Kogawa was born Joy Nozomi Nakayama on June 6, 1935, in Vancouver, British Columbia, to first-generation Japanese Canadians Lois Yao Nakayama and Gordon Goichi Nakayama. She grew up in a predominantly white, middle-class community.[3]
During World War II, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and twelve weeks later Kogawa was sent with her family to the internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Slocan during World War II. After the war she resettled with her family in Coaldale, Alberta, where she completed high school.[4] In 1954 she attended the University of Alberta, and in 1956, the Anglican Women's Training College [5] and The Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.[6] She moved back to Vancouver in 1956 and married David Kogawa there in 1957,[7] with whom she had two children: Gordon and Deirdre. The couple divorced in 1968,[6] and the same year Kogawa attended the University of Saskatchewan.[6] She moved to Toronto in 1979 and has lived there since.[8]
Kogawa's published first as a poet, beginning in 1968 with The Splintered Moon. She began to work as a staff writer for the Office of the Prime Minister in Ottawa in 1974.[3] In 1981 she published her first prose work: Obasan, a semi-autobiographical novel that has become her best-known work.[9] Books in Canada awarded the book its First Novel Award for it in 1981, and in 1982 Kogawa won the Book of the Year Award from the Canadian Authors Association and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Kogawa adapted the book for children as Naomi's Road in 1985.[8]
A sequel, Itsuka (1992), was rewritten and retitled Emily Kato (2005), and then republished as Itsuka (2018).[10]
Obasan has been named as one of the most important books in Canadian history by the Literary Review of Canada and was also listed by The Toronto Star in a "Best of Canada" feature. Obasan was later adapted into a children's book, Naomi's Road (1986), which, in turn, Vancouver Opera adapted into a 45-minute opera that toured elementary schools throughout British Columbia. The opera was also performed before the general public in the greater Vancouver area, Red Deer and Lethbridge, Alberta, Seattle, Washington, and Ottawa, Ontario, at the National War Museum. Revival performances in November 2016 by Toronto's Tapestry Opera won rave reviews, especially in the Toronto Star, which recognized their setting as one "steeped in significance".
Although the novel Obasan describes Japanese Canadian experiences, it is routinely taught in Asian American literature courses in the United States, due to its successful "integration of political understanding and literary artistry" and "its authentication of a pan-Asian sensibility."[11]
Kogawa now lives mainly in Toronto, Ontario, but at one time divided her time between Vancouver and Toronto and was the 2012–13 Writer-in-Residence at the University of Toronto.[12] In 2018, Kogawa formed a group called Yojaros with a Vancouver-based Japanese poet Soramaru Takayama.
Kogawa wrote the narrative for the augmented reality game East of the Rockies, produced by the National Film Board of Canada and released in 2019.[13] The project won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Video Game Narrative at the 8th Canadian Screen Awards in 2020.[14]
The home of the last Japanese-Canadian Anglican parish in Vancouver is Holy Cross church.[[1]]
