Frances Itani’s Requiem: A Story of Reconciliation

By Sally Ito

Many years ago, my mother told me how my childless Nisei great aunt, who lived on a farm not far from Redwater, Alberta with her husband, had tried adopting a child of her brother’s who lived in southern Alberta. This would have been sometime in the late fifties or early sixties.  The brother had several children, so many in fact that it was thought that one of them could be spared to be ‘given’ to his sister. A daughter was chosen and driven up to the farm. She stayed for a time with my great aunt and uncle, but she was lonely and homesick. When next the brother came to visit his sister, the daughter went back home with them. And so my great aunt and uncle remained without children for the rest of their days.

Why am I telling you this story? Because this custom of giving one’s child to the childless is at the heart of Frances Itani’s novel Requiem. I was asked to blurb this book by editor Phyllis Bruce of Harper Collins this spring likely because of my familiarity with the historical events of the novel, but I am also familiar with this quiet practice amongst some Japanese families of a certain generation of giving their children away to childless family members. In the case of the protagonist Bin Okuma of Requiem, however, the child in question is himself given away by his parents, not to a childless family member, but to an educated and cultured tanin or stranger, while the family is interned in interior British Columbia. It is precisely the events of the war that have brought Bin’s original family, the Odas, and the bachelor Okuma-san together. Bin’s father and Okuma-san become friends. Okuma-san is a gentleman of many talents, but he is all alone in the world. Orphaned twice in his childhood – once by his immigrant Japanese parents who perished in a storm on a freighter, and then later by his adopted missionary parents, the Dobsons, who eventually took him to London where he learned music – and early widowed by his singer-wife, Okuma-san is a man abandoned by circumstance by all who might love him to the end of his days. Was it the pathos of his situation that prompts Bin’s father to give Bin to Okuma-san?  Perhaps, but there is more to this giving up of his son than Bin can ever know or imagine as a child.

It is only during a period of grieving and loneliness in Bin’s adult life that he can finally come to terms with his father’s decision.  The novel opens just after Bin’s beloved wife has died.  Living in eastern Canada with his only son away at university, Bin undertakes a long overdue car trip westward to journey back into the past and reconnect with his birth family. Understandably estranged from his birth parents with whom he has lost much significant contact, the time has come for him to face the circumstances of his past squarely. His father, now in his old age, is at last asking for him.

With a historical novel like this one, there are always the facts of the case which must be told to the reader, and there are the visceral experiences of the characters which must be felt by the reader at the same time. For the writer, it’s a fine balance between the telling and the so-called ‘showing’ and, depending on the reader, Itani may have erred too much on the ‘telling’ side. In Canada, the bar for the telling of the Japanese Canadian story has been set very high by Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and in some ways, writers that tackle the Japanese Canadian story in fiction trail in that novel’s wake.

And yet history must be told anew for every generation of reader.  As a reader and a Japanese Canadian, I am familiar with the facts of the case, but as a writer, I know the individual stories from this time in Canada’s history are myriad and complex, all filled with inherently dramatic details arising from each situation. But Itani’s novel is not only a ‘victim of unjust circumstances’ novel; Bin is well past the age of holding the government and its actions accountable for the circumstances Japanese Canadians were put through during the war. What he needs is a reconciliation with his father – the father who gave him away and who now wants to see him again before he dies. It is this desire and need for reconciliation that made this novel a compelling read for me, and what made me choose it as one of my best reads of 2011 for the Globe and Mail’s annual round-up.