Abstract
This heated argument between a brother and sister after the detective’s visit following the murder of a neighbor and her lover goes to the heart of issues about identity and monstrosity that are explored in Kerri Sakamoto’s The Electrical Field. In this discussion about contemporary Canadian literary traditions and the revision of national and cultural identities through fiction by racial minority writers, what might be the function of images of monstrosity in a novel written by a young Japanese Canadian woman in the late 1990s? Are they confined to the accusations hurled in a family quarrel? On the contrary, as I shall argue, the monster image has a wider resonance here, for this is a story that returns to a deliberately forgotten episode in Canada’s recent past that casts its uncanny shadows over the present. This novel takes as its subject the psychological legacy of the internment of Japanese Canadians in World War II after Pearl Harbor, which was undergone by Sakamoto’s parents and relatives and was first written about in fiction by Joy Kogawa in her novel Obasan (1981). Unlike Kogawa who was interned as a child, Sakamoto born fourteen years after the war looks back to an experience of which she saw only the aftermath.
“Is that what you think of me? That I’m the monster?”
“Why not?” he reeled. “You’d do anything to stop me from having a life besides you and Papa. I can’t even have a friend to myself. Even Yano!
(The Electrical Field)1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Kerri Sakamoto, The Electrical Field (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998), 135. All further references to this novel will be included in the text.
Eva Tihanyi, “A Sequel to Internment: Eva Tihanyi speaks with Kerri Sakamoto,” Books in Canada 27.6 (September 1998): 2–3.
In 1942 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the 21,000 Japanese Canadians (either Canadian born or naturalized citizens) living in British Columbia west of a line drawn a hundred miles inland from the Pacific Coast were evacuated to camps and detention centers in the interior of the province or sent to work as laborers in the sugar beet fields of Alberta and Manitoba. Their property was confiscated and after the war they were given the choice of being deported to Japan or moved east to the prairie provinces, Ontario or Quebec, but were not allowed to return to British Columbia. “Only in 1988 were they granted Redress by the Canadian government in the form of an official acknowledgement of the injustice, an individual cash settlement to 14,000 internees still living, and a monetary award to the Japanese Canadian community.” I am indebted for this information to John Herd Thompson’s Ethnic Minorities during Two World Wars, Canada’s Ethnic Groups 19 (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association with the Support of the Multiculturalism Program, Government of Canada, 1991). See also Ken Adachi, The Enemy that Never Was: A History of the Japanese Canadians (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Reprinted 1991); Tomako Makabe, The Canadian Sansei (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).
Robert C. Christopher, The Japanese Mind: The Goliath Explained (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1988), 184.
Guy Beauregard, “The Emergence of Asian Canadian Literature’: Can Lit’s Obscene Supplement?” Essays in Canadian Writing 76 (Spring 1999): 53–75.
Rosi Braidotti Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York Columbia University Press, 1994), 78.
Ibid., 80.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in Art and Literature, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 345.
For further discussion of the vocabulary of racism and the racialization process, see Smaro Kamoureli, Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2000), 175–221, from which the Adachi reference is taken. See also
M. Vautier, New World Myth: Postmodernism and Postcolonialism in Canadian Fiction (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 195–98, on the question of racist language in Obasan.
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 83.
Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Hougluon Mifflin Company, 1989), 24. See also
Albert Axell, The Kanaikaze (London: Pearson Education Ltd., 2002), a translation of the manual that Kamikaze pilots carried in their cockpits for inspiration.
Copyright information
© 2003 Coral Ann Howells
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Howells, C.A. (2003). Monsters and Monstrosity. In: Contemporary Canadian Women’s Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973542_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973542_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38675-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-7354-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)