiences, or to not “disappear into gloom” (124) and “shut down” (272) as he tends to do, drowning in a depression and anger that seems singularly his and inaccessible to any others.85

85 Besides allowing Bin to reflect on his experience, widening the perspective on the internment to include all histories of loss implies a double and contradictory result for thinking about the event. On one hand, the larger view might help imply the other factors and parties responsible for the unjust and traumatic event. If, as John Donne says, “no man is an island,” but we always exist in relationship to and are responsible for each other, Requiem’s river of history could gesture us to remember the politicians, government officials, government policies, and racism that were culpable in displacing and dispossessing people of Japanese ancestry in Canada. However, arguably, the novel does not specifically indicate these political antecedents, thus it does not really do this. Indeed, the problem with figuring the internment as one of many experiences of loss in the immense movement of history is that doing so also threatens to assimilate the event with all the others, whereby its specificity and import cannot appear from out of the mire.

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3.4 Beautiful Things

I began this chapter by showing that the objects in both Requiem and The Electrical Field reveal how painful and damaging the experience of the internment was for the characters. However, tracing the significance of the broken things in Bin’s collection, as I did in the previous section, shows us how objects can also help the characters, at least in Requiem, see outside of their otherwise overwhelming experiences. In this way, Bin’s fractured goods, like Brown’s and Heidegger’s broken things, point him outside of his experience and toward other possibilities, namely toward overcoming and reconciling with his past. In this section, I will explore how we might read Bin’s life as also incorporating the possibility of Bin coming to terms with his past, as well as explore whether some similar potential of coming to terms with her past happens for Asako in The Electrical Field.

Because Bin is able to recognize a larger view of history including the experiences of others, in part through his relationship to the damaged artefacts he collects, by the end of Requiem, Bin is able to understand his experience of internment and of his being given away by his parents in a different way. He recognizes the love and desperation his parents felt at not being able to provide him and his artistic talent with the resources and support they needed, which was itself an effect of the family’s internment and dispossession: of destroying their community that included artists like a piano player and Japanese doll collectors and any means they might have had to send him to art school. Bin also recognizes how important it was for him to have the love, support, and influence he gained through his second father, Okuma (289-91, 309), and that, in a way, he was lucky to have the choice of two different father figures and role models: “‘One who seethed with anger’” and one who created “‘peace around himself and everyone else’” (276). Additionally, he finally views the historical documents in the manila envelope that Lena left for him – his package from the past including the tally of how little remained – and lets the folder and papers scatter into the Fraser River, after he returns to the camp at the end of his road-trip (313).86 Such letting go of the documents

86 The files are an inventory of the material losses of Bin’s family – “that no crosscut saw was inventoried,” “no sewing machine was located,” and “no property could be identified at the location described” among other lost things (312, italics in the original). This inventory of losses suggests that one of the only ways of registering the effects of the internment on the population was through documents

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related to his painful past implies he is overcoming it, just as he overcomes his creative block and begins drawing again there on the shore of the Fraser. Bin even reunites with his first father at the end of the novel, who having given Bin away now comes back to the same spot to find him (313). In the final scene of the novel, the two men hug and Bin’s final words are “A son, after all. Again. A father, a son” (314).

The resolution appears complex and appropriate insofar as it is not a reconciliation based on similarity or equivalence so much as on an acceptance of the differences of character and experience between them, as signalled in the pairing of the words, “A father, a son.” The final father-son statement echoes the call and response of Beethoven’s phrase “Muss es sein? . . . Es muss sein,” that Bin refers to a bit earlier in the book as he contemplates his life (306). In both cases, the responses – “a son” and “Es muss sein” – are versions of and different from the calls: the son is like the father, but different, and Es muss sein restates the question as an answer. The existential question for Bin is ‘Must it be this life with this trauma of separation and identity?’ And the answer is one of resignation and even acceptance, ‘It must be,’ at the same time that the reconfigured words in the response signal the difference (the silent différance): the unspeakable damage done to the father-son (and mother-son) relationship and the immense pain of the internment experience that is part of his life.87 Or, as Lena expresses the acceptance with a difference (justified anger), “‘You have a right to be angry. The anger is part of your story . . . . All of those things that happened, they’ve also made you different from everyone else’” (275). In the end, the accretion of experiences makes his story what it is and makes him who he is: a “fine artist.”

Unlike the objects Bin collects in Requiem, no such objects that point to an outside and other possibilities exist for Asako in The Electrical Field. Because the narrative is recounted from her deeply damaged perspective, nothing seems to escape appearing tainted by her difficult past. However, Asako still manages to get by, and the outlining the material items that could not be found or claimed, whereas the other wrongs committed against Japanese Canadians (like not actually being interned but detained and, without being changed, not even having the right to habeas corpus) were not and could not be officially recorded and therefore did not “appear” at all. 87 Bin describes missing his mother and never really saying goodbye to her as the hardest loss that resulted from his internment (278).

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novel even suggests she begins to come to terms with her past by its close. Although The Electrical Field portrays a darker and more unsettled version of the internment and its history – “a community that has imploded,” as Goldman describes (373) – comparing the resolution of the family drama in Requiem with what happens in Sakamoto’s novel highlights the ways in which Asako’s story can be read as beginning to resolve. Indeed, Asako does appear to enter into new relationships (building community) at the end of the novel, and perhaps understands her relationship to the internment differently.88 At the end of the novel, Asako revisits and repeats the experience of her brother’s near drowning in the river after Sachi accuses her of lying about what happened to Eiji and jumps in the creek herself – “‘I would never lie about Tam. . . . I didn’t save Tam and you didn’t save your brother’” (278). However, in this repetition of the near drowning (a repetition with a difference), Asako does not feel herself responsible and guilty for Sachi jumping into the moving water in the same way she does for Eiji, and she appears to save Sachi.

Also, Asako finally admits, at least to herself, what she had withheld and secreted in her other stories about swimming with Eiji: that she did not save him – “I know what I did and I will say it. For you I will. Sachi. I didn’t save him” (279). Instead of being an admission of her guilt, however, revisiting and restating the past event in these terms means Asako is able to acknowledge the experience of Eiji’s near drowning more in line with what actually happened. That is, Asako did not save Eiji because he never drowned – once she held onto his neck too tight and in the fatal instance he died of pneumonia. Instead of continuing to condemn herself as an effect of her feeling culpable for Eiji’s death, which, following Freud’s conception of melancholia, suggests a melancholic attachment to her dead brother (assuming the loss into herself), she begins to articulate

88 I am reading against the grain, here. For, critics often consider that The Electrical Field (set in 1975), especially in comparison with Obasan (set in 1972), depicts the ongoing and unresolved effects of racism on the community by stressing the lack of closure and resolution in Sakamoto’s novel. Recalling the chicken imagery in both novels, Goldman writes of the final scene that, “the present in which [the characters] are enmeshed is still governed by racist and sexist principles” (384). Similarly, Visvis reads Asako as “maintaining a silence that suggests continued fragmentation” (301). I very much agree with these readings; however, there is something about the ways in which the novel hints at and almost gestures to Asako gaining a new relationship with her traumatic past by the novel’s end and the way she is not broken but carries on, that seems to me to lead to a more complicated understanding of her and her predicament.

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how she is not responsible for his death (separating the loss from herself). And acknowledging that she is implicated only insofar as she went to the river at night in order that he would go after her (300), perhaps marks the beginning of a kind of transformation and recovery for Asako, which includes the commencement of a new community. For, besides beginning to reflect on her internment experience and Eiji’s death after Sachi is saved from the river, Asako also feels she might now be friends with Keiko, Sachi’s mother (289). She is grateful for and accepts Angel’s food and help (290). She feels things have changed between her and Stum as he longer appears as the kid brother but as someone who helps and cares for Asako (292). And, going with Stum and Angel, Asako leaves her house and immediate neighbourhood of the electrical fields for an outing, meeting an old acquaintance she had not seen for years.

These changes are not quite perfect and thus do not confirm a satisfactory and complete resolution: Asako and Keiko hug awkwardly and Keiko leaves before Asako can return her gift; Stum only takes Asako as far as the chicken farm, never exiting symbols of the racism and impoverishment to which they had been subjected; and Sachi never appears in the novel again after her near drowning, so readers never see her restored. However, we might imagine that Asako is able to reflect on her past in new and better ways, and refract it against an appreciation of the fragility of life (as Bin does so with his painful past) insofar as she refers to things as being beautiful at the end of the novel, using the word utsukushii (beautiful). According to Asako, utsukushii, denotes “A pretty that can’t last; a pretty that can even turn ugly” (218) or “The prettiness of a thing that will soon die” (289). And at the end of the novel, Asako admires her roses as utsukushii (289) and recalls the notion again when appreciating Kaz Fujioka’s sakura trees behind the barn where Stum works. And she remembers Tam and Sachi’s relationship as utsukushii (292). Using the word so often at the end of the novel suggests she has gained an appreciation of beautiful things, and an appreciation of how such beauty also is as such because it contains its opposite (ugliness) and its end (death). Recognizing and accepting that beauty and life also include death and ugliness implies that Asako grasps a larger notion of life as fleeting and the inevitability of death, which seems to help her reflect on and contain her own traumatic experience, as the ugly,

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deathly part of a life, rather than being overwhelmed by it. If beauty is such because it also comprises what makes it ugly and its own fragility, the notion is not only appropriate for Tam and Sachi’s love or for Chisako’s or Eiji’s lives, but for Asako herself: her life, like the idea of beauty in the novel, encompasses what is inappropriate and death.

Thus, in both novels, we find that trauma is part of the characters’ lives, making them the complex figures they are. These subjects (like Miss Carrie lugging her belongings to the banister) carry their histories and they carry on as they are borne forward by time and history. And, indeed, the incorporation of such difficult and traumatic experiences into the individual is, perhaps, the only response. Recall Roy Miki describing how, in his life, he assumed a mythos based on loss, not on the presence of relationships, of extended family members or of personal histories represented in photographs. For, there were no photographs to help remind him of his relatives and personal history. As Mari Ruti describes the non-destructive aspects of trauma, “there is also a ‘functional’ side” to consistently returning to and repeating traumatic losses, “for it is precisely this compulsion that introduces a modicum of consistency to our lives – that, over time, allows us to attain a sense of continuity” (The Singularity of Being 15). Though traumatic losses may haunt us and cause us to repeat an experience, such regular returns to the same waylay stations are also what structure us and our lives, establishing our path via the route that it takes and subsequently making us the people we are.

In a slightly different articulation, Catherine Malabou describes one’s subjectivity as a course or movement during which an accumulation of experiences, reactions, and changes make and reinforce the subject as the individual she is: In the usual order of things, lives run their course like rivers. The changes and metamorphoses of a life due to vagaries and difficulties, or simply the natural unfolding of circumstances, appear as the marks and wrinkles of a continuous, almost logical, process of fulfillment that leads ultimately to death. In time, one eventually becomes who one is; one becomes only who one is. (Ontology of the Accident 1)

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In this image, one’s life is like a river and all the obstacles, rocks, narrow or steep passages are what shape the subject – the flowing water – as she is. If we recall the river image in Itani’s novel that evokes all histories – through which Bin can recognize his experience as connected to others’ and gain perspective (other perspectives of what happened during the war) but in which his personal story threatens to be lost – Malabou’s river image reminds us of the individual’s life. And, whether we imagine the subject as formed by repeating losses or by flowing into and against obstacles, trauma appears as integral to the individual and benefits her insofar as it shapes her in unique, if painful, ways. Bin bumps and flows along, repeating his story of lost belongings as he adds to his collection of broken smalls; and, he dwells on his internment and the loss of his mother in a way that makes him the painter he is. Similarly, Asako repeats her routine of tending to her things in her house, taking on her mother’s role, and returning to her pictures and her stories of the past becoming the carer she is. By depicting these characters, the novels neither deny the wrongfulness of the internment (these lives and the circumstances of these lives are not fair), nor suggest a simple overcoming of the traumatic events (there can be no adequate redress), but they do show how these losses make a life: how these particular currents of rivers, or rivers in a larger landscape, flow in their unique and uniquely pained ways.

Yet, if this incorporation of unsettling events is inevitable, how do we, as those viewing the experiences of these characters – who “witness” and maybe even teach others about these events – read and remember the internment? As Samantha Bee’s passionate defense of Cockroach during the 2014 Canada Reads competition reminds us, the ugly and unresolved version of the story and all the complexity of the encounters are important because they challenge our assumptions that displaced and dispossessed people always have acceptable endings. And, if by recognizing our assumptions and how wrong we might be, we might begin to better understand, make space for, and host new entrants, how, then, do we make sense of these experiences and traumas of displacement that seem to come out all right? How do we reconsider that people carry on and appear to have resolved their experiences or to be untroubled by their displacement in a way that helps us sense and give value to the contours of the experience that is like Blanchot’s

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disaster: one that “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact” (Blanchot 1)? Whereas Bin and Asako carry on with their lives, the question of the disaster turns rather into the issue of understanding how to appreciate the wrong that not only escapes our perception, but leaves no trace.

3.5 “New Wounded” Subjects

In order to try to answer the question of how to sense a wound that leaves no evidence of itself, I now turn to consider Malabou’s notion of the “new wounded.” Although Malabou opens her book, Ontology of the Accident, with the river image of how subjects come into their particular being and are uniquely structured through their movements within and against the world, her focus is on exceptional experiences and trauma: experiences through which she finds that subjects are utterly transformed, though they appear to be continuing on their course. In her ideas of the “new wounded” and discussions of other forms of post-traumatic subjectivity, traumatic transformation is not physically obvious, though it has a physical component. Indeed, the transformation of the wounded subject is not like Kafka’s Gregor or Hage’s protagonist who turn into bugs, because, in Malabou’s conception, the wounded subject transforms in a way that cannot be seen, at least not on the outside. Additionally, Malabou’s subject is not like Gregor or Hage’s protagonist because their subjective selves remain intact pursuing a continuous “his inner monologue” (18). In Malabou’s conception of the traumatized subject, one’s identity is replaced by another, new identity, fundamentally altering the subject.

Reconceiving of trauma as Freud proposed it in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” as rupturing the subject’s regular process of binding the stimuli entering her consciousness, 89 Malabou argues that the experience of trauma is rather an effraction or “a shock that forces open or pierces a protective barrier” (The New Wounded 6). Instead

89 According to Freud, when an event provokes: a disturbance on a large scale in the functioning of the organism’s energy . . . . the pleasure- principle is for the moment put out of action. There is no longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another problem arises instead – the problem of mastering the amounts of stimulus which have broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that they can then be disposed of. (“Beyond the Pleasure Principle” 301)

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of repeating, binding, and working through traumatic experience, for Malabou the subject is overwhelmed by her experience to such an extent, because of how powerful the experience was for the subject, that the affective brain is pierced in ways that cannot be repaired or overcome. In this way, the traumatized subject suffers a kind of material brain damage, insofar as “the cerebral sites that conduct emotion” and the “neuronal connections” (New Wounded xviii) are ruined. One way to think about this damage is to imagine “the brain as an electrical system” (New Wounded 32), whereby trauma short- circuits its nodal connections and the brain must make wholly new ones, disconnecting former nodes, and, in the process, shattering what identity previously existed.90 Or, in terms of Malabou’s idea of plasticity, whereas the brain normally has the capacity to be malleable and adapt itself to change, in traumatic experiences, its capacity to be plastic becomes destructive and the affective brain becomes destroyed through which a new one is configured in its place.91

For Malabou, as emotionally and materially destructive as trauma can be – whereby an emotional experience can end up causing material damage to the brain – it also never appears because the subject, at least from the outside, always looks the same, such as the case of Malabou’s grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and became a completely different person, but was not diminished or made frail by the change (“a stranger,” The New Wounded xi). In this way, Malabou’s conception of the new wounded subject echoes Blanchot’s notion of the disaster, only rather than focusing on larger, political events and the question of how we might deal with them on a more social, communal level (as Blanchot implies), Malabou turns to consider how the disaster appears (or fails to appear) and its effects in the individual’s personal experience. Because signs of trauma do not appear in the person, Malabou’s idea of the new

90 According to Malabou, “The pathological modification of cerebral connections does bring about changes of form but these changes utterly efface the previous form. Therefore, the paradigm of transformation of a form that remains the same must be displaced by that of transformation that creates a new form as it sweeps away the original” (New Wounded 63). 91 As Malabou explains of the notion she applies to the brain, plasticity must “be understood as a form’s ability to be deformed without dissolving and thereby to persist throughout its various mutations, to resist modification, and to be always liable to emerge anew in its initial state” (New Wounded 58). Also, the notion of plastic, for Malabou, includes the meaning of plastic as explosive: “the deflagration or explosion of every form – as when one speaks of ‘plastique,’ ‘plastic explosive’” (New Wounded 17). Destructive plasticity, for Malabou, not only connotes ruination but also implies the capacity to create new connections and a new identity from and through the destruction of the old.

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wounded subject reformulates the question of how to attend to trauma when, for example, the wound does not speak.92 How do we understand trauma when there are no immediate signs of it, or when, for example, Bin or Asako appear the same from one day to the next during and after their experiences of forced displacement and dispossession?

And, whereas trauma for Malabou does not appear, the only symptoms we can grasp at, according to Malabou, are observing changes in character accompanied by “disaffection or coolness [and] A bottomless absence” (The New Wounded 49) that results from “posttraumatic changes of personality” (49). However, both changes in character and indifference related to trauma are hard to perceive, or at least to distinguish from changes and disaffection that might occur but not in relation to trauma. The traumatized subject is fundamentally detached and estranged from the world and from the people and things in it, or as Slavoj Žižek describes Malabou’s wounded subject, she “is no longer ‘in-the-world’ in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence” (12). Instead of engaging with things in the world and being aware, to some degree, of the world and one’s place in it through that interaction, the wounded subject suffers from agnosia, “the incapacity to remember the identity of a perceived object,” whereby the subject “cannot recall the name or the identity of a familiar thing” (The New Wounded 52). Moreover, the subject is afflicted with anosognosia or the inability to perceive her own illness, whereby the subject cannot recognize herself or changes in her condition (52). Additionally, unable to interact with things in the world or to understand herself

92 I am thinking of Caruth’s discussion of attending to the way wounds cry out in the “Introduction” to Unclaimed Experience, when she recalls Freud’s account of Tasso’s story of Tancred and Clorinda in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” Whereas Caruth argues that “Tasso’s story dramatizes . . . the repetition at the heart of catastrophe,” and that we need to try to attend to the “moving and sorrowful voice that cries out . . . through the wound” (2, italics are in the original), the question according to Malabou would be what to do about understanding trauma and catastrophe when there is no voice and no apparent wound. Indeed, if, as Caruth suggests, “the infliction of the injury and its inadvertent and unwished-for repetition” is what allows the voice to be released (2, perhaps even giving unique shape and form to the individual’s being), what happens when we cannot hear a cry or recognize the other? Because trauma does not always appear as such, how do we know that our actions are causing harm or would we go on slashing at what appear as trees, as Tancred did? On the other hand, what makes me hesitate with Malabou’s conception of trauma is that it allows almost no access to the wound, which could lead to the conclusion that the analyst- citizen-knight in the role of Tancred should either not touch any trees or lovers because he might be re- inflicting wounds on them, or he can slash at all of them because it does not matter when one can never tell anyway, and, if you keep trying, perhaps at one point you will hear something after all. Indeed, this is Žižek’s critique of Malabou’s ideas, in “Descartes and the Post-Traumatic Subject,” when he asks, “What if les nouveaux blessés are literally the new blessed ones?” (16) because their transformation means they no longer suffer and we no longer sense their trauma.

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through a relationship to things, the subject suffers from an “extremely impoverished” emotional life and an “unfeeling manner of reasoning” that impacts her ability to evaluate options and make decisions (50). In this conception, trauma fundamentally changes the subject and utterly disconnects her from the world and its objects – from others and from herself – whereby she cannot make decisions, because she cannot relate to the things that maintain a connection to the past or that gesture toward the possibility of the future in order to appreciate the implications and meaning involved in a decision. Nor, can she make any narrative or sense out of her own trauma, for, such psychic wounds, according to Malabou, can never have meaning ascribed to them (53).93

3.6 Bin and Asako as New Wounded

Having outlined Malabou’s idea of trauma for the “new wounded” subject, I want to apply this idea to Bin and Asako to examine how we might fathom that they suffer and further understand the nature of suffering caused by the internment that their experiences might suggest. I am not implying that every Japanese Canadian who experienced the internment is traumatized in these unseen ways. Rather, taking these fictional characters as subjects deliberately depicted by the authors for us to learn about, think about, and explore, I aim to consider what further light the imagined lives of the figures shine on how to understand the possible effects and legacy of the internment.

Whereas Bin and Asako can be read as overcoming their experiences of the internment – which makes it easier to conceive of the internment as having been “not so bad” or as just a matter of property and things rather than of peoples’ lives – turning to Malabou’s argument helps to indicate the trauma and suffering when it otherwise cannot appear. Reading Bin and Asako as new wounded subjects shows us how these characters have not effectively overcome their experiences, even in the moments when they seem well-adjusted or feel they have dealt with their pasts, but rather remain somewhat damaged; and, what appears as them successfully dealing with the trauma of the past can actually appear conditioned on an immense loss of self. Indeed, according to the

93 Because the experience for the new wounded is so traumatic that meaning cannot be ascribed to it, it also echo’s Agamben’s “bare life,” in which a subject can be punished or wound without recourse or meaning because he neither appears within the law or as a sacrifice.

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symptoms (or lack of symptoms) outlined by Malabou, both characters exhibit depressive numbness and they undergo fundamental changes in their identities. Bin’s means of coping with his past is often to resort to numbness and to sink into his silent depression rather than to get angry or to speak about his experience and feelings to his wife and son. On his drive across the country, he looks forward to reaching the prairies in order to feel “numbed by the early flatness” of the landscape, and he remembers not participating in the story games that Lena and Greg played on their road trips together (124). Bin figured he did not need to play at guessing what might be in that dark space inside the “dark dark house” inside the “dark dark wood” because, as he describes, “I had enough dark spaces of my own to fill” (124). For, (as previously mentioned) Bin is always tipping “into darkness” and shutting down (272), or as Bin recalls Lena describing of him, “there are times when your dark side hangs over you like a mantle” (275). Sinking into darkness and depression, Bin is often described as numb and without emotion, which begins in the novel and in Bin’s life with events surrounding the internment. Just before being forced from their homes on the coast, his family members and community build a bonfire of dolls, burning the objects they could not take with them in order to keep them from being looted or lost (like Keiichi’s daughter, in Strength for the Bridge, who destroyed their garden as part of her “scorched earth policy”). As their Japanese dolls burn, “The children are ordered not to cry, one more emotion that must be buried, to simmer endlessly under the skin” (51). The children are taught to resign themselves to the loss of objects and their emotional connotation. Subsequently, the loss of objects leads to a numbing of affect and the inability to bind to things, recalling Naomi’s difficulty with relationships that results from losing her transitional objects. Similarly, we see the evacuation of affect in Bin and his family members losing their capacity for anger: “Where did the anger go? Did it find its own swallowed place to reside and brood within us, along with the shock and helplessness we felt at the time?” (57). And as Bin recalls Lena commenting on his lack of emotion: “Every emotion you have ever learned . . . has been turned inside. Locked in” (275).94

94 One rather common idea about the internment is that Japanese Canadians did not get angry enough about their treatment at the time. However, as this discussion of Bin’s things suggests, anger may have been a casualty of dispossession insofar as objects appear as necessary to having and registering emotion. Indeed, the “bare life” circumstances to which Japanese Canadians were subjected implies that there could be no

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As part of his emotional numbness and depressive tendency, Bin also experiences life as though he is living is suspension, whereby he cannot engage with things or others nor make meaningful decisions. Implying his existential malaise, at the beginning of the novel and his trip, Bin describes having “the distinct sensation that despite the wheels of the car rotating as they should, I’m suspended in a kind of punishing no man’s land” (28). Bin’s suspension is not an experience of interruption or postponement that might lead to a new and positive sense or encounter, as, for example, Berlant analyses in her reading of an untitled poem by John Ashbery: the “‘bee’s hymn’” (Cruel Optimism 29) reminding her of a hum, “which might be heaven or bees or labor or desire or electric wires, but whatever it is it involves getting lost in proximity to someone and in becoming lost there, in a lovely way” (Cruel Optimism 33). On the other hand, Bin’s experience of suspension is a punishment that is non-productive, does not engage with others in the world, and is evacuated of meaning: he cannot feel or understand where he is or that he is moving, and without connection to the things around him, there is no significance and he cannot act or have agency. As Bin explains, “I had doubts. There were always doubts” (273) and he has trouble deciding what his next moves will be, resolving on the road trip at the last minute and taking the length of time of the action in the novel to chose a title for his show.

Similarly, Bin remains disconnected from others throughout the novel, as is the case when he refrains from participating in conversation and stories with Lena and Greg. Even with his wife, with whom, according to Lena, he only held hands in public once, Bin describes, “I was always uneasy when any sort of effort to probe moved in close” (78), and he does not share with her the story about his father telling him his fate (the story that opens the novel) until years after Lena and Bin are married and shortly before her death. Not only does he feel, at times, uncomfortable and disengaged from Lena, but also he has difficulty with basic social interaction and understanding the social cues of others. When a woman stops to talk to Bin’s dog, Basil, in the parking lot, Bin cannot tell if she disapproved of Bin or whether she was making a pass at him: “The encounter

emotion. As exceptions, the people could not appear either before the law (they had no right to habeas corpus, Miki 71), or as emotional subjects. And, so impoverished and subjected to chaotic circumstances, in which surviving intact (as families) was most important, there was no time and place for emotion.

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made me wonder if I’ve become invisible or if I’ve created my own impenetrable wall. Or was it an invitation and I missed the cues entirely?” (119). However, besides not being able to read and relate well with others, Bin also suffers from agnosia, the inability to identify and remember things, and he does not relate well to things from his past. Though he keeps his smalls and remembers the rice pot, Bin does not want to know what documents and discoveries Lena unearths while researching his family history and the internment in the National Archives, and he cannot make himself open the manila folder containing the documents she finds (39). And Bin’s lack of feeling and engagement with things in the world contrasts with his dog’s very bodily and material reaction to loss, dragging his mattress around the house when Lena is in the hospital and then ripping it to shreds and scattering it all over the house when she dies (303-4), or with Miss Carrie, as she holds and lugs weighted objects about with her and digs them out of the hellhole.

Similarly, whereas Malabou’s symptoms for the post-traumatic subject include a change in personality, Bin’s experience of the internment occasions a significant change in his identity insofar as his parents give him to another man, a widower named Okuma, to raise as a son. Losing his close connection and daily interaction with his mother, father, brother, and sister, because his parents feel that with little to offer him he is better off living with someone who might be able to provide him with the means to further his art and talent, Binosuke Oda becomes Binosuke Okuma: a new and different boy with a new and different life, in which Okuma gives Bin books and art materials, teaches him about classical music, takes him east, and encourages him to continue his studies in Europe. Following Malabou’s idea that material connections in the affective brain change with trauma, we might even suggest that Bin’s transformation of identity is precipitated by a kind of damage to the head insofar as Bin’s first father hits him in the forehead with a chunk of wood, knocking the boy momentarily unconscious (135) and leaving a permanent scar, which Lena, years later, calls “‘a genetic marking’” (148). The mark is the result of first father losing his temper over a misunderstanding, and was perhaps the event that compelled his parents to consider that Bin would be better off living with someone else. However, although Bin adjusts to this new life and new self, the change remains painful and traumatic. Unlike the description of life as a river flowing along and

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being shaped and moved by experience, with which Malabou opens Ontology of the Accident, Bin describes his sense of himself and his life after being given away as being “stranded like an island in the midst of cross-currents that overlapped in the same stream” (219). Isolated and disconnected in the middle of a waterway, the demands and pull of the currents are chaotic and contradictory, whereby Bin finds it difficult to get his bearings or stay afloat.

Although Bin may feel he has dealt with his anger over his internment as a child, and though by the end of the novel he is able to reflect on his traumatic experience as part of a larger history that includes both life and death, suffering and hope, thinking of him as a new wounded subject shows his numbness to be an effect of dissociating from the world and becoming a new person painfully detached from his former life because of the trauma of his internment. These profound and distressing results in his life testify to how terrible being displaced and dispossessed was for him; however, the ways in which his experiences do not fit with Malabou’s ideas further indicate the violences and painful injustices involved in his experience of internment. For example, Bin does not at first become emotionless as a consequence of some unwitting experience, but because he and his friends are told to and have to work at not showing emotion at the burning of the dolls, in order to not make the scene harder than it is and possibly in order to give any white onlookers the advantage of seeing how pained they are. And, if he does not engage with things and is, recalling Wayson Choy, sociopathic as a result, part of the reason why this is the case is that he was forced to give up most of his objects or they were taken from him and his family.95

Similarly, because of racism and the harsh, impoverished circumstances brought on by their internment, Bin has no choice and his parents feel they have no choice but for

95 As I previously mentioned in the “Introduction,” in an interview about his novel The Jade Peony, Choy suggests that people become sociopathic when they lack an appreciation of the meaning of things. Echoing Choy’s comments, political theorist, Jane Bennett, more recently argues that objects have a power or vibrancy of their own that is important for us to acknowledge. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett evokes Marx’s critique of fetishizing commodities, but rather argues that we should not try to “prevent their fetishization” (xiv). Like Choy, who sees that healthy social relations result from the ability to sympathetically project into things, for Bennett, highlighting the “positive, productive power” things have in public life (Vibrant Matter 1) helps us cultivate a more open sensibility through which the meaning and production of things matter to us and their social, political, and ecological implications in the world come into view.

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him to assume another identity and name regardless of the one, Bin Oda, that was there before. Racism is also the root of his identity change insofar as the white schoolteacher in the camp, Mr. Blackwell, changes the children’s names so that Binosuke becomes Benjamin and his brother and sister become Henry and Kay (209). And, when Bin begins school in southern British Columbia after the war, the teacher, Miss Paxton, makes fun of his name and the confusion of Bin having two names, declaring, “‘We say bin for dustbin or garbage bin, but it is not a name we give a child,’” giving him Ben instead (260). The cruel irony for Bin is that later in life he and his siblings have trouble applying for passports because of all the name changes they were forced to undergo: “The same agencies that had taken their names away now demanded that the originals be pulled out of storage” (37). As much as we know that Bin “reclaimed [his] real name for the final time” after moving east (37), at the end of the novel, we cannot be sure what First Father says when Bin tells us that he “speaks my name” when they meet for the first time in over fifty years, suggesting that rather than changing identities, Bin continues to be denied one, even as he recognizes himself as his second identity.96 Thus, as much as Bin seems to recover from his past and to reconcile with his First Father, not only undergoing a transformation of identity, as Malabou suggests, but moreover being denied his identity, effectively attests to the intensity of suffering due to racism that was part of the internment for this character and his family.97 Considering the significance of the title of

96 Remembering how he gave a painting he had made to the art teacher and war veteran who had encouraged his ability at school in southern British Columbia, Bin says, “I signed the painting Bin Okuma, using my real name. It was the first time I had ever signed anything I had drawn or painted. Never again did I use any other name except my own, after that day” (270). 97 Supplementing Malabou’s re-conception of trauma as a break so powerful it fundamentally undoes and changes a person, in showing how Bin is forced to take on another identity and how he is denied his identity as Bin Oda, I am indicating an additional dimension of racism to the traumatic violence: a dimension that Malabou does not address. In some ways, my thinking recalls Kelly Oliver’s discussion of Frantz Fanon’s ideas in The Colonization of Psychic Space, when she suggests, following Fanon, that whereas alienation often appears as necessary for the formation of identity, for racialized subjects who experience “alienation of oppression,” such alienation “does not constitute . . . subjectivity but undermines it” (3). Imagining how this difference translates into ideas about trauma and the new wounded, whereas numbness and a changed identity signify trauma for Malabou, Bin’s trauma is even harder to mark and identify because his numbness is also an effect of the racism that exists long before and after his internment and because he continues to be denied his identity or to suffer from its confusion. Interestingly, Fanon, like Malabou, was interested in the somatic or bodily and material changes that might happen because of affective experiences. As Oliver quotes, just as biochemical alterations take place in intimate partners, Fanon proposes investigating “‘the modifications of body fluids that occur in Negroes when they arrive in France. Or simply to study through tests the psychic changes both before they leave home and after they have spent a month in France’” (51).

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the novel, requiem might be the song to remember and give rest to the dead, or it might be the song for the living as the inevitably flow on their way to death. However, with the newly wounded racialized subject in mind, perhaps requiem is also a song for the living- dead: for those who were numbed by and nearly drowned in their histories and who might still feel denied an identity.

Like Bin, Sakamoto’s Asako also suffers from depression and numbness, and undergoes a significant change in her identity, which suggests that even when she appears well or recovering, such as at the beginning and end of the novel, even these moments point to exceptional events that still plague Asako and require attention (even new forms of attention, according to Malabou’s project). Moreover, like Bin, her particular experience of detachment and character transformation additionally reflects the racism she endured. Other characters often describe Asako as cold and compassionless, suggesting how detached and unfeeling she can be towards others. Asako remembers Chisako calling her “‘cold,’” and saying, “‘I would never want to be so cold’” (208) when Asako responds callously to Chisako’s confession of her love for Spears. And when Chisako embarrasses Asako in asking her if she had ever been with a man, Asako recalls that, in the moment, “my cheeks burned, but my body was cold as if without clothes” (215); even though she was embarrassed, she mostly remained unresponsive, unaffected, and dispirited. Even with those closest to her, like her brother, she remains frigid and inhospitable and feels threatened in return. Stum describes his sister as formidable because of how cold and hard she can be (210), and when she feels herself drowning with the realization that she is responsible for Yano finding out about Chisako’s affair (which may or may not be the case), she refuses to reach out for help, though Stum attempts to be there for her and even to take the blame himself (240).

Nor can Asako extend herself to help others, such as when Sachi is most vulnerable; when Sachi learns that Tam is dead, Asako mechanically recites the lines that should offer comfort – “‘You have your memories,’ I whispered in her ear. ‘Hold on tight to them, and Tam will be with you always’” – but that fail to do so because, by Asako’s own admission, her “words sounded hollow and false” (270). Indeed, she cannot receive or give help because, so void of feeling and identity, she experiences herself as

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an empty vessel without agency that relates with others because they fill her up with their own needs, describing herself at the beginning of the novel as “a finely tuned receptacle for others’ impulses and confidences” (4). Whereas Naomi, in Obasan, is sceptical of and resists people, like the father she dates, who tries to project onto her, Asako has become adapted to others’ purposes. Moreover, such numbness and indifference not only affects her sense of self, but also results in her disengaging from time, life, and her body. Washing rice one evening, Asako watches her hand disappear and reappear in the milky rice water and remarks, “This moment, then the next, each one bloodless. There was no death, no Chisako, no Yano, no Tam or Kimi to worry over” (85). For Asako, all moments are the same, suggesting how she feels herself separated from time, and there is no life in them, nor death, meaning, or any meaningful connection that would give way to an appreciation of her own or others’ situations and loss. Like some suffering from agnosia unable to recognize objects or sensory stimuli, even her hand appears disassociated from her and as someone else’s disappearing in the water. Unable to feel herself located in time or in relation to the world and others, being dislocated, numb, and emotionally exhausted, Asako feels “Only this persistent fatigue that was, it occurred to me, like jetlag, though I’d never travelled far enough, never flown in a jet to know. Still I was sure it would feel like this: part of me here; part of me there, never catching up” (292).98

The very notion of the electrical field, which exists just beyond her house and after which the novel is titled, echoes Asako’s intense and thorough dissociation. The wires carry a current of energy, power, and communication (create a force-field) in which everyone else shares but from which she is excluded: a circuit protected and supported by the giant towers that loom over her head but that she can only look on. However, if there is a shared system of energy and communication of which she is a part, it is the history and shame that joins Japanese Canadians together, as Yano points out: he “pointed from me to him in a continuous loop, implying some sort of connection that was

98 Even the simile – fatigue like jetlag – is depleted because the referent is meaningless for Asako: she has never been on a trip and plane to know jetlag. Not having had the experience of flying also suggests the family’s poor circumstances. Also, as much as Asako enjoys telling stories of the past and feels meaningfully attached to her brother’s picture, remembering also exhausts her (81) and she feels further dislocated when she cannot remember the stories correctly or piece the past back together.

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beyond words” (94), which Yano goes on to explain is feeling ashamed for being “‘herded up’” and “‘ashamed to be nihonjin’” (94). And this shame and the inappropriate and misplaced guilt she feels about Eiji’s death, the more appropriate cause of which was the internment, have transformative effects on Asako’s body and who she is. Whereas Asako does not suffer from material damage to the brain, nor changes identity in the way Bin does, acquiring a new name and a new set of experiences – valuing art and calm strength rather than experiencing his father’s temper and manual work as he previously did – she does become a new subject insofar as she loses the capacity to reproduce and even becomes a monster.

Asako recounts the first time she menstruated, first noticing “a trickle of blood” on her thigh two years before they had “to leave for the camps” and after an incident when she and Eiji had been swimming and she had held on to his neck too tight nearly drowning him (150). But she stops menstruating after Eiji’s death – “The last time I bled was just after he died” (151) – when another dramatic water experience leads to Eiji’s pneumonia.99 Asako describes her transformation after Eiji’s death as her own figurative death in which she becomes a skeleton and embraces numbness: When I stopped eating and sleeping, it was Papa who watched over me. There was nothing my body could take in. It was hateful to me, the thought of my body succumbing to sensation with any relief or pleasure when all I wanted was to be numb. To be closed over. Yet, however deadened, alive to my own misery. Though I wished for it as for nothing else before or since, I did not deserve to die with Eiji. Or to survive without him. Stum once told me that, in his infant memory, I was a skeleton that stalked his dreams. (220) Refusing food, sleep, relief, and pleasure because they are hateful and painful reminders of Eiji’s death and her hand in it, Asako wills herself into a state of apathy and dissociation, and though her father keeps her alive by pushing beans “between my teeth with his brutish fingers” (220), Asako becomes a living-dead figure, a skeleton existing in a dream-world. Asako persists in the world, but, like Kogawa’s Obasan, she cannot partake in the normal intercourse of the world around her, chatting with acquaintances

99 Asako often confuses the incident of going into the water at night to get Eiji’s attention with the episodes when she holds onto him too tight.

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and building relationships. The trauma physically scars her body, leaving her infertile and even asexual, and it transforms what was previously a budding and sometime capricious girl into an aged custodian and even an object. Whereas, as a girl Asako had been intrigued by the mystery of men that her father and brother represented for, as an adult, the penis becomes “a little lever on an old machine” that she has to lift and move from side to side in order to clean (51). And, as a stoic caretaker and apathetic shell, a thing that can be mobilized to protect or be filled by others, as well as being the oldest surviving family member born in Canada, in their new circumstances living a city in white Ontario, Asako’s family huddle behind her as “they pushed [her] out . . . to the world, thrusting [her] homely face to it when they were afraid” (51).

Besides becoming an apathetic skeleton and empty shell, their internment experiences and the losses they experience further make Asako, as well as other Japanese Canadian characters in the novel, monstrous in their appearance and in their violent behaviour. On one hand, the shame they feel for being Japanese Canadian and “enemy aliens” disfigures the characters, in a way that Chisako, for example, being from Japan and not interned, never experiences; as Yano explains, “‘she doesn’t know what it’s like to get herded up. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be ashamed to be Nihonjin’” (94). Unlike Chisako, the Japanese Canadian characters are intrinsically unattractive: “‘We’re so full of shame,” Yano describes, “Chisako saw it in me . . . . It isn’t attractive, Asako. Especially in a man’” (231). And the “stress and grief” of their shame makes Yano’s “homely face” break out in blemishes. As Asako recounts, “He never had that smooth, poreless skin that so many nihonjin have, but his face was worse than usual that day. Swollen, oddly chapped, his features more lumpy than ever. A large ugly blemish, perhaps a boil, was forming on his left cheek” (229). Asako herself appears inhuman and repulsive when she shamefully measures herself against Chisako, choosing to take “baths in the dark to avoid seeing the changes happening to me. My thickening toenails, the short hairs that fell from my head . . . . my skin that was becoming dark and rough. Like nori” (dried seaweed, 25-6).

However, what makes Asako and the others particularly monstrous, and unlike the new wounded subject who is numb, indifferent and suffers from agnosia, is that, at

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certain moments, they violently lash out toward the wrong person or object. In other words, though Asako rarely feels anything at all, when she does relate emotionally and meaningfully with others, she tends to do so through pain and by hurting them. Asako verbally attacks Chisako, out of jealously and shame, while telling Yano about the affair: “‘You can make all the excuses you want for her, but Mr. Spears did not make Chisako do anything she didn’t want to do. . . . She thinks she’s better than us . . . . But she isn’t . . . . Not one bit’” (232). After which she even refers to herself as a monster – “A monster, that was what I was” (239) – for having done so. Asako’s outbursts also include physical attacks against her brother. When Stum reveals Yano was a close friend, implying Asako’s lack of understanding and control of Yano and the situation, she hits him: “Before I knew what I was doing, I heard the smack of my hand against his cheek” (134).100 What makes her violent explosions so difficult is that she is often not in control of them and does not even realize she has committed them (which points to a monstrous lack of agency and reflection). When Stum asks to learn more about Eiji and to see the old pictures from the past, Asako coolly denies him, and, in yanking her hand away from his, she stabs him with the pin she is using to darn a sock without initially realizing what she has done or at least refusing to admit it, even though she sees “his cheeks bunch with pain” and him suck his palm and shake it (181). Never taking responsibility for her aggressive actions, she concludes, “He must have stabbed himself with his own impulsive gestures” (182). Similarly lashing out in uncontrollable ways, when Stum admits his intimate fears to his sister, though Asako admits, “I wanted to say it. With all my heart, I wanted to let go. To say, yes, Tsutomu, I am afraid,” in a monstrous transformation, what emerges from her mouth instead is a hurtful, “crude” accusation: “‘This is a game to you, is it? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?’” (195). Whereas Obasan hardens into a posture of decrepit openness from her experience, Asako hardens into numb and empty being that cannot help her aggressive, emotional flare-ups;

100 In response to her aggression, Stum accuses Asako of wanting Yano and his family to be dead in order to have Sachi’s attention, whereby Asako asks, “‘Is that what you think of me? That I’m the monster?’” (135).

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and she is not the only character who erupts so violently, of course. Yano murders his family and Spears, and kills himself.101

If the end of the novel hints at a resolution and a new beginning – Asako recognizing beauty and breaking out of her monstrous shell by going beyond the boundaries of her familiar yet broken territory into new places and relationships – the novel also suggests that the consequences of racism and the internment – the internalized violence and the erasure of whole families – were so great that they should not be overlooked even if they cannot be seen. Moreover, even though she recognizes that she is monstrous, it is hard to tell in the last moments of the novel, and in her wistful attitude during her ride to the chicken farm and her conversation with Kaz, if rather she continues to be numb to the objects and people around her (agnosia) and oblivious to the trauma she has suffered and the transformation it continues to effect in her life (anosognosia), especially as her discussion with Kaz does not join them together: they deny each other’s memories of the past. Indeed, reading the ending of the novel with Malabou’s insistence on the unknowable wound and its permanently altering effects, what comes into relief is Stum’s pain and wounding. Indeed, as his more Anglo-acceptable nickname suggests, and though of all his family members he appears the one least agitated and stirred up by the internment – he has a job, works with other people, and has a loving, intimate relationship with Angel – he also appears as the ‘stump’ or remnant that remains after parts have been broken or cut off. In this way, his name metaphorically implies the physical, material wounding that he does not otherwise appear to endure (accept through Asako’s abusive gestures). Moreover, subjected to and internalizing the shame and abuse experienced by Japanese Canadians, Stum is himself a monster who cruelly kills new life, suffocating and crushing chicks that are themselves born “wounded” or with

101 Another violence committed by the government’s actions and policies against the Japanese Canadians and indicted in the novel is that Asako internalizes the shame and guilt that primarily belongs to the government, feeling herself as such and unable to reflect on her situation otherwise. As Goldman argues, Asako’s traumatic experience of racism – the internment – renders her a melancholic, but “the racial and political context complicates the portrayals of melancholia” (371). In this case, Asako is unable to overcome the loss of her beloved brother. Moreover, she internalizes the loss in such a way that she blames herself for her brother’s death, assumes racist views against herself and other Japanese people (Goldman 373, also see Visvis), and becomes a victimizer in betraying Chisako and not supporting Yano (Goldman 378).

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markings that do not fit what is acceptable.102 Infinitely wounded, these subjects do not recover compassion or a full range of emotional engagement with others and the world, they do not regain productive relationships with others so much as find ways of coping with and even taking professions – like caretaker and chick sorter – that allow them to accommodate their disabilities and wounds.

3.7 What Remains after the Disaster

If, as Samantha Bee suggests, we need to know the pain and suffering of others in order to respond more appropriately to their plights rather than blindly overlooking them and expecting gratitude for our apparent hospitality, the novels by Itani and Sakamoto and Malabou’s theory of the new wounded that stresses the symptoms of numbness, dissociation, and character change provide us with a means of imagining how suffering might be at play even if we cannot see it. Applied to Itani’s and Sakamoto’s novels, in which the protagonists, at least at times, appear to come to terms with their traumatic pasts of lost loved ones, painful displacements without return, dispossession, and shame, Malabou’s concept helps us appreciate how the subjects might continue to suffer from their traumas even as they carry on. Bin becomes a successful artist, who, by the end of the novel, overcomes his painter’s block and reunites with his father, and Asako is generally considered responsible and organized, and, by the end of the novel, is able to venture further into the world and onto relationships with others (Kaz and Angel). However, with Malabou in mind, we can imagine that these seemingly healthy selves were born from traumas that were so significant they destroyed the previously existing personalities of the characters. Bin Oda becomes Bin Okuma, and Asako, the active and loving girl, becomes sterile, isolated, empty, and disposed to angry outbursts. The only signs of these changes are the nearly imperceptible material marks – a scar of Bin’s genetic inheritance on his forehead and the scarring that induced menopause for Asako as

102 Asako describes Stum and Angel pretending to do his sexing job in order to show Asako what it is like. When they find a chick with two marks instead of one, they squeeze it hard and kill it: “‘See, not so bad,’ said Stum, smiling, in some way proud, I suppose. Slowly, gingerly, Angel placed the lifeless chick to one side, into a third box, and pushed it away. . . . ‘You didn’t know your Tsutomu could be so cruel, did you, Asako?’” (304-5).

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a young teenager – and the changes in their characters to predominantly numb, depressive, cold, and detached subjects.

If, as Ahmed describes, a subject develops character through her habitual orientations to the objects around her, the traumatized subject suffering from agnosia – and thus minimally aware of her connections to the things and people around her – might have an impoverished character, as well as a diminished understanding of the ways in which their lack of emotion hurts the characters closest to them. However, following Malabou, these character transformations, depressive attitudes, and indifference (in otherwise functioning people) are the clues for us to attend more astutely to the pain that will not speak or cry out. In this way, Malabou’s ideas provide a personal and subject- psychologically oriented supplement to Blanchot’s concept of the disaster: as the event that is of such magnitude that it fundamentally undoes everything, including the mind’s ability to process events, all the while leaving everything intact. For, just when nothing seems to have changed, when the state of affairs seems to be the same as usual, Blanchot’s and Malabou’s conceptions imply, as if in response to Bee’s concern, that we need to try to take into consideration the violences and difficulties that still are there, that have and continue to happen though they are beyond our grasp and perception. Whereas Blanchot’s conception of the disaster calls up the issue and question of how we might better comport ourselves to the world in order to begin to appreciate and attend to atrocities happening right under our noses, Malabou’s discussion of trauma in The New Wounded, consistently returns to the question of how we might appreciate and perhaps even conduct ourselves with the others we live and share the world with, yet whose pain and painful circumstances are radical and powerful absences that will not appear for us.

However, the novels also add to Malabou’s discussion insofar as the characters’ experiences of racism and institutional, state sanctioned violence exceed the criteria of destructive plasticity and numbness. Bin, for example, does not change his identity once, but is forced to do so several times by school and government officials, that later on will not give him a passport because it cannot comprehend all the name changes it has itself required of Bin. Thus, whereas Bin had been wrongfully denied rights as a Canadian citizen when he was interned as a child, and even years after the Canadian government

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officially recognized their actions against Japanese Canadians during WWII to have been wrong, Bin continues to be denied any simple affiliation with the state. Asako’s experience similarly shows how the effects of racism, particularly when it is so pervasive it is supported and exercised by state institutions and has the very material consequences of forcing people to live in substandard, rough living conditions that lack adequate services. For Asako, her transformation into an infertile caretaker, old before her time, does not signal the break with and destruction of her old identity that is replaced by a new one. Rather, her trauma changes her so fundamentally that it transfigures her past experiences and memories. Asako cannot understand her brother’s death from pneumonia as either as a consequence of being forced to live in impoverished conditions and communities, or even as a terrible accident, but exclusively as her fault and shame. The power of the trauma of her internment is indeed that it fundamentally changes everything in the past and future for Asako, transfiguring what should have been normal experiences – Asako trying to get her brother’s attention (like Naomi’s mother going to visit relatives) – into disasters, and tainting everything and all her relationships, past and future, with a misplaced shame.

With Malabou’s ideas and with the experiences of the protagonists in Requiem and in The Electrical Field in mind, a conclusion to this chapter might be to ask how we make space for others whose difference (différance) and trauma do not appear (even as the trauma persists), not only because the experience defies our attempts to grasp it, but also because socio-political circumstances do not allow the experiences to appear as the traumas they were or are. Such a question seems to be an ever more pressing one, requiring more articulations, in these days of mass migration of global subjects amidst reactionary anti-immigration policies and sentiments (new state violences), especially as an appreciation of the value of narrative (which might foster empathetic connections with the plights of others), never mind truth, appears lacking. Indeed, I would argue that narrative is ever more important in this so-called “post-truth” era because it points us toward meaning and gravitas.

One final question I am left with here is what happens to things for the new wounded subject. Returning to the discussion of Bin’s and Asako’s things, their objects,

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even the ones they acquire after the internment, or the one’s they have lost but for which they retain memories, keep them strongly connected to the past. For example, Bin’s “smalls” express his need to protect wounded things because of his experience, and Asako’s eyesore of a car express her shame. And, Bin’s memory of his mother’s yellow dress and Asako’s memories of Eiji, to whom she returns through his photograph, maintain the objects (his mother and her brother) at the imploding centres of their losses. If, as Malabou suggests, one of the casualties of trauma is things, that is, trauma refigures the relationship to things so that they do not appear for the new wounded subject with the significance and meaning they used to and should have, the experiences of these protagonists suggest rather that things, even if we are not always aware that they are doing so, keep us connected to the past and the world in unpredictable ways, and ways that may always be re-found and retraced (such as in my experience of finding “Lara” traced on the wall of the room in which my grandmother and father were interned). Thus, relationships to things might redeem the “new wounded.” As Heidegger, Benjamin, or Brown might remind us, things connect us to a whole world of entities, including their histories and possibilities; things create constellations of meaning that orient us to the past and future; and even or especially broken things indicate other ways of thinking and being, outside of the ways to which we have become accustomed. Because they connect us to the world and the past, and orient us, in many different and indeterminate ways, even when we least expect it or even though it seems one is completely detached and changed from one’s past self, things maintain some sort of continuity with the past and that helps us hold the traumatic experience in sight even if only as a trace. Things for the trauma sufferers in these novels might flicker between something from which they dissociate and something that provokes a connection – between signalling the impossibility of incorporating the experience into one’s life and story, and the ways in which the experience is already part of oneself and story and needs to be articulated.

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Conclusion: An Ethics of Materialism

In this project, I proposed attending to the meanings and functions of things in four novels about the Japanese Canadian internment in order to better understand the affective stakes, complexity, and devastation involved in that experience. As Ryoko, in Strength for the Bridge, articulates, the internment is often misunderstood, appearing as an experience in which people only lost their things. For the most part, however, the characters in the novels themselves are obsessed with things insofar as they collect or even hoard things, they hesitate in entering into any exchanges, or they obsess over and even fetishize objects. Taking my cues from the ways in which the novels indicate that material things and property are difficult and particularly problematic issues for the characters, as well as how issues of property remain emblematic of the internment experience, I investigated what the novels tell us about the relationships between the characters and their things, and about the damage involved in displacement and forced dispossession.

In the first chapter on Beattie’s Strength for the Bridge, I analysed how even the common, everyday, and unexceptional objects that surround the characters – the objects that nearly do not appear because of how insignificant they are in the lives of the characters or the objects that appear only as part of the setting – are integral to the lives of the characters in the book. Read through Heidegger’s and Ahmed’s ideas, which suggest that even the simplest dealings or interactions with things meaningfully connect us to the world and to others in it, I analysed how Keiichi’s relationships to things helps him orient himself in the world and build relationships and community with others. Remembering objects from his past and building and interacting with material items in his present also provide Keiichi the means of making his place in the world, such as in constructing his house to include Japanese and Canadian objects. Examining the issue of possession or ownership more precisely, my reading of the novel suggested that the joy of possessing things does not come from projecting additional and personal values into the object and being cruelly optimistic about what advantages come with property gains.

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Indeed, such a self-interested treatment of objects actually appears necessary to the subject’s character development and self-fashioning in order for her to become the subject she is. And rather, evoking Benjamin’s discussion of the benefits of owning and collecting books, I argued that ownership appears as a mode of engaging with things in an especially profound way, insofar as one understands and appreciates objects as intimately part of oneself and as having a history and future of their own. Possessing property thus positions the owner as a particular subject in her moment in time situated as she is to the past and for the future, through which the subject gains a sense of herself not so much as an agent in the world but moreover as being responsible to the world and for the things in it. Without the possibility of possession, of being able to care for and be responsible for things, the novel’s depiction of the internment shows how vulnerable objects and people become. Relationships to objects become perverse attachments, in which characters feel that the only way left for them to care for their things is to destroy them. And, without property rights and utterly impoverished, the characters themselves are stripped of all meaning, appearing neither to have rights before the law, nor to have the symbolic value of a sacrifice.

In chapter two, on Obasan, I evaluated Naomi’s family’s objects and their experiences of dispossession finding that, for Naomi, there were so many material losses that her experience appears as one of loss upon loss upon loss. In this experience of multiple losses, it becomes exceedingly difficult for Naomi to pause on and work through her losses because the other things that should point to the lost object, in order to outline the place where it was and the value it held, and thereby help her remember and make sense of the loss, are themselves looted or liquidated. Dispossession, for Naomi, thus appears as an infinitely destabilizing experience. And, like in Beattie’s novel, such material losses also indicate the extent to which the community was impoverished and deprived, and the ways in which the people themselves were consequently reduced to things. Obasan, moreover, further figures the experience of being dispossessed and deprived of the right to the ownership of one’s things as a violation, implying that the people and their things were being used (for example, as political pawns and material goods) for others’ gains. However, as Naomi and Obasan show, the experience of being

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forcibly displaced from one’s home and life, and being deprived of all one’s things also becomes internalized by the characters. In Obasan’s case, as a result of having to save everything as a provision against possible future need or because she intimately appreciates that everything can get lost, she acquires a hoarding comportment toward the world that lets everything enter and that keeps it all, regardless of its value. For Naomi, the massive losses she suffered make her hesitant about entering into any relationships or exchanges because she knows the stakes involved in acquiring anything or in giving anything up. For both characters, the primary issue is trust: Obasan cannot trust that others will not want to deprive her of things or that they will be there to help protect the scraps and stuff of the world. And Naomi does not trust that others will not misunderstand her and take from her what she does not want to give. The problem with trust for the characters urges us to rethink the importance of trust to other experiences of dispossession.

In chapter three, I investigated how the particularly vivid images of losing things in Bin’s memories of looting, in Requiem, and the depictions of post-internment objects with little to no connection to Asako’s internment experience, in The Electrical Field, both suggest to readers how difficult the internment experience was for the characters. Indeed, even without “seeing” the experience in the mind’s eye, in The Electrical Field, the psychological disquietude we sense through Asako’s relationship to her more recently acquired things implies how damaging being interned was, for, the experience still haunts her. Asako never recovers from the death of her brother and the guilt she feels about her attachment to him (holding him too tight) and about the role she thinks she played in his death. And similarly, Bin and his family members still suffer from economic impoverishment years later, and many of them have difficulty ever feeling at home anywhere. However, these characters can also be read as coming to terms with their traumatic pasts insofar as they carry on, even successfully (Bin), or appear to others as having their lives organized and their houses orderly. Additionally, the novels suggest ways in which the characters gain perspective on their experiences. Thus, in these cases, I considered the problem of what happens when the markers that might be needed to acknowledge the experience and keep it in view, so to speak, seem to disappear.

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Malabou’s suggestion that we look for traumatic symptoms in less obvious articulations – people appearing numb to the world or as having undergone a change in character – helps return us to an appreciation of how devastating the internment experience was for the characters and how it was internalized by them in ruinous ways that continue to haunt them. In Bin’s case, he loses his identity as Binosuke Oda, and he continues to be denied his identity by the institutions that now insist he need one, thereby remaining unable to fully claim one. Rather he appears, as a teacher once called him, a dustbin for the debris, remembrances, and feelings of the past, and, like Naomi and Obasan, he has difficulty relating to other people. The Electrical Field similarly portrays Asako as, at times, an empty vessel. Furthermore, for Asako, and much more darkly, the novel depicts her and her community as having become monstrous and lashing out against each other. In both cases, the novels seem to suggest that though the characters proceed with their lives, a kernel of their internment experience remains un-metabolized and powerfully painful. This discussion further urges us to consider the problem of how to make space for painful experiences even when we cannot see or sense the pain of others.

Returning to my proposal that attending to depictions of things in the novels about the internment helps fill in the contours of the experience that otherwise does not appear, in the analysis of these novels, the internment emerges as an exceptional event both politically and personally. On one hand, the preoccupation with property in the novels points to how the internment, which effected a gap in social and political consciousness and was a state of exception that was justified as part of exceptional circumstances, was an unjust and violent event that destroyed peoples’ worlds and relationships. The forced displacement and dispossession devastated families, kinship ties, and communities. And, denied the ownership of their things (the “joy of possession”), or the possibility of investing in and being responsible for their property, the characters no longer know and feel themselves as entrusted with and belonging to the world. Moreover, as the novels’ depictions of condoned looting and impoverishment suggest, the policies led to a violation of basic rights that reduced the exiled population to the situation of Agamben’s idea of “homo sacer,” in which even the characters’ suffering and ill-treatment has no meaning.

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On the other hand, or the flip side of showing us the social and political implications of the internment, the novels’ depictions of their characters’ relationships to things conveys the personal and individual difficulties involved in internalizing such exceptional treatment and meaningless suffering. The shape of the disaster as it appears in the minds and emotional worlds of the characters is an open wound, the jagged and rough edges of which have not been smoothed with time, even as the characters carry on. For, rather than repeating and working through, or attending to the voice that might come from the wound, the characters appear altered by the traumatic effraction, with their essential sensibilities about the world and others in it fundamentally changed and undone. For many of the characters, losing so much most significantly resulted in losing the possibility of trusting others: trusting that other characters share the same values, sensibility, and responsibility for each other, which is necessary for a civic and communal sensibility. Additionally, such material loses resulted in losing the possibility of trusting the permanency of the world: trusting that the world as the characters knew and lived it would go on despite what the characters do or what happens to them. Highlighting how characters’ relationships to the things around them creates and sustains the faith in others and the confidence in the world that is necessary to living, we find that subsequent to their loses, Obasan and Asako are paralysed and burdened with a sense of how responsible they have to be because they cannot trust others and the world. (Indeed, the politicians, government officials, and the laws of the country that were obligated to protect its citizens and treat them fairly instead betrayed and persecuted them.) Similarly distrustful, we find that Naomi and Bin are hesitant of such responsibility, and unable to relate to things in the world or to exchange with others (connect with them through things and through giving and receiving objects), these characters appear existentially and infinitely displaced, and uncomfortable in the world with others.

4.1 The Remaining Things

This dissertation has focused primarily on how contemplating things can show us a way to better appreciating what is at stake in traumatic experiences of displacement and dispossession. In stressing the significance of material objects and in highlighting the importance of such objects for life, not only have the novels suggested how we should

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reconceive of the internment, but also they gesture us toward thinking about the plights of others: the suffering, damage, and loss of trust that may be part of other experiences of forced exile. In this way, this project has indicated other experiences of dispossession that compare with and echo the experiences of the Japanese Canadian characters. These include the painfully isolating and alienating experience of immigration that the protagonist of Cockroach undergoes, and, in a non-fiction example, how the Habash family members with which I began this dissertation had to choose what belongings to take with them to Canada from their former lives in Syria and which ones to leave behind.

However, in showing us the losses and the meaning of the losses, the novels additionally reveal for us a different relationship to things that effectively points us toward a more ethical engagement. Indeed, what many of the characters in the novels display is an awareness of and respect for the value of things as being essential to the uniqueness of others, as well as essential to respecting their difference and to better appreciating the larger world and history. For example, as Naomi recognizes, all the things that Obasan keeps are “tiny specks of memory” (Obasan 16). And whereas furniture contains people’s stories, memories, and dreams, which seep into the material items like dust into the upholstery becoming part of them, Obasan appears as the keeper of these essential aspects of peoples’ lives. In Bin’s case, his collection of broken tokens and figurines that come from rivers representing all stories and history, connect him and his caring actions to others’ lives and pasts. Understanding that objects relate to infinite pasts and contain the residual debris or dust of others’ lives, Bin, as a collector of things also becomes a character who takes care of the histories that others cannot or do not see. And, even Asako is aware, like Obasan or the forensic anthropologist, Schuppli, of how dust from or on things relates back to bodies and lives, and peoples’ unique, if tragic, histories. All these characters acknowledge the value and meaning of things and they display care for material things, carefully keeping and tending to their property, and taking things into their collections and homes (protection), even if doing so also leads to hoarding and exceptional fixations. Their acknowledgements of and actions toward things suggest that caring for things is, at least, some small way of attending to the

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stories and lives of others: of keeping them somehow alive instead of lost and dead, recalling Obasan’s word for lost things.

Indeed, another way to read these novels is to consider how they are engaged in an ethical endeavour of advocating for a more respectful attention to others that begins with a more thoughtful concern for the small things. In other words, through the emphasis they place on the meaning of material objects to characters’ lives and their worlds, the novels suggest that one way to acquire a better comportment toward each other is by preparing ourselves through learning to appreciate the meaning of objects and learning to care for even the smallest of material items. Read as implying an ethical component to our relationships to things, these novels about the Japanese Canadian internment, appear in line with the debates and thinking of other writers and thinkers grappling with questions about the meaning of things and our relationships to them.

As I have already considered, Wayson Choy, for example, says investing our imaginations into things prevents us from being sociopathic. Similarly, for Jane Bennett (“speculative realism”), attaching to things helps us cultivate a more open sensibility through which the multiple meanings and the histories of things matter to us, and their social, political, and ecological implications in the world come into view. Though, in a very different way, Bill Brown, drawing on Heidegger’s ideas about broken objects, suggests that things in being glimpsed in all their thingness (stripped of all their additional, cultural meanings) can help prepare us to recognize otherness more generally, including the otherness of people. Similarly, Graham Harman (“object-oriented ontology”) is critical of the idea of finding vitality or power in things, and further conceives of things as wholly different and inaccessible to us because doing so preserves the thing from our social, cultural, and historical projections and prepares us to engage with the thing on its own terms. As diverse and even opposed the ideas of these critics are – suggesting on one hand we need to project onto objects and on the other hand that we need to divest our projected meanings from objects in order to see them better – what these critics share is a concern for how we should think about and relate to things in order to attune ourselves to a deeper appreciation of the world and to be better, more ethical human beings. Similarly, I think of Miki’s most recent book of poetry and Ruth

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Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, which are very much concerned with ethics and the human condition, specifically with regards to our contemporary moment and the degree to which commodity culture and global technologies affect our sense of ourselves and of our relationships. In these texts, the processes involved in the production and our consumption of material goods have encroached on our ways of being in the world and infected every inch of the planet in this “Anthropocene” era. Also, in these texts, people are very alienated from themselves and each other, appearing numb, which might indicate, according to Malabou, that they suffer a kind of trauma of contemporary living. Indeed, having very few things in common, except for commodities and consumer culture that subsumes their relations into capitalist exchanges, the characters and figures in these texts even appear to others as only trafficable items.

By way of conclusion, I want to briefly take up the gesture that the novels about the internment make toward understanding relationships to things as pointing a way to a more ethical engagement with each other and the world. I want to briefly suggest how those characters that hoard, collect, keep, and care for objects might also be read as indicating how to live better and more ethically towards others. And, to do so, I will briefly dwell on the characters that collect, care for, and make things – the Obasan- and Bin-like figures – in Ozeki’s novel. Indeed, the world that Ozeki depicts in A Tale for the Time Being is overflowing with material things because global market exchange, modern technologies, and natural and man-made disasters move objects around the world, touching every inch of the planet. Such mass movements of commodities and waste cause a Hello Kitty lunchbox to wash onto Canada’s western shores after the Fukushima disaster. And Ruth, the fictional protagonist of the novel, happens to pick it up, finding an old French edition of À la recherche du temps perdu in which the pages have been replaced by diary entries written in purple pen by a teenaged girl named Nao. Like Naomi’s package from Emily, or Bin’s manila folder from Lena, Ruth receives her own package from the past, the contents of which indicate a mystery and trauma from history that initiate the story. And, also like Naomi and Bin, Ruth is propelled into a search and journey that takes her into the past.

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However, in the novel’s depiction of massive world movements of global market production and distribution, global technology, and waste, things are also easily lost, or, more precisely, they are often either misrecognized as commodities exclusively for and infinitely available to the perceiver or mistaken for rubbish. Because the novel shows how objects can be very significant – meaningfully connecting characters to the world, history, and others – but also easily misrecognized, it presents the problem of material value that has echoed throughout this dissertation. That is, similar to the novels I have discussed about the internment, Ozeki’s book shows the issues involved in recognizing, on one hand, a house on a valuable piece of property, versus, on the other hand, a home of personal property and intimate belongings. Indeed, we can imagine the Custodian of Enemy Property misread the items listed in Morishita’s nine-page list of his property, mistaking a family’s home and life for a house. Thus, we can read the Office of the Custodian and looters as effectively fetishizing Japanese Canadian property. They saw it as commodities for their personal benefit or for how it would benefit the government’s coffers when it had so many internment expenses, at the same time that, just as Marx warns (“The Fetishism”), the value they gave the property concealed the people, the relationships, and the circumstances involved in the creation and existence of the item. In other words, the bureaucratic logic of the Custodian or concern for one’s personal interests meant that the thing could never appear as a thing in Heidegger’s terms – as what relates to everything else and to history (“The Thing”) – or as a kind of work of art that crystalizes a life (“The Origin of the Work of Art”). And, it could never appear as personal property that engages one in and makes one responsible for the world in unique ways, as Benjamin says of the things one collects and owns (“Unpacking My Library”). Indeed, even Ozeki’s novel precisely indicates the problem of the value of things with regards to the Japanese Canadian internment insofar as there is an area near where Ruth lives that the locals call “Jap Farm” because it was confiscated from an interned family. In the quagmire of present concerns and because the event is so far in the past, the history of the land (including how it originally belonged to the First Nations) is nearly forgotten and no one can recall who owned the land or anything of the people who lived there.

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According to Ozeki’s novel, such misunderstanding and forgetting of the meaning of objects is nearly always the case. In her novel, objects washing up on shores or being sold on fetish websites, and even property (land), appear out of murky seas and cyberspaces and out of distant histories that obfuscate the origins of these objects. Characters cannot see or sense the history of the items because the production and past of objects is so distant and unknowable. Moreover, people depicted in the novel do not care about seeing objects because they are too caught up in their own lives, desires, and anxieties from which they cannot break out or gain the perspective they need to see or care about things other than themselves. However, far from being an issue concerning only things, A Tale for the Time Being shows us how not being able to sense the origins of an object and not caring for things also has violent and painful consequences for the people involved. For, people in Ozeki’s novel, like the objects, are easily forgotten or violently objectified, appearing to others only insofar as they gratify the desires of the perceiver. Characters often, painfully or ignorantly, use each other as objects and instruments for their own desire and ends. People scavenge for what valuable debris they can acquire from victims of the tsunami, gaming companies purposefully cultivate unethical behaviour in those playing their games in order to make money from military investors, and Nao, the teenager, is bullied and sexually abused for the gratification of classmates.

Moreover, the novel suggests that the problem of misunderstanding objects and instrumentalizing others is impossible to overcome. For, in A Tale for the Time Being, even things that should signal their utter alterity because they are broken and no longer can be used as they should (Brown “Thing Theory”), and that should gesture us toward recognizing otherness outside of our self-enclosed and unethical indifference, also appear as the excessive or lacking things that initiate desire (more like Lacan’s “Das Ding”). Nao’s bloodied underwear that the bullies strip from her when they sexually assault her may move those who learn about their sale on the internet to consider the circumstances that gave rise to their sale, and to perhaps glimpse Nao’s suffering. However, there is no guarantee that such a view of the other or of otherness will take place. Rather, unsheltered in the flow and exchange of items in the global market and on the Internet,

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the underwear and the girl they belonged to can appear to those who peruse fetish sites as part of the self-enclosed economy of their own desires and fantasies. Similarly, the scavengers who arrive en mass, once the news of Ruth’s find of the lunch box gets around, misunderstand broken remains from the tsunami as goods by which they may economically gain They do not appreciate how these things belonged to people who had families and friends and who may have suddenly and horrifically disappeared.

Whereas Lauren Berlant argues that subjects optimistically attach to things even if the attachments are cruel or bad for them because people feel them as part of themselves, Ozeki’s novel rather suggests a cruelly pessimistic view. Showing us what one’s attachments do to others (rather than to the subject herself, as Berlant does), the novel suggests that even in what appear as optimistic and positive attachments to things, characters can easily overlook and likely are overlooking others and even hurting them. Thus, even Ruth’s desire to find and help Nao upon reading her diary, appears as possibly being more about Ruth, her projections, and her need to know what happened. Yet, whereas the novel suggests that people are compelled to project onto things, always making objects and others appear in their terms, it also proposes that these self-serving projections also makes things and our relationships to them deeply social (as Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s poetic and profound conceptions of things and property admit, or as Wayson Choy and Jane Bennett have similarly suggested). Such attachments to things can actually make us more aware of our world, humanity, and the suffering of others, in a similar way to which recognizing others’ things or even the dust on things connects characters like Obasan and Bin to other characters and their stories.

To explain how projecting onto others and onto things might be good, consider one of the most moving and tragic examples of how objects do and need to appear as having a special, personal significance for the beholder: Ruth’s account of a man on a TV news report shortly after the 2011 tsunami in Japan. While searching the debris where his house used to be, looking for the Hello Kitty backpack that belonged to his six-year-old daughter, Mr. Nojima describes his horrific experience of losing his wife and children. Acknowledging he will probably never find his family, he says, “‘if I can just find something, just one thing that belonged to my daughter, I’ll be able to rest my mind and

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leave this place’” (112). The Hello Kitty backpack, through this traumatic experience, becomes intimately related to the person to whom it belonged, so much so that it can become a symbol of and substitute for the missing and dead daughter, even if the metonymy is horrific and the difference between the object and the person it represents points to Nojima’s unbearable loss. Whereas Nojima’s desire to have an object belonging to his daughter might appear as an irrational commitment to a material item in the belief that it retains some aspect of her spirit, and though it may appear as an impulse that is meant to satisfy his own needs, it is also a desire that is deeply about his daughter and his family. For Nojima, the unimaginable loss he’s suddenly suffered has left him feeling that his former life with his family was a dream (112). The backpack, if he were to find it, promises to maintain his memory of the past and his connection with it, as well as to help his daughter, son, and wife to not be forgotten: to help him remain oriented toward his lost loved ones, whether or not the backpack becomes a point of melancholic fixation or helps him mourn and work though his loss. It would be some trace that survived to help single them out from being completely lost in the catastrophic mess of history or it might stay the movement of the disaster that threatens to overwhelm the memory of them. The desire for the object in this case is also an expression of the love for another person.

Exploring the affective connections of the backpack in this fictional account further, whereas the daughter’s Hello Kitty backpack, one of millions of the same marketed item, is singled out of the mire, it also reminds us of Nao’s Hello Kitty lunch box and the diary within it that both Ruth and us readers read. And perhaps it further reminds the reader, because we, too, are familiar with the Hello Kitty brand, of our own such bags and items hanging in our closets, whereby we suddenly sense ourselves related to Ozeki’s fictional world in a particular way, and moreover sense our real world with its real tsunami in a different way. The point for Ozeki’s novel is that things are deeply social (as Marx suggested) and deeply affective. They connect people over time and space and have their own histories and meanings for others from which they can never be completely disassociated, but that remain somehow traced through them, even if these histories and meanings are not always, or at least not immediately recognized. Whereas

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objects in the novel do get caught up in personal desires and are misrecognized as objects to be used for one’s own gratification or discarded and overlooked, they also always retain their own vitality or power that is (comes from) the relationship with other people over time and space. In this way, Ruth’s interest in the box might be read as obsessive, and the way she projects onto the objects she has found and onto Nao’s story might be read as Ruth satisfying her own desires and imagination. However, the material items in A Tale for the Time Being are not only animated by Ruth’s desires and secrets, but also come alive because they are deeply connected to the lives of others and keep Ruth connected to and pointed outside of herself toward other characters. Through the objects, Ruth cares for a girl she never meets, and builds closer connections with the people in her community, like the Quebecois manager of the local dump who helps her shed light on the mystery of the lunchbox.

Thus, A Tale for the Time Being depicts characters that thoughtlessly overlook and project onto things reducing them to their own terms, and objects that are also easily overlooked and mistaken, as was the case with the Custodian and looters during the internment. The novel also portrays characters who project onto things in a way that may better attune them to their place and time in the world and toward an awareness of other things and people. In these cases, things help characters relate to history and see something of the lives that came before them or that exist outside of their experience and comprehension, such as the people preserved in the furniture Obasan keeps, or the extended family members that Miki might have remembered had the trunk containing his family’s photographs survived the war. And these very different relationships to things lead me to the final question I want to ask in this dissertation. In the case of Ozeki’s novel staging the problem of perceiving the value and function of things, I ask what stops the characters from misrecognizing the objects as garbage or as existing only for their personal gratification, and rather helps them engage their imaginations in the right way to see the social nature of the things. And, by way of a response, it seems that the novel proposes (reminiscent of Bennett) that we can gain a better ethical comportment and awareness by learning to engage our imaginations and care by starting with the smallest, least important things and caring for these items in the smallest ways possible. Or in

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slightly different terms, against the immensity of time, history, nature, environmental disasters, the Internet, and the seas of projections and desires, in which people and their humanity threaten to disappear, Ozeki’s novel suggests that caring for the simplest objects is one of the most meaningful ways to live. For, tending to things is how we begin to stake meaningful claims and make connections that might stay these movements, just for a moment, and doing so can help us learn how to have compassion for others and the world.

To provide an example of what this kind of care of objects that extends to caring for the world and to better modes of comporting to it and to others looks like, consider Nao’s Buddhist nun great-grandmother, Jiko. Like Obasan, Jiko and her fellow nun keep rubber bands, scraps of fabric, and plastic bags, carefully collecting them, washing them, and reusing them. When they must throw things away, because they are broken, they hold a memorial service for the items once a year during which they chant for the items and, for example, stick broken sewing needles “into blocks of tofu so they will have a soft place to rest” (205). Jiko understands that “everything has a spirit, even if it’s old and useless, and we must console and honour the things that have served us well” (205), and for her, washing the bags is the same thing as meditation, which is to say that caring for things is a way of inserting a moment of calm and reflection into our lives. Jiko’s view of objects as having a spirit indicates the meaningfulness of objects that is mostly concealed to us in our daily lives, perhaps less so when they are useless and broken. And, according to A Tale for the Time Being, such excessive care for even the most useless things can interrupt the thoughtless economy of circulating goods – of circulating, self- interested desire, and of neglectful ways of being in the world – in order to open a regard toward the precarity and vulnerability of our own and other people’s lives.

In a final example from the novel of how the care for things can expose us to thinking about others and to other ways of thinking, Nao’s father creates meticulous and elaborate origami insects. The paper that Haruki uses for his insects recalls other historically significant pages and pieces of paper that I have discussed in this dissertation: Morishita’s nine-page document outlining his house, the documents in Obasan’s house that Naomi receives from Emily, and the pages Lena amasses from the

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archive attesting to all the property Bin’s family lost and that he lets fly into the Fraser River. In Haruki’s story, the historical papers he uses to create his insects are thin pages carefully torn from the volumes of the History of Western Philosophy. Most appropriately, the pages on Heidegger are one of his favourite sections to use. And, like the collector that Benjamin describes as having a child-like sensibility of engaging with and working over the artefacts he collects, Haruki cuts up and folds the pages containing philosophical ideas to make figures of some of the smallest, barest forms of life: insects.

To Nao, Haruki’s paper folding appears almost pointless, except that it keeps her father occupied and from killing himself. However, like Hage’s beetle protagonist, that makes readers feel the sadness and humanity of a man transformed into a beetle – who has been so reduced by his experience of being uprooted and dispossessed – Haruki’s insects remind us of the small things. They remind us of the personal moments and individual lives, and all the significance they might hold against the chaos of the world and the harmful disregard of others that happens in it. For, traced in these insects are the great ideas and lives of philosophers, and the very material nature of these insects’ bodies as paper from trees, as well as the barest form of life that its likely possible to reproduce through origami – insects, which are often considered a dispensable life form. Haruki’s collection is a tribute to all these things and how they are connected in the world, and a tribute to life itself. And through his origami collection, Nao begins to understand this weight and meaning of things. On a large screen television in a Tokyo store, Nao watches Insect Gladiators, a show in which insects fight to the death amidst fireworks displays. When the Staghorn Beetle shudders and dies after being stung by a scorpion, Nao cries because of “the human beings who thought this would be fun to watch” (291), and she thinks of her father and the meaning of the paper beetles he made. In a world in which desires, commodities, debris, and history threaten to overwhelm others and other beings, even the smallest, seemingly useless things, which also resonate as homages to the lives of others, are very meaningful. And, as A Tale for the Time Being, as well as Obasan’s and Bin’s concern for objects implies, caring for these things may just make us stop and think and be more human.

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