Between Love & Loyalty

Author Kerri Sakamoto's new novel crosses boundaries

One Hundred Million Hearts is a very slow explosion. Author Kerri Sakamoto's second novel is striking and prolific, and follows in good pursuit after her first world acclaimed novel The Electrical Field.
Sakamoto's new book begins with Miyo, an only child scarred with birth defects, a mark from radiation. Her father Masao, who lives with her in Toronto, is very protective.
Slowly the story unfolds with Miyo's changes, from a reclusive daughter to a woman, and the struggle between two worlds: a love attained between life and death. The struggles are many, from her sexual discovery and road of independence.
When Masao dies, Miyo learns she has a half sister, and travels with Hana's mother to Japan. Miyo follows the wanderings and obsessive efforts of the artist Hana, who paints cherry blossoms on the walls of her room. Soon Masao's history in the war as a kamikaze unravels.
Kerri Sakamoto began writing during undergraduate. Then she says, "I stopped, fell off the wagon when I started to work. I worked in Public Relations when I realized that I wasn't so good at it. I got worried that I would never find out how much writing meant to me, and whether I might produce something. So I decided to quit my job, and go back to school, move to New York, change everything."
Change was anticipated, and from a tiny room she began writing a road of unshakable material that fills the soul and mind, something that good writing is meant to do
Tandem had the opportunity to get between the pages of Sakamoto's new book, while the author was on tour in Toronto. This was this scribe's second encounter with the author, in completely different circumstances, however Sakamoto's presence is continually engaging and vivid, as is her writing.

How long did you spend writing One Hundred Million Hearts?
"It took about four years. I did a lot of research in Japan, and it was really the first time that I started to fully explore my Japan and my Japanese heritage. I hope the next one doesn't take as long."

That's probably always the hope... How did it feel to finish the second novel?
"It felt good. I think because when you do a first novel it feels like 'Do I have another book in me?' So it was a good feeling."

How did you get from focusing on internment camps to someone's half-life in Japan?
"After I had written The Electrical Field, I felt that I had worked [the subject of internment camps] through and it had so much to do with understanding my own position as a person of Japanese descent in Canada. So after that, I felt ready to look to Japan as my country of origin, two generations removed, and try to understand all its beautiful traditions, but also the darker aspects of its history. Many remain unresolved for myself, anyway. So this book was a way of working through probing those kind of issues."

Do you see it as a bridge? You cross different boundaries. Breaking a silence.
"That's a really interesting way of putting it. I guess that's true. In trying to understand my relationship to Japan, I created these characters and look at these circumstances where people were both physically in Canada and in Japan, and in being that, crossing different histories. I felt that the internment and everything the war in Japan and the atomic bombing - these are presented as distinct histories, that have to do with national boundaries. But realistically, people are more caught in between places. This applies particularly to Canadians, many of whom have roots elsewhere. Our lives aren't that simple. We go back and forth now more than our parents did. And we have access to the global village through technology. I wanted to explore this one man's history of being born in Canada and then finding himself in Japan at that time, and having to become a believer in the Imperial system ethos. And Hana, similarly, because she has an outsiders position, even though she was born in Japan, but having this Canadian father, she is in a position to question that, and also as an artist, that whole past."

Did choosing to make Hana an artist give you more liberty to write and explore?
"Yeah. That was important to me because I have thought a lot about how we represent visually the horrific aspects of history, like the internment camps, and concentration camps, and the atomic bombing, and wartime atrocities. How do we ever convey in words or pictures, without them becoming palatable, or ever made beautiful and aestheticized? It becomes very problematic, to aestheticize something so ugly and horrific. That's something that Hana grapples with in her work. And she tries to shock people out of their complacency and what she sees as their complicity. This has been talked about by so many thinkers and theorists, you know, like poetry after the holocaust, and so I tried to probe those issues through Hana and the art dealer."

Mia fights not to fall back into her old role.
"I've always been interested in that relationship. The stoicism of my parents' generation, and the strongly imposed roles and demands placed on men at that time. I often thought of the Japanese-Canadian men who came out of the internment camps and had to forge their lives in the midst of this racist climate, while the women could stay within the domestic environment and they didn't have to face it head on. Dealing with the demands their gender and to be breadwinners, just to go out on the streets and hold their head up would have been so difficult, and I admire that generation of men who did that. I think it was a kind of emasculating experience to be interned. There were certain cultural factors around the stoicism and patriarchy, but I think it's also generational and it cuts across a lot of different cultures and communities - the father-daughter thing. But there's a special bond and an unconditional protectiveness that fathers feel for their daughters. It's just always fascinated me."

The title. Where does it come from?
"Military propaganda from Japan in WWII. The full military phrase was something like 'One Hundred Million Hearts beating as one human bullet to defeat the enemy.' It was used in different ways throughout the war. Near the end of the war, the phrase became, 'One Hundred Million Hearts will shatter as one jewel in the sky', i.e. we will die before we will surrender. Very romantic and inflated; there were more like 70 million Japanese at the time. I chose it as a title, because it a beautiful sounding phrase that's actually very insidious and used for evil purposes."

You're an important Canadian-Japanese writer. Has this affected your writing the second book in a different way?
"I don't think so. I hope not. I think about that audience, and want to be responsible to it, but I don't want that to prevent me from writing things that I believe are important. And I'm really grateful for that support. Seeing the people that I know around me - I'm very involved in my community - it's really very heartening to see how when these issues are dealt with in a book and its out there for a broad audience to read, it's a really positive thing for a whole community. People come up to me and say that they are proud of me. It's a very special feeling. It's like having this great big extended family."

One Hundred Million Hearts by Kerri Sakamoto is published by Knopf Canada. $32.95

Publication Date: 2003-11-23
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3372