Figurative language in ‘Obasan’ by Joy Kogawa

In this short story, Joy Kogawa describes Japanese Canadians’ bitter experiences during World War II in poetic expressions through a protagonist’s visit to her ‘Obasan’, which means aunt in Japanese.

Along the story, the narrator describes her feelings and thoughts in poetic words. As a consequence, Joy Kogawa uses figurative language in order to help the readers evoke the miserable images of what Japanese Canadians had experienced during World War II.

The moments after her husband’s death are a proof of the fact that ‘the language of grief is silence’. Obasan keeps her lips unmoved at her niece’s question, the only thing that moves inside her being the grief. The narrator likens this grief with a tapeworm, saying that ‘grief inside her body is fat and powerful’. In this metaphor, according to I. A. Richards’ terminology, the tenor is grief, whilst the vehicle is the tapeworm. The ground, that is the commonality between the tenor and the vehicle, in this particular case, is exactly their power and the fact that they can both grow very big at times. Also, just as the tapeworm lives as a parasite, feeding with nutrients inside us, grief ‘feeds’ with every moment of relief that tries ‘to make its way down the road’.

A very beautiful, yet sad image is that of Obasan seen as a dwarf star. This metaphor is based again on the characteristics that bring these two entities together. Obasan is the tenor, whereas the dwarf star is the vehicle. She is the ‘inverted sun’ that sucks in the lives of her daughters, which are the source of her existence. The ground of this metaphor are Obasan’s daughters, who feel a necessity of leaving their mother likened with the balls of liquid metal which are unpredictable in their sudden departures.

The narrator sees her aunt as a person trapped in the past, and every little item that she has in her house is a proof of that. She keeps even the most insignificant things, such as ‘a daughter’s rubber ball’, so that the narrator concludes that ‘this house is now her blood and bones’. This beautiful metaphor has as tenor the house and the vehicle the blood and bones. Of course, in this case the ground of the metaphor is harder to trace, but we can say that what the narrator means is that all the things that her aunt keeps in her house are part of her body without which she wouldn’t feel complete anymore.

The next paragraph continues with comparing Obasan with ‘all old women in every hamlet in the world’. The narrator thinks her aunt is a common French old lady in a southern village, as well as a Mexican mountain village woman. The ground of this comparison is the fact that Obasan, just like any other old woman around the world, ‘is the bearer of love’s keys to unknown doorways’.

Just as Obasan and her niece are get to the attic of the house, the younger protagonist of the story has a revelation of the past. She sees the ‘old [cob]webs’ that were hanging in the dark attic and she instantly thinks of the past. She uses the webs as tenor and the past as vehicle, whilst the ground is the ability that both have of waiting for its victims to adhere or depart. So just like a fly is trapped in a cobweb,

the memories that refuse to be explained away become prisoners of the past, with no chance of escaping. This way, the narrator gives the reader fearful images.

Another figure of speech that she uses is the foreshadowing; the aunt’s “falters” at the beginning of the story somehow make the reader expect the aunt’s “stumbles” at the end, which causes the climactic hold between the aunt and the narrator. Irony is also present in the sentence “The other [grandfather’s] boats are towed away and left to rot” because, of course, the purpose of confiscation is not the rot. However, the idea is that the narrator emphasizes the unreasonable injustice suffered by the Japanese Canadians.

All in all, the figurative language used in ‘Obasan’ help us come to a conclusion: the narrator’s conflicts inside herself and between generations come forth to the resolutions, realizing that seeking the past is useless.