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 side of my face, but it isn’t enough, is it? It’s your hands . . . pulling the growth from the lining of my walls, but bring back the anesthetist turn on the ether clamp down the gas and bring on the chloroform . . .

Chapter 29, one of the most powerful in the novel, features this furious diatribe against Aunt Emily. To this point, Naomi has tolerated her aunt’s insistence that she think back on her childhood. She has sometimes evinced annoyance at Aunt Emily’s pushiness, but her reactions have been notably mild. Here, however, she lets fly with a full-throated rant. She is no longer concerned with keeping up a serene countenance or suppressing emotion for the comfort of those around her. Enraged and speaking honestly, she likens Aunt Emily to a mad doctor armed with folders and filing cards that work like scalpels, cutting into Naomi’s head and forcing out the bloody memories. The deterioration of the grammar toward the end of the passage reflects Naomi’s anger, which overflows the boundaries of commas and periods. The call for ether, gas, and chloroform suggests Naomi would rather die than be forced to relive her childhood any more.

Still, the fury in this passage does not mean that Naomi is permanently angry at her aunt, or that Kogawa wants us to dismiss the work of remembering as painful and unnecessary. Naomi’s metaphor is full of violence and blood, but it does not necessarily cast Aunt Emily as a villain. She is hurting Naomi, true, but she is also like a surgeon performing a necessary operation. She seems to sadistically want Naomi to produce more and more memories, a process that Naomi likens to blood pouring “down the side of [her] face”—but perhaps she is not sadistic at all, but rather intent on removing the poison from Naomi’s system. Naomi says that Aunt Emily is “pulling the growth from the lining of [her] walls,” an image that compares her childhood memories to a cancer that Aunt Emily is rooting out. The fury on display in this passage is directed here at Aunt Emily, but its real target is the memories and the people who forced those memories into being.