Floating City by Kerri Sakamoto

Floating City by Kerri Sakamoto

Written by an internationally renowned authority in the field, the founder of the highly regarded School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University, the book draws heavily on research done on three Continents: North America, Europe and Australia, to trace the discipline's historical evolution, its current problems, disappointing achievements, and promising trends. It concludes with a prospective look at the future of criminology and criminology of the future. Although the perspective is critical, the author's critique is constructive and he expresses a healthy optimism about the discipline's future and offers several guidelines as to how current deficiencies could be remedied and present gaps could be addressed.

Kerri Sakamoto was born in Toronto in 1959, the younger of two sisters. She has written scripts for independent films as well as writing extensively on visual art. In 1998 her first novel, The Electrical Field, was a finalist for a slew of awards -- the Governor General's Award, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award -- and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and the Canada-Japan Literary Award. The Toronto Star said Kerri Sakamoto represents a major new force in the landscape of Canadian fiction.

In The Electrical Field she wrote about the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War from the point of view of her own generation. Her parents, aunts and uncles and grandparents were all forced out of their homes after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when all Japanese Canadians on Canada's West Coast were herded into the exhibition grounds in Vancouver where for several months they slept in horse stalls. Able-bodied men were then sent away to work, the others transported to live in camps of tarpaper shacks in the mountains. When the war ended with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese Canadians were allowed to resettle only in designated areas of eastern Canada. Sakamoto's grandparents lost the homes and businesses they had worked so hard to acquire.

Kerri grew up in mostly-white suburban Etobicoke of the 1960s and '70s; her parents avoided talking about the camps, or even about Japanese culture and history, even though racial taunts were a fact of life. She found out about the internment camps at the age of twenty, reading a magazine article. Then she read Joy Kogawa's Obasan in 1981, and worked with Kogawa in the redress movement for two years, although her parents refused to attend the meetings. It was the idea of being visible once again that was uncomfortable for them. She felt compelled to write about the internment and its residual effects.

She had studied English and French at the University of Toronto, published some short stories, but then wasn't sure how she would make a living, and worked in a range of jobs, often libraries. Aged thirty, panicking about whether she would ever become a writer, she applied and was accepted to the creative writing program at New York University, where she studied with E.L. Doctorow and Peter Carey. She stayed in New York for six years, enjoying the talks and readings and films, and wrote about art for a gallery. By the time her work permit ran out, exciting things were happening in Canadian literature and she felt optimistic about returning to Canada; soon after her return, The Electrical Field, which she began writing while at NYU, was accepted for publication.

Her second novel examines the many Canadian- and American-born Japanese men who were in Japan at the start of the war and joined the military. Suffering racism in North America but aliens in Japan, they were not accepted anywhere. It was absolutely conceivable that some of the kamikaze might have been American- or Canadian-born... I think if you're anxious to prove your authenticity and your allegiance, what better way to do that? She spent four months of 1999 in Japan doing research. Unable to speak the language, she experienced being a cultural outsider as she visited war museums, and tracked down memoirs and wartime propaganda. The novel, which took five years to complete, reflects her interest in memory and the splintering of history. She is currently working on a new novel set in Manchuria, as well as a screenplay for The Electrical Field.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780345809902
ISBN 10	0345809904
Title	Floating City
Author	Kerri Sakamoto
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Vintage Canada
Year published	2019-08-20
Number of pages	272
Prizes	Winner of Canada-Japan Literary Awards 2018, Short-listed for Toronto Book Award 2018
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.