As all the Japanese living in Canada, Joy Kogawa and her family had a rough time due to the

'41 attack on Pearl Harbor. Being unable to fight the system, she used literature as a means of social action.Thus, 3 of her works: the short story obasan, the novel obasan and a childrens book: naomi's road tell the story of Naomi, who is a child of the evacuation. In this essay, I will focus on the short story "Obasan", trying to identify some instances of figurative language (mainly metaphors) in terms of I.A. Richards' diagram. In order to do that, I will mention the two component elements of a metaphor in Richards view: The tenor, referring to the concept, object or person meant(that is usually more abstract or poorly understood and needs the metaphor to clarify it), and the vehicle as being the image that carries the weight of the comparison or simply the different thing that the tenor is identified with. Another new concept related to these two elements is the ground. The tenor and the vehicle need to have something in common in order for us to understand the metaphor; in other words, they need to have a similar association or to have a common ground. In obasan the first metaphor that caught my eye , is the representation of grief as being both: An almighty tapeworm and a highwayman who blows up every moment of relief that tries to make its way down the road. The tenor (the grief) is a concept that does not have a simple definition.Which is why J. Kogawa provided two vehicles and emphasised the ground, in order to convey its meaning and depth.Sometimes, words fail to describe a feeling because its profoundness transcedes the limits of a language. Thats why, throughout the story, we see the recurent theme of silence. Obasan is unable to express her feelings,so she represses the grief that eats her alive, like a tapeworm. And we are given the most poetic reason for her attitude: The language of grief is silence . She is unable to get over her husbands death and refuses to move anywhere else because she feels connected to that house, where they lived as a family. Even though her two doughters left, departure for them being as necessary as breath, she can not leave the house that has become her blood and bones. Thus, she becomes trapped in her past. Another striking metaphor is related exactly to this image of her past, presented as a spider that snaps up its victims and leaves them locked up forever, dangling like hollowed out insect skins. So the past is no more the harmless paradise of memories but a very dangerous spider web from which one can not escape. The last metaphor to analyze is in the last paragraphs, where we witness an incredible imagery of human life and nature as being one and the same. The branches of the trees are our veins, the blood cells lay dormant in the trunks of our bodies, waiting for a spiritual osmosis to awaken and entrust them with movement and dance.