Daruma Days

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

These 11 crisp and moving stories convey more than a century of
Japanese-Canadian experience. With images and narrative that cut to the
core of what Issei, Nisei, and Sansei have lived through, Terry Watada
conjures up a broad spectrum of Japanese Canadians living in Canada
before and after World War II.

At the heart of it all lies the deep homesickness felt by the first
generation of Japanese Canadians, the pain of broken communication with
parents felt by their English-speaking children, and the ongoing
struggle for reconciliation being made by the sansei, today’s
generation, whose experience may still include a sense of being
“other.”

The first story, “The Daruma,” centres on an embittered elderly
Japanese-Canadian woman who, faced with the prospect of being committed
by her son to a nursing home, chooses instead to commit suicide. The
last, “The Moment of Truth,” is fictionalized autobiography. The
author moves toward a homecoming of sorts after weathering “the storms
of history,” his own and his father’s. The final image here is of
stories and communal memories as messages in bottles cast into the ocean
of death to travel toward their true home in the minds of living
relatives.

Many of the stories catch the suffering of incarceration during World
War II, but all go beyond this to move, at least haltingly, toward
reconciliation. Fine writing.