Obasan
... be at peace with your past you must stand up and yell at those at fault for reconciliation. Emily shows that her beliefs remain contingent upon facts, and that everyone needs to be on the same page before healing can begin. "'It matters to get the facts straight…Reconciliation can't begin without mutual recognition of the facts,' she said. 'Facts?' [said Naomi] 'Yes, facts. What's right is right. What's wrong is wrong. Health starts somewhere.'" (Obasan 219) Naomi cannot comprehend the angle with which her aunt approaches life. While Naomi may believe reconciliation is in order, she is only discouraged when she looks to see where speech has placed her Aunt Emily. "If Aunt Emily with her billions of letters and articles and speeches, her tears and her rage, her friends and her committees—if all that couldn't bring contentment, what was the point" (Obasan 50). Naomi becomes more and more frustrated when she sees the futile efforts of her Aunt. Albeit, she does believe that what her Aunt is doing is important for her Aunt, she cannot see the use if the results of such hard laborious tasks go for naught. "All of Aunt Emily's words, all her papers, the telegrams and petitions, are like scratchings in the barnyard, the evidence of much activity, scaly claws hard at work. But what good do they do, I do not know-those little black typewritten words-rain words, cloud droppings. They do not touch us where we are planted here in Alberta, our rots clawing the sudden prairie air. The words are not made of flesh. Trains do not carry us home. Ships do not return again. All my prayers disappear into space."(Obasan 226) The sight of the work Aunt Emily has done compared to the amount of success she has received has collapsed all hope that Naomi had in the government and in those who would try to aide the Japanese-Canadians currently under siege. Naomi's Obasan and Ojisan attempt to protect both Naomi and Stephen through their stubborn silence. Every year on August 9th, Naomi and Ojisan walked out near a river and sit on a hill. To Naomi it seemed like a quiet pilgrimage that she did not understand. Ojisan would not tell her the reason they always made the walk. "From both Obasan and Uncle I have learned that speech often hides like an animal in a storm."(Obasan 4) Naomi searches for her answers and yet, her Obasan and Uncle do not help, but hide there answers fearfully. No matter how many questions she asked she was either ignored or brushed off with vague excuses like 'You are still too young.' While in a bathhouse with Obasan, Naomi attempts to play with a friend of hers from school; the friend tells Naomi quite brusquely stated that she cannot play because Naomi's family has tuberculosis. While not wholly true, Naomi's father has tuberculosis, Naomi did not even know what tuberculosis was and could not understand why the friend's family would not even speak to her. When questioned, Obasan simply replied, "Perhaps there was nothing to say." When she was little, Naomi told her mother much about her life, "I tell her everything. There is nothing about me that my mother does not know, nothing that is not safe to tell her" (Obasan 72). Unfortunately, Naomi was molestated by a man known to her as Mr. Gower when she was at the tender young age of four. "He lifts me up saying that my knee has a scratch on it and he will fix it for me. I know this is a lie. The scratch is hardly visible and does not hurt. Is it the lie that first introduces me to the darkness? The room is dark, the blind drawn almost to the bottom. I am unfamiliar with such darkness. The bed is strange and pristine, deathly in its untouched splendor." (Obasan 75) Mr. Gower, a fat and balding man, is at fault when considering the sources for Naomi's silence. The hideous experience with Mr. Gower caused Naomi to feel that it was her fault that he did it to her, and to believe that "If I tell my mother about Mr. Gower, the alarm will send a tremor through our bodies and I will be torn from her"(Obasan 77). Naomi keeps Mr. Gower a secret and thus begins Naomi's quiet life of non-communicative silence. Before Naomi can tell her mother and make her wrongs right, her mother leaves. Naomi did not know why, it is Japanese custom not to question or show sorrow when parting others, and she would not find out until much later in her adult life. When Naomi's mother left, it was to return to Japan. Along with Naomi's grandmother Kato, her mother was going to return to take care of Naomi's great-grandmother. Sometime after arriving, WWII broke out and the United States began their bombing of Japan. The mother and grandmother fled Tokyo for Nagasaki just before the Atomic Bomb was dropped on the city. Naomi's mother was caught in the blast of the bomb and was cruelly disfigured. Half of the flesh on her face was blown away leaving terrible scars. From the moment her bandages were removed in the Japanese hospital, Naomi's mother wore a cloth mask to hide her hideous disfigurement. Not only hiding her form from...