Journal Entry 1 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Saturday, March 06, 2004

This is a beautiful book. It took about twenty pages to get into the story, but once there, I was hooked.

Nominated for a Governor General's Award for fiction in 1998 (and winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book the following year), The Electrical Field tells the story of Asako Saito, an unmarried, thirty-something nisei (second generation Japanese Canadian) living in Ontario, where she cares for her elderly father. The book is part psychological exploration and part murder mystery, and also provides important historical back-fill on the treatment of Japanese Canadians during WWII (in this respect, the book reminded me very much of Joy Kogawa's Obasan). Highly recommended.

W.W. Norton & Company has posted a reading group guide for this book here 

Journal Entry 2 by goatgrrl from New Westminster, British Columbia Canada on Thursday, March 18, 2004

I'm passing this book on to my pal Heather, who was kind enough to lend me Sakamoto's second book, One Hundred Million Hearts.