The Electrical Field — Kerri Sakamoto

Winner of the Commonwealth Prize for First Fiction, finalist for the Canadian Governor General Award, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize: a rare and haunting debut about memory and murder, the unusual friendship between an aging Japanese-Canadian woman and a young girl desperate to uncover the truth.

When the beautiful Chisako and her lover are found murdered in a park, members of a small Ontario suburb in the 1970s must finally acknowledge certain inescapable truths about one another and the way their community has been shaped by the dark shadow of World War II internment camps. With all the suspense of a psychological thriller, The Electrical Field slowly exposes all those implicated in the murders -- particularly Miss Saito, the novel's unreliable narrator, through whom we gradually discover the truth. Like Kazuo Ishiguru in A Pale View of Hills, Kerri Sakamoto invokes a Japanese sense of the relativity of memory and reliability of consciousness. Miss Saito, middle-aged, caring for her elderly, bed-ridden father and her distracted younger brother, on the surface seems to be a passive observer. But her own disturbed past and her craving for an emotional connection will prove to have profound consequences. A masterful and elegant story of passion, memory, and regret, The Electrical Field reaches deep into the past and into Canada's communal response to war. A reading group guide is bound into this paperback edition.