Naomi's Road: Original Version

Naomi's Road tells the story of Naomi Nakane - a little girl with "black hair and lovely Japanese eyes and a face like a valentine" - and her Japanese-Canadian family during the 1940s, when Canada was at war with Japan. We follow Naomi and her older brother Stephen from their home in Vancouver to an internment camp in the interior of British Columbia, and then to a farm in Alberta, seeing the effect of war through the eyes of a child growing up with hardship and prejudice, Yet Naomi's adventures lead her to see the world with hope and understanding. As Joy Kogawa says of Naomi, "If you walk with her a while, you will find the name of a very important road." Based on her award-winning novel Obasan, Naomi's Road is Joy Kogawa's first book for Children, and the first Canadian novel for young readers to deal with an important and painful episode in Canadian history.