A Conversation with Author
Q. Your book draws much of its
emotional intensity from the legacy of the Japanese
Canadian internment experience. What was your family's
experience during the war?
A. My parents, my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents
were all interned in camps during the war. After the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, all Japanese Canadians living
on Canada's West Coast were herded into the exhibition
grounds in Vancouver where for several months they
slept in horse stalls. They could bring only what
they could carry, leaving most of their belongings
behind. Families were split up with able-bodied men
sent to set up camps and work on road crews. The others
were transported to the camps—in hastily resurrected
mining ghost towns—in the mountains of British
Columbia. There they lived in tarpaper shacks. It
was a very ardurous existence. My mother was one of
the oldest in a family of eleven siblings. One of
her brothers died in the camp after being injured
on a baggage crew. His death may have been partly
due to inadequate medical facilities.
Once the war effectively ended with the bombing of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese Canadians were released
from the camps and allowed to resettle only in designated
areas of eastern Canada. My grandparents lost the
homes and businesses they had worked so hard to acquire
before the war, which were sold off by the government.
My mother worked as a domestic and then as a seamstress.
School was not a possibility for her. My father luckily
had finished high school by this time. Like my mother,
he came from a large family and had to work immediately
to help buy a new home for them.
Q. How does the history of internment
in the United States differ from that in Canada?
A. When I lived in New York, I
was often surprised to learn that many people didn't
know Japanese Canadians were interned in camps just
as Japanese Americans were. Although the history and
events are very parallel, in some ways the Canadian
government's treatment of its 22,000 Japanese Canadian
citizens was much harsher than in the United States
where 120,000 individuals were interned.
In Canada, the goverment seized
and sold land and personal property and the proceeds
were used to build the camps. In other words, they
made Japanese Canadians pay for their own incarceration.
In the United States there were panic sales, looting,
and depreciation, but no goverment sale of property
because of constitutional protections. Families were
not broken up in the United States as they were in
Canada. American citizens were permitted to return
to the coast in 1945 while Canadians were not allowed
back until 1949. And in Canada, a policy of exile
to Japan and dispersal eastward continued for years
after the war ended. These policies were intended
to permanently destroy the Japanese Canadian coastal
communities.
Q. In what ways has the internment
experience affected those who were interned and their
descendants?
A. My parents were teenagers at
the time of the internment and I belive the experience
affected their lives profoundly. My parents' schooling
was curtailed, and I believe their generation (called
nisei) lost its sense of possiblity for the future.
The loss of opportunity is difficult to quantify.
No one talked about internment
—not the history books at school and certainly not
my parents at home. There was a collective silence
among Japanese Canadians that had to do with a sense
of shame, a sense that somehow they were to blame
for their incarceration. As I recall, I first learned
about internment from reading something in a magazine,
then I began to ask my parents questions that made
them very uneasy. It was not until the redress movement
—the lobby to secure an apology and restitution
from the government—gained momentum and public
support that Japanese Canadians started to speak out.
I worked in the movement for two years, and in the
beginning my parents refused to attend the meetings
I helped organize; so did many others. It was the
idea of being visible once again that was uncomfortable
for them, even threatening.
Things have changed over the ten
years since redress was attained. More people speak
about their experiences, memoirs have been written,
films have been made. But certain scars still remain.
It seems sad to me that there is no Little Tokyo or
Japantown anywhere in Canada—only vestiges of the
original one in Vancouver. This is the legacy of the
Canadian government's policy of forced dispersal.
There has been, as a result, a kind of cultural impoverishment
for my generation. I believe this is because our grandparents
and parents were forced to relinquish the artifacts
and rituals of their cultural identity, leaving behind
family heirlooms when they were evacuated, sometimes
destroying items fearful it would signal disloyalty
to Canada and an allegiance to Japan. Of course, for
many, Japan was a country they had either left behind
decades earlier or, as Canadian-born citizens, had
never even seen.
Q. How did the personal history
affect your writing?
A. I grew up in the shadow of internment.
I felt that history cast itself over the present because
it remained perpetually unspoken. I grew up in the
suburbs of Toronto, which in the '60s and '70s were
predominently white. Racial taunts were a fact of
daily life. My response was silence—not unlike
my parents' response to the internment. As I got older,
I felt compelled to articulate my response to that
racism. My work in the redress movement helped me
to do that and my early writing grappled with the
difficulties of expressing the anger and sadness I
felt. As a child of internees, I felt and witnessed
its residual effects. I felt compelled to write about
that.
My book focuses on the trauma and
repression associated with the experience of internment
and the particular ways individuals carry this history.
I wanted to portray the characters in my book as individuals
with their own personal experiences that were colored
by internment in very different ways. For example,
the protagonist, Miss Saito, is traumatized by memories
of her brother's death; the trauma and tragedy are
compounded by the fact that he died in an internment
camp.
My mother often talked about her
teenage brother who died in the camps. There was a
photograph of him on our dining-room table. At family
gatherings, I'd hear stories of his kindness, his
winning charm, and how handsome he was. He became
a mythical, tragic figure to me—all the more tragic
because he died without a country, without a home.
My uncle was the inspiration for the character of
Eiji, although in the book, his death has been completely
fictionalized.
Q. Where did the image of the
electrical field come from?
A. I grew up in the suburbs where
those vast open hydro fields cut a swath through the
landscape and you see those huge, oppressive towers
going on in the distance. I walked past those fields
on my way to and from school every day. After living
in New York City for several years, I revisited the
place where I grew up and saw those fields with a
fresh eye. And after viewing the old sites of the
internment camps, I sensed an odd connection between
the two landscapes. At one point in The Electrical
Field, Miss Saito looks out onto the grassy field,
the houses on the other side, and Mackenzie Hill in
the distance and is reminded of the camp: the floor
of the valley in the mountains where the rows of tarpaper
shacks stood. It's a reflection of her psychological
state: she hasn't yet left the camp behind. She hasn't
yet let the memories surface.
Q. Miss Saito is such a disinctive
character. How did she come into being and why did
you choose her to narrate the story?
A. I suppose Miss Saito is what
one would call an "unreliable narrator" because the
reader cannot trust her to consistently tell the truth
about events and her role in them. The murders that
occur at the beginning of the book function as a kind
of flashpoint for her memories—memories of what
actually led up to the murders and, at the same time,
of the death of her brother in an internment camp
thirty years earlier. Because her memories are painful
and repressed, they surface in fragments that, over
the course of the book, gradually piece together to
form a complete picture by the final pages. In that
way, The Electrical Field is a kind of psychological
mystery.
What results, more than an unreliable
narrative, is a kind of narrative of self-delusion,
of trauma. It was important to me that there be a
unity between the story being told—about the pain
of remembering or forgetting a traumatic event—
and the way in which it is told. I know that Miss
Saito is a challenging character to contend with;
I wanted to imbue her with a psychological complexity
so that it would be impossible to see her simply as
a victim of racism. She is difficult to love—perhaps
because she finds it difficult to love herself—
but I'm hopeful that readers will ultimately feel
a compassion for her. I believe the book culminates
in redemption for Miss Saito.
Q. The book has received a great
deal of attention in Canada for a first novel. How
do you feel about that? Does that put pressure on
you in terms of your second novel?
A. To be honest, it's been both
thrilling and overwhelming. When you're typing away
in your solitary hovel, it's difficult to imagine
an audience for your strange little thoughts apart
from your best friends and your loving mother. Now
that it's out, it's a wonderful relief and pleasure.
At the same time, the public aspect of publishing
a first novel is such a contrast to the private experience
of writing it. It's definitely a challenge to reconcile
those two experiences. But I'm learning. With regard
to a second novel, the way the first has been received
in Canada has been a great encouragement to me. I
feel more confident to call myself a writer. I'll
be a novelist when the second one is written.
Q. What will your next book
be about?
A. I'm in the midst of research
for a novel that will be set partly in Japan where
I've just returned from. It's about twin sisters of
Japanese descent who only learn about each other's
existence on their thirtieth birthday. One has been
raised in Tokyo, the other in Toronto. The Canadian
sister goes to Japan in search of her twin. Like The
Electrical Field, the book will address issues
of history casting its shadow over the present, specifically
the legacy of the bombing of Hiroshima.
It will also deal with the experience
of a third-generation Japanese Canadian, not unlike
me, going to Japan for the first time, not being able
to speak the language—being, in effect, a cultural
outsider. I'm very interested in the idea of "return"
to a mythical homeland—a reverse of the more familiar
narrative of east to west migration.
Discussion Questions
- Kerri Sakamoto describes The
Electrical Field as a "psychological mystery."
In another sense, it is a traditional murder mystery:
a woman and her lover are found killed, her husband
and children are missing. How does it both use and subvert
the conventions of the mystery novel? Think perhaps
of the interview with the detective and of Miss Saito
and Sachi's searches for "evidence" at the murder sites.
- How do questions of guilt and blame play themselves
out, not only in the murder but in the death of Miss
Saito's brother Eiji and the legacy of the internment?
How, especially, do Miss Saito and Yano deal with
these issues?
- Which of the characters do you sympathize with?
Why?
- Why is the novel named The Electrical Field?
What sort of emotions and memories do the electrical
towers evoke in Miss Saito?
- Compare that backdrop to the ocean of her childhood,
even to the internment camp. How does Sakamoto use landscape
to convey both mood and meaning?
- What do you make of Miss Saito's obsessive cleanliness?
Is it merely a ritual that helps her pass the days or
is it linked to her attitude toward the past, trying
to simultaneously circumscribe and preserve it?
- What do you make of the scene when Chisako pulls
up her shirt to show Miss Saito something—presumably
a bruise or a cut—and Miss Saito sees nothing?
- How different are Yano and Miss Saito's feelings
about the internment and where exactly do they differ?
- Miss Saito is cast as a witness, even a voyeur—
she stands at ther window looking out, she spies on
Sachi and Tam, Chisako enlists her as an audience for
her stories of Mr. Spears. However, much of the novel
is concerned with that which cannot be seen: the whereabouts
of Yano and the children in the days following the first
murders, the goings-on in Tom and Keiko's house, what
Stum does when he is away from home. How does the novel
use this tension to explore the limits of Miss Saito's
perception? Perhaps tie this to her role as what Sakamoto
calls an "unreliable narrator."
- The fact that the two sets of murders that frame
the story are remote, relayed back only through the
newspaper, helps emphasize the alienation and isolation
of Miss Saito. In what other ways does Sakamoto heighten
Miss Saito's distance from the world around her?
- Miss Saito is unable to keep her thoughts to herself;
her memories always bleed into the present so that she
catches herself participating in decades-old conversations.
What do you make of this habit? In light of this, do
you believe her when she says that her past "mattered
little now"?
- What does Japan represent to Miss Saito? To Yano?
To Chisako? How and why does Chisako play off others'
conceptions of Japan?
- How does Sakamoto use issues of naming or translation
to highlight relationships or power dynamics? Think
of Sachi and Tam's "game" of naming and touching or
Miss Saito's relationship with Sachi or Keiko or Yano's
hatred of Mackenzie Hill.
- Sakamoto claims that "the book
culminates in redemption for Miss Saito." Do you agree?
If so, what realiation brings about that redemption?
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