Joy Kogawa`s Obasan deals with the interaction between the mother/daughter conflict and the protagonist`s finding an identity. The narrator, Naomi Nakane, suffers from the mysterious disappearance of the mother and the loss of communication with her. In the course of the story, this lack of a mother keeps Naomi from establishing her identity as a grown-up. Even though Naomi`s mother is disfigured and then dies in the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Naomi and her brother, Stephen, do not hear about her mother`s death because the mother asks her relatives not to tell her children about her own death. Because nobody explains to her why her mother left and why she does not come back, Naomi`s waiting seems to go on forever and even time hardens like a stone. Reading the letter of her grandmother, however, Naomi discovers the explosion of the atomic bombs in Nagasaki. Finally, she figures out what happened to her mother and why her mother had disappeared forever. Also, the misunderstanding and the grudge toward her mother`s lack of communication fade away from Naomi`s heart. After Naomi finds her ancestors` and her mother`s past, she understands her mother and comes to establish her own identity as a Japanese Canadian woman. In Obasan, the absence of Naomi`s mother signifies Naomi`s own problematic absence of identity. During her struggles to find her mother, Naomi`s psychological health and self-consciousness have been cured. Naomi`s reconstruction of the mother-daughter bond represents a recovery of her Japanese heritage, and also the subjectivity of the mother is re-constructed by her daughter`s discovery of her mother and of a new stronger self in which both mother and daughter are bonded.