The Electrical Field
by Kerri Sakamoto
Nomination: Dublin Longlist 2000
Date Read: January 16, 2003
From Kirkus Reviews:
“A lugubrious debut novel describing a middle-aged woman’s attempts to come to terms with the mystery of her best friend’s murder. In comparison to most Westerners, the Japanese are famed for both their restraint and their highly developed sense of honor. This can make difficult burdens even harder to bear, of course, even after the passage of many years, just as it makes them harder to describe. In her narration, Asako Saito is well aware of this: “I had long ago understood you had to live in the midst of things to be affected, in the swirl of the storm, you might say. . . .You couldn—t simply sit and watch, imagining from time to time how such-and-such would feel, would be, what happened to others and not to you.” Like most Japanese living on the West Coast, Asako and her family were interned in camps during WWII, and the shame of this particular memory has not subsided in the intervening 30 years. Now living in Ontario with her bedridden father and her younger brother, Asako has remained close to her friend Chisako, whom she knew from before the war years. Unhappily married, Chisako begins an affair with a Caucasian and confides her secret to Asako—whose distress soon turns to horror when Chisako and her lover are found murdered. Under the prodding of the homicide detectives, Asako is forced to consider certain aspects of her friend’s life, and her own, including the possibility that Chisako’s own husband may have killed her after learning about the affair from Asako herself. If your friend has betrayed her husband, must you protect her from discovery? If your friend murders his wife, must you protect him from arrest? Even if the authorities who pursue him are the same men who imprisoned your own family? Tangled knots unravel slowly, especially when you—re not very eager to see them undone. An impossibly snarled tale, told in beautiful prose, but few readers will manage to plow through the fractured and introverted narration.”
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