One Hundred Million Hearts

From the award-winning author of The Electrical Field comes this riveting story of love, guilt, and complicity in the context of war. Miyo and her father, Masao, live a reclusive life in Toronto. When Masao dies, Miyo discovers he harbored a secret life, including a previous wife and child. Miyo travels to Tokyo to meet Hana, her half-sister (who is obsessed with their father's war history) and is shocked to learn he was a member of the Special Attack Forces-a kamikaze. But if these pilots' code of honor required death, how did their father survive? Miyo learns the meaning of the Japanese wartime propaganda phrase "one hundred million hearts beating as one" as she travels through her father's past and his native land's present, witnessing the complex and lingering consequences of war.

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After the death of her widowed father, Miyo discovers that he had been secretly married once before and leaves Toronto for Tokyo to meet her half-sister Hana, only to be shocked to learn of her father's war history as a kamikaze pilot who somehow survived the conflict. By the author of The Electrical Field. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

DURING THE WAR my father learned to shoot a rifle, lunge with his bayonet and march the perimeter of Okayama Second Middle School, knees high and arms swinging. He had been born in Vancouver but sent to Japan for schooling, then to a farther away place he called Manchukuo. I couldn't find it on my map of the world. Manchuria, he said when I asked, but he never uttered it again. He never spoke Japanese except to count ichi ni to me, one two, when I woke up in the middle of night afraid, which rarely happens these days.

No one would look after me the way my father did. He laid me down when my breath twisted like a rope in my throat, or doubled me over when my heart pounded and raced and rattled my whole body. When the headaches came, he pressed his fingers into my left temple until I fell asleep. He rubbed my back, slapped my leg when the blood didn't flow. Good blood, he'd say when it came back. He saved me, just as he might have saved others as a soldier in the Japanese army had he ever been sent into battle.

Every day he'd drive me to and from school, pulling up by the doors after the other children had gone in. He was still a young man in those days, a young man not much older than my thirty-two years; a young man with chances. His hair was very thick and very black; his limbs were strong as he carried me up the steps I couldn't climb back then, my feet bouncing in thick-laced orthopedic shoes over the crook of his arm. He could have found someone, someone to keep him company, to take my mother's place. I remember him pausing for a moment to catch his breath, eyeing the other children around me, sizing up the differences. He was a giant among the dwarfs seated at their miniature desks, elbows out, hands in cups and saucers as Miss Whitten instructed: little fists planted in open palms. I remember my father towering over them, I remember him handsome, the way people look in old pictures when they were young, their faces still an open road.

Setsuko first came knocking when I was seven. She was like him, a nisei, Canadian-born Japanese. She was younger than him, a tough woman who'd weathered the internment camp as an orphan. So many times he broke their bowling dates at the last minute when I needed prescriptions from the pharmacy, books from the library; a snowsuit when it suddenly grew cold. My father even bought me my first brassiere, my first sanitary pads, and later on tampons, when I wanted to be like the other girls, though we didn't know if they'd work because of how my insides are shaped. A woman could have helped with those things but Setsuko had no feeling for me. One time my stomach started to ache just as she arrived, and he left her at the door to drive to the drugstore. I stood there staring up at her and she didn't say a word; finally I went to my room until my father came back.

By the time I was eight she gave up, seeing how little was left for her. One night weeks later, when he put me to bed and went to close the door, I saw him in that lonely light from the hall, and felt sorry for him. I said the only words I could think to say: "Thank you, Daddy."

"For what?" he shot back. It isn't in him to say much; he flailed for words. "What?" He was angry at my feeling sorry for what he'd lost. "Who am I?" he stammered, poking his chest with his thumb. I shrank under the covers, ashamed. "I'm your father," he said, almost shouting, "that's what I do!" He slammed the door, muttering to himself.

At Wellington's, where I copyedit legal documents, everyone seems bored, they want out; they have ambitions I overhear a cubicle away. I like the fact that my carefulness gets rewarded; that's why I've stayed ever since high school. Somewhere out in the world things happen to other people, decisions get made and written and arrive on my desk. It's a mystery. I have a window overlooking the parking lot in a valley amid blocks of steel that shimmer like knife blades but, like mountains, seem too big for people. In between, there are lawns vast as wilderness. Every so often, I see a man scamper out and squat with a cigarette, like the cooks I glimpsed in Chinatown alleys on drives to church with my father as a child. In the lot, people park their cars close together in the same spots every day, leaving it empty on one side.

One day my father doesn't show up. He's never late; he's early, always. It's past the usual five-thirty and I sit in my spot in the glass foyer watching for the green Chevrolet. Any minute now, I tell myself. People swing their briefcases, leave in twos and threes, then one by one, until I notice the music because it has stopped and, for the first time, I miss it. The lights dim to match the sky outside; my reflection melts away. I'd sit until morning if not for the guard, who taps me on the shoulder. "Excuse me, ma'am," he says in his slate-blue uniform, his face so fresh that I realize I've gotten older; ten years have gone by and my father has never not come.

I arrive home breathless from a careening taxi ride that has slid me from side to side on the cold cracked seat. In the driveway, the green Chevrolet is crushed on one side, one eye out. I find my father in the kitchen, a bandaged cut on his cheek. He's studying his hands, holding them close, then far away. He barely glances up. "Daddy," I start to say, then stop myself, harness my breath. I wonder how I'll survive; if he goes away, leaves me, dies, I may too.

For the first time, I must take the subway to work. I have no choice; my father's dizziness from the accident hasn't gone and his eyesight, I now learn, has long been deteriorating. His licence has been taken away and won't be given back. I plan which trains to take in which direction, try to guess where the escalators are. I lie awake the night before, practising.

In the morning, my father is all dressed up with no place to go; he's in his usual work clothes for the auto shop but seems like a man out of uniform. It's different leaving him at the door. Glancing up from the street, I see him in the window, watching me make my way toward the station. I know he's keeping count for me, an old habit. I remind myself that I have my own rhythm, my own pace that will get me where I need to go. I'll be just another body going from here to there.

On the train, there's a vicious rush to get out; I find myself pushed on all sides, wobbling; my left knee buckles. I step out just before the doors clamp shut. But my shoulders snap back, my knapsack is caught and the train starts to move. I'm pulled along, slowly at first, then faster. I scream but there's no one here for me. My feet are tumbling fast so I lift them. I see the blur below and the wall at the end of the station looming; beside it a long dark hole. I close my eyes and feel my hair whisked back, my face cold and bare with only eyes. This is what it feels like to move, to fly, for once.

Then suddenly arms are grappling for me, my body is yanked and jolted to a standstill; the train screeches to a halt. The ground is under my feet once more, and I crumple to it. The ride is over.

I open my eyes to passengers squished in against one another, staring at someone else's mishap from inside the train, their arms hanging from handles though they aren't moving. Down a few cars my knapsack is dangling, a little black pouch with my new subway tokens, my medications, my keys: a funny mole on the sleek silver body of the train. A man crouches close to me, watching with probing eyes, arms around but not on me. My legs are splayed in front, and at the sight of them I sob, I haven't left them behind, especially the crooked one, brittle as a cane. I'm crying for the first time in years. It makes me remember the last time, though the wetness on my cheeks feels unfamiliar. He touches my tears.

"Does it hurt?" the man asks, and it seems an odd question. My father has never asked; the doctors

Kerri Sakamoto is the author of The Electrical Field, which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. She lives in Toronto.