ジョイ・コガワ
(Joy Kogawa)
ジョイ・コガワは1935年、日系カナダ人の両親のもとバンクーバーに生まれた。第二次世界大戦中、ジョイと家族はブリティッシュコロンビア州スロカンへの強制移住を余儀なくされたが、この不当な扱いについてコガワは1981年の小説『おばさん』で取り上げている。コガワは日系カナダ人の歴史についてカナダ国民を啓蒙する活動に取り組み、政府による正式な補償を求める闘いにも積極的に参加した。コガワはアルバータ大学とサスカチュワン大学で学んだ。最新の詩集は『 A Garden of Anchors 』。2000年に出版された長編詩『 A Song of Lilith』は、リリアン・ブローカの絵で、アダムの最初のパートナーである神話上の人物、リリスの物語を語り直したものである。コガワは1986年にカナダ勲章受章、2006年にはブリティッシュコロンビア勲章受章となった。 2010年、日本政府はコガワさんに「日系カナダ人の歴史の理解と保存への貢献」を称えて旭日章を授与した。コガワさんは現在トロント在住。
2013年7月更新
この執筆者によるストーリー
Excerpt from "Gently to Nagasaki" (a work in progress) - Chapter 46
2013年9月10日 • ジョイ・コガワ
It was a quirky millisecond contact of eyes in the city of angels, city of strangers. In 2011, I was in Los Angeles, attending an Asian American symposium. During a break before supper, Ray Hsu, a poet from Vancouver and I were exploring an area called Japan town. My first time there. Gift shops, restaurants, tourists milling about. We were wandering back out of the plaza when from out of nowhere a voice called, “Joy!” I turned, looked up. “It’s …
Excerpt from "Gently to Nagasaki" (a work in progress) - Chapter 42
2013年9月5日 • ジョイ・コガワ
My brother said the actions by a church that did not want us back were deliberate and intentional and had been concealed by a “code of silence” until Greg revealed them. The contrast between the companion churches in Vancouver and Seattle is a tale of two bishops, a good shepherd and a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Bishop Huston tends his flock. Bishop Heathcotte rends them. Love was alive in the Seattle church. The personal belongings of his exiled parishioners were …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 3
2011年1月23日 • ジョイ・コガワ
Read Part 2 >> The word “rape,” the word “murder,” the word “horror,” the word “atrocity,” the word “massacre,” none can adequately describe ‘that for which there is no word.’ Minnie Vautrin and Iris Chang were both, in the end, swallowed up in the quick sand. Iris Chang, a young woman of thirty-six committed suicide in 2004, driving away from home at 3:00 a.m. with a revolver, leaving a two-year-old son and a husband. I am told by a friend …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 2
2011年1月16日 • ジョイ・コガワ
Read Part 1 >>Where, dear Goddess, on the arid landscape of the battle of words, does caring lurk? How, dear Cherry Tree, can we come to the place of caring? Is it in the flight of the wisp through curtains of stone words? It is, she tells me in the spaces between words and stones, in the spaces within sound and no sound. Caring comes to walk with us in the cracks of the day and the night, as we …
From Gently to Nagasaki - Part 1
2011年1月9日 • ジョイ・コガワ
Marjorie Chan and I sat in the teal blue armchairs in my apartment nibbling rice crackers and sipping green tea. I’d seen her harrowing play, A Nanking Winter, a few months earlier. It addressed one of the roots of the ongoing animosity between China and Japan—the deep historical traumas of Nanking, 1937. When we began the conversation, we were simply two writers, one young, one old, one of Chinese ancestry, one of Japanese, and from our great distance of time …
