REQUIEM

Frances Itani. REQUIEM. HarperCollins, 2011.

Finished this April 10, after reading THE COMPANY WE KEEP for the U of M Book Club. I preferred this one, mainly because of the local interest and the historic connection. Itani is Canadian but I just discovered her. Requiem is about Bin O, a Japanese-Canadian artist whose wife just died and who decides to drive from Ontario to BC because some family crisis is calling. Turns out he was interned as a child in a camp near LILLOOET but they do not name the town. It is the first I knew there were camps up there along the Fraser, in the mountains, with sandy soil and hot summers. I only knew about Greenwood (where my mother was born), TASHME near Hope, and the several in the Kootenays – Sandon, Solcan, Kaslo, New Denver, etc., places Joy Kogawa wrote about and David Suzuki talks about. The structure trades off chapters of the travel across country, memories of his marriage and his wife’s sudden death, and memories of what happened to him as a child--moved off the island, off the coast, to Hastings Park, then inland, 100 miles from the water. It seems the camp they had was self-supporting, self-governing, more so than the others where there were overseers. I also enjoyed the parts about how Bin thinks as an artist, the role of water and the river linking his life and work.