The Return of a Shadow
By Kunio Yamagishi
Synopsis
Part One
Eizo Osada is a pre-World War II Japanese immigrant to Canada who, after 43 years of solitary labour, decides it’s time to reunite with his family in Japan. He had left his young wife and three sons at home to support them with wages from Canada. Eizo has inexplicably lost contact with his wife, and although his daughter-in-law continued to write, now even her correspondence has stopped. Yet duty-bound, Eizo continues to work and send money home; the last letter from his wife implored him to stay in Canada because of the terrible war-torn conditions in Japan. He lives anxiously alone in a foreign country with the hope that his grown family will accept him once he returns.
Many Issei felt it was a shame to have been interned and rarely talked about their internment experience to other ethnic groups, as did Eizo. He is buried under a bewildered, ambiguous smile and lives quietly in Canadian society as a shadow. He is also a shadow from his family and, in extreme loneliness, he needed a shadow, that is himself, to talk to. He is a man who had three-layered shadows.
Part Two
Only one son greets Eizo at the airport in Japan. His anxiety grows. Returning to his hometown, he finds his wife does not recognize him: she is insane. In the evening, she calls out to the East that he would come back to her quickly. With his heart broken, he blames himself for not coming home sooner. The family of his eldest son does not welcome him, nor does the tightly knit rural community he once belonged to. By chance, he learns the family is seen as a laughingstock because of his wife’s condition, and now, so is he. And yet there were moments when Eizo vainly thought that he saw sanity in his wife’s eyes. Every family member talks as if they were concealing something. Finally, Eizo is told by his third son, a shrewd businessman, that his wife had eloped 23 years ago with another man. After the man had deserted her, she became mentally ill, calling out every night—not for Eizo—but for her lover to come back to her. Eizo bitterly realized his time and struggles in Canada for his family were in vain.
Part Three
Devastated, Eizo calls a family meeting to explain what he had endured in Canada to support them. Three chapters describe his horrific experiences in British Columbia: the discriminatory Canadian society and how the Japanese lived before the WWII, a Vancouver Island logging camp full of danger, the exploitation of bosses in the logging camp, the bombing of Pearl Habor by the Japanese Imperial Navy and the unrest of the Nikkei in Little Tokyo, a series of Federal Government’s policies towards the Japanese, the forced labour camp on the Yellowhead Highway, the introduction of ‘Mass Evacuation’ policy, plus, the fact that a “Mass Evacuation’ was not imposed on German and Italian descendants, life in Tashme internment camp: the first winter’s heavy snowfall caused the internees’ misery, the anger of the Japanese towards the sale of their properties without consent and the use of the proceedings for their life in the camps, the ‘Loyalty Survey,’ the end of the war, the shock and anguish of the internees who had believed of Japan’s victory and liberation from the camps by the Japanese military, another forced relocation to the East, heart-rending farewells to their families and siblings by those who were leaving for Japan, and the Japanese’s life in the East in hiding their identity.
To be continued…
Pamela Wonnacott
In this heart wrenching story of loss and perseverance, the author deftly guides his readers on an emotional journey through time and place. His ethnicity, as a Japanese Canadian, lends authenticity to his protagonist’s agonizing choices post Interment in British Columbia’s Interior. Thoroughly researched and masterfully executed, Kunio Yamagishi’s debut novel – The Return of a Shadow – is a must read.