Kagawa Fonds visit
Obasan is truly a Canadian classic and it plays a crucial role in recognizing the struggles of those who lived through the Japanese encampment during world war two. This past week in my ASTU class we took a trip to the RBSC and were able to look at some artifacts donated by Joy Kagawa. I was extremely surprised with the amount of care and precaution that used around these papers, as the 1980’s doesn’t seem like such a far away time. The documents I were able to look at came from three separate publishing companies that Joy Kagawa wanted to publish Obasan. It was extremely interesting to see these as the came from the year 1980, only one year prior to the release of her book. These three companies, however, chose not to publish Obasan. It was interesting to read these rejection letters and find out why these publishers didn’t want Obasan, one of them giving the simple reason that the novel wasn’t marketable. The critics given by the two other publishing companies were very interesting and I shared some of there observations whilst I read Obasan. The biggest critic these publishers had was that the characters weren’t fully developed and that this caused readers to become lost throughout the story. I agreed with this and this might have to do with Kagawa’s style of writing. This being Kagawa’s first novel, as a poet, it is understandable that she wasn’t able to develop the characters and plot as well as an experienced author. Reading through the publishers critics I was curious to see how Kagawa responded or changed Obasan in order to appease the publishers criticism. Another group in my table had the answer, they were given documents showing the exact critics from the publishing agencies. This was interesting, not only because Kagawa kept critics if her novel, but because Kagawa also annotated through the critics and wrote down the major things she had to change. Not only was it cool to see her actually taking criticism, but it shed some insight on her writing progress and the amount of effort she put into Obasan.