From Library Journal
Itsuka translates to "some day," as in, someday ancient wrongs will be righted, old grievances will be redressed. This is the story of the long struggle by Japanese Canadians to receive compensation for the racist evacuation and internment policies carried out by their government during World War II. Many derailed lives never got back on track; many continue to carry the burden of the fight for redress. Naomi Nakane, raised by her gentle aunt and uncle on a prairie farm, finds herself thrust into the redress movement in middle age. She and her friends are up against not only a resistant government and its successive ministers for multiculturalism but also the insidious contingent within their own ranks who believe that a formal apology and a token compensation sum will suffice. In language at once spare and poetic, Kogawa's powerful polemic moves us to dream with her that "itsuka, someday, the time for laughter will come." Recommended.- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, OntarioCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The title means someday, and it refers to redress for the treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War II. Like Japanese Americans, Japanese Canadians were rounded up and imprisoned, but unlike their U.S. counterparts, they had their property seized and families separated by the government. This political yet lyrical novel tells the story of the Japanese Canadian community's long, anguished battle for redress from the vantage of a shy "spinster" who, through her involvement with the issue, discovers a passion she never knew existed. It's a simple, linear story told through the interior actions and observations of Naomi, the narrator. At times individual sentences and paragraphs transmute prose into poetry, and the gentle beauty of Kogawa's words--each chosen with loving care--make the quiet story sing. Mary Ellen Sullivan

From Kirkus Reviews
From Japanese-Canadian author Kogawa, a sequel to Obasan (1982) that--despite admirable intentions--reads more like a partisan political history than a novel. Continuing the story of her Japanese-Canadian family's deportation from their home in Vancouver at the beginning of WW II, Naomi recalls how her idyllic childhood on the West Coast suddenly ended, and how she and older brother Stephen found themselves living with their uncle and aunt (Obasan) in a remote prairie town. A place of few options and even less tolerance, the town was dominated by fundamentalists who preached hellfire and damnation and thought dancing a sin. Musically gifted Stephen finally left for Toronto, but Naomi, withdrawn and fearful of provoking local bigots, remained behind to become a schoolteacher and help her relatives. She also grieved for her mother, who went to Japan in the middle of the war and never returned, an apparent radiation victim--and this is to be expected in this very politically correct novel--of the bombing of Nagasaki. When her beloved uncle and Obasan die, Naomi is persuaded by feisty activist Aunt Em to move to Toronto. There, she works not only on the magazine that Em publishes for Japanese-Canadians, but also on Em's campaign to win reparations from the Canadian government for the losses the community suffered during the war. Though the cause is just, this long battle--exhaustively chronicled in every tedious detail--is relieved only slightly by Naomi's sluggish and preternaturally tepid romance with Cedric, an Episcopalian priest and fellow activist. Justice is finally done--the government will pay--but the victory has all the punch of reading Robert's parliamentary rules at a meeting of the local school board. Dull and disappointing: a novel that promises much--but delivers a great deal less. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Already a Canadian bestseller, Itsuka, the sequel to Joy Kogawa's award-winning novel Obasan, follows the character Naomi Nakane into adulthood, where she becomes involved in the movement for governmental redress. Much more overtly political than Kogawa's first novel, the story focuses on reaching that itsuka - someday - when the mistreatment of those of Japanese heritage during World War II would be recognized. Although during the war both the United States and Canada interned Japanese-Americans and confiscated their property, when the war ended the property of those in Canada was never returned to them. Itsuka is the story of the fight to get government compensation for the thousands of victims of the wartime internment, which was, unbelievably, only just accomplished in 1988. Both a moving novel of self-discovery and a fascinating historical account of the fight for redress, Itsuka's final message is one of inspiration and hope.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal