Summary: Chapter 25
Naomi found out that the family had to move. At the time
she didn’t understand, but as an adult she has seen the government
letters ordering her family out of Slocan. As the family packed,
Nomura-obasan, Saito-ojisan, Sachiko, and Nakayama-sensei came over. The
minister led a service. By sitting on a box, Stephen accidentally cracked
one of his mother’s records. The service continued, and the priest
broke the communion wafer. Afterward, he said goodbye to everyone
and went off to lead another service.
Summary: Chapter 26
Father disappeared one day. People poured out of town
on trains. One day, Naomi and her family left Slocan. No one told
Naomi where they were going or where her father was.
Summary: Chapter 27
Back in the present day, Naomi expects Aunt Emily and
Stephen to arrive at Obasan’s soon. She feels exhausted with the
effort of remembering the past, and more broadly with the burden
of behaving politely, not staring, and trying to disappear. She
thinks that by delving into the past, she is escaping the present,
and vice versa.
She remembers talking to Aunt Emily in Granton after the
conference first mentioned in Chapter 7.
Naomi says that in 1945, families like hers
had to choose between moving east of the Rockies and going to Japan.
She knows that Kenji’s family went to Japan, where they suffered
greatly. She is no longer in touch with anyone from Slocan.
On that night, she asked Aunt Emily if Mother and Grandma starved
in Japan. They went for a walk, and Emily said she’d told Naomi
all she could. She then changed the topic to Nakayama-sensei and
his attempts to keep the community unified. She said no one in the
family got their land back, even Uncle Dan, who was an intelligence
officer in the Far East.
Naomi wondered if the efforts of letter-writers like Aunt
Emily did any good.
