To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

Books in Revi
they choose to relate personal experiences
of communication in perhaps the most
hermetic of literary forms. They tell the
readers, through the density of the poetic
medium, how complex, how emotionally
charged and memory-encumbered the
interior lives of these exiled women are.
One is drawn to and at the same time distanced
by these poems. They are voices of
intimacy with obstacles built in. No two
experiences are alike. The only commonality
is that the women are a long, long way
from home.
Who is the Daughter?
Maryka Omatsu
Bittersweet Passage: Redress and the Japanese
Canadian Experience. Between the Lines n.p.
Ann Decter
Paper, Scissors, Rock. Press Gang $12.95
Reviewed by Marilyn Iwama
In the preface to her book, Maryka Omatsu
promises a "personal account of the redress
years." The writing in Bittersweet Passage is
most convincing when Omatsu does tell her
story, for instance as she leads the reader
into her dead father's room, raging against
the father's lifetime of injustice. Equally
tantalizing is Omatsu's sliver of a tale
describing January, the month when there
is no work on the farm, and grandmother,
her friends, and all their children "move in
with one another, spending the time sewing
and enjoying each other's company."
Consistently, the vigour of Omatsu's text
emerges in such narrative vignettes of family
history, and in Omatsu's telling of how
the struggle by Japanese Canadians to
achieve redress of wartime injustice rewove
the unravelling tapestry of her family by
reuniting generations in a common effort.
Regrettably, in this thin volume Omatsu
also attempts an overview of Japanese
Canadian history from the beginning of
immigration to the present; a detailed narrative
often years of redress negotiations;
and an analytical foray into Ronald
Reagan's motivation surrounding his signing
of the Japanese American settlement.
This Omatsu sacrifices a potentially powerful
and simple telling of the personal and
the particular for what reads as a representative
record of the general, compromising
her rendering of this community's history
in Canada, and its struggle to redress
wartime wrongs.
Omatsu's historical summary offers conclusions
and conjecture presented hastily
and treated superficially, partly because the
book is short. Because of this, her text contextualizés
the central event inadequately.
Not surprisingly, this superficiality locks
Bittersweet Passage in a subtext of generalization.
As Omatsu tells it, first-generation
Japanese Canadians who "were universally
treated as second-class citizens" all met
with absolute "enmity" from the 'white'
Canadian community, and all found their
strength in their lineage from "the sun goddess
Amaterasu." Omatsu borrows heavily
from Japanese mythology throughout
Bittersweet Passage, to the point of comparing
Otto Jelinek with "Japan's samuraicowboy
icon, Miyamoto Musahi." This
interdependence of myth and universal
philosophizing is a dangerous one when
treating a political event, and Omatsu
snares herself in this trap, depoliticizing
redress to the point of "a timeless and universally
understood tale."
Further obscuring Omatsu's personal
story is her disturbing reliance on racial
stereotyping and physical features as modes
of characterization. At some point, she
describes most major actors in the redress
negotiations with reference to their ancestral
heritage, often predicating their behaviour
on their race. Frequently, this
dependence on racial characterization
extends to her treatment of complex political
conflict. For example, the early fight for
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