This 24-by-32-inch horizontal panorama portrays Joy Kogawa in Toronto—the celebrated Canadian author whose novel “Obasan” (1981) brought Japanese Canadian incarceration to international literary attention. The horizontal format places Kogawa within domestic or urban environment while the moderate dimensions suit portraiture of this significant cultural figure.

Created in 1998, the work documents Kogawa during the period when she continued writing and speaking about Japanese Canadian experience. “Obasan,” based partly on Kogawa’s own childhood incarceration in the Slocan Valley camps that Hayashi separately documented, remains the defining literary work on Canadian Japanese internment.

The Toronto location reflects Kogawa’s post-war life in Ontario, far from the British Columbia communities from which Japanese Canadians were forcibly removed. Like many survivors, she built adult life in regions far from the West Coast home that wartime policy made inaccessible.

The photo collage technique creates portraiture that documentary photography’s single exposure cannot achieve, the assembled composition capturing Kogawa from multiple perspectives. The fragmented assembly resonates with “Obasan’s” own narrative technique: memory fragments assembled into coherent story.

Kogawa’s portrait connects literary testimony to photographic documentation, together creating multiple forms of witness to Japanese Canadian incarceration. Her writing and Hayashi’s photography approach the same historical events through different media, together creating richer testimony than either alone provides.