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275 pages hardcover
Finished books available
US: Harcourt Brace, Jan 2004
Canada: Knopf, Fall 2003
Netherlands: Ambo/Anthos
French Canada: Editions les Allusifs
(Photo: Jerry Bauer)
Time Out New York selected Kerri Sakamoto, as one of six novelists among 99 People to Watch in 1999. In October 1997 The New York Post described her first novel The Electrical Field as “the most sought-after book of the season.” Kerri Sakamoto is a Toronto-born writer of fiction, film scripts and visual-arts criticism. In 1999 she spent three months working on One Hundred Million Hearts in Japan as a guest of The Japan Foundation.
a novel by Kerri Sakamoto
A STORY OF LOVE AND MEMORY, PATRIOTISM AND SACRIFICE, AND GUILT AND COMPLICITY IN THE CONTEXT OF WAR
Miyo, an only child, and her elderly, austere father, Masao, live a reclusive life together in Toronto, as they have since Miyo's mother died. When her father also dies, Miyo learns that he had been briefly married to a woman named Setsuko. Their daughter, Hana, was given up for adoption and raised in Japan. Miyo and Setsuko travel to Tokyo to meet Hana, who is consumed by bitterness for having been abandoned by her birth parents. Hana has been engaged in an obsessive effort to probe the wartime history of Masao, and Miyo is shocked to learn that he was a kamikaze pilot in the Special Attack Forces.
When Hana suddenly disappears, Miyo tracks her to 
Yasukuni Shrine, the resting place for the spirits of the war dead, where Hana is sequestered with the widows of the perished kamikaze pilots, who meet once a year to share their grief and memories. It is there that Miyo begins to appreciate the alarming truth of how her father survived the war, and at what cost. She also learns to appreciate the war from an entirely new point of view—that of the Japanese, especially the men sent off to die for the emperor.
PRAISE FOR ONE HUNDRED MILLION HEARTS
“Painstakingly precise.. Sakamoto is masterful in showing us the world through her [heroine's] eyes.” — THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Sakamoto really shines.” — NATIONAL POST
“Sakamoto fashions haiku-like prose with a breathtaking economy of words.... One Hundred Million Hearts paints a portrait of Japanese life...that is similar to those in David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha.” — THE VANCOUVER SUN
“A dazzling, multilayered novel of loss and regret, of love and death.... Sakamoto writes with a keen, almost merciless eye for detail, a painter’s eye for scene and setting.” — OTTAWA CITIZEN
“Evocative...poignant.... In Miyo, Sakamoto has created a marvelously complex, compelling character who is transformed...from a brave but helpless cripple to a woman who runs and dances and loves, not in innocence, but in full, terrifying knowledge.” — MONTREAL GAZETTE
“In a novel where history could have easily overtaken fiction, Sakamoto invests in each of her characters so fully they seem to live their own lives, struggle with each other through real conflicts, and dance beautifully around the give and take of love.... The tension between her characters covers the spectrum in the conflict over duty and sacrifice.” — QUILL & QUIRE