Yes, I know, the calendar says August, however I’ve been living in home renovation hell these past several weeks, so am horribly behind in my blog posts. Which just means you get to hear about all the lovely CanLit books I read last month, this month. Enjoy! J
Canadian author Kerri Sakamoto tackles the impact of the Japanese internment camps on immigrants and first generation Japanese thirty years after the war in her book, The Electrical Field.
Asako Saito lives with her ailing, bed-ridden, ninety-year-old father and younger brother in the old veterinarian’s house across the electrical field from the rest of the town’s settlements. Many Japanese, once released from the camps in British Columbia, moved east and settled in small communities, trying to put their shattered lives back together.
Across the field, Asako watches her neighbours come and go – Keiko and daughter Sachi, Yano and his wife Chisako and children Tamio and Kimi. These are the lives that intersect with hers as she walks the electrical field. Yano is desperate to see some form of government compensation for the Japanese who endured the camps, but few go to his redress meetings. Sachi’s mother ignores her, and so she spends most of her time with Asako, fueling her mother’s jealousy.
When Chisako is found murdered with her Caucasian lover and Yano disappears with the children, Sachi clings to Asako even more, desperate to find her boyfriend Tamio before it’s too late. Asako is drawn reluctantly into the child’s drama, dealing with her own guilt over confessing the affair to Yano.
The trauma and guilt arising from her friend’s death plunges Asako into a whirlwind of memories of life in the camps and her favoured brother’s death – another death she had a hand in – and her life begins to spiral out of control.
An interesting novel that travels back and forth through time in memory, and presents events from differing angles so the reader is left to wonder exactly what really happened, but then again, that’s what memory is – it’s not perfect and we always remember things a little differently than they actually were.
Till next time, happy reading!
L J
| TBR = 14 | WPL = 23 |
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