Kerri Sakamoto

Kerri Sakamoto (born 1960) is a Canadian novelist. Her novels commonly deal with the experience of Japanese Canadians.

Sakamoto's debut novel, The Electrical Field (1998), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. It also won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and was a finalist for a Governor General’s Award. Her second novel, One Hundred Million Hearts, was published in 2003. Both books have been published in translation internationally. She is presently at work on a third novel for which she received a Chalmers Fellowship. Sakamoto has given talks and readings and has participated in literary festivals in Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia.

Sakamoto is also known as a writer of screenplays and essays on visual art. She co-wrote (with director Rea Tajiri) the screenplay to the 1997 film, Strawberry Fields. She often collaborates with filmmakers as story editor or script editor on narrative, experimental and experimental documentary works. She has also written on visual art for museums and galleries in Canada and the United States, such as the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Fine Arts Centre, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Honolulu Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2004, she contributed a catalogue essay on the work of Painters Eleven abstract expressionist Kazuo Nakamura for an exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

In 2005, Sakamoto was appointed the Barker Fairly Distinguished Visitor at the University of Toronto.

Bibliography

• The Electrical Field. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1998.
• One Hundred Million Hearts. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2003.

External links

• One Hundred Million Hearts - book review

In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly refers to the dilapidated billboard of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The billboard appears in the Valley of Ashes as a symbol of God watching, and waiting, as the already death stricken valley turns into a desolate wasteland. The people that inhabit this place are far from rich, unlike most other characters in the novel, but are instead struggling to get by with a gas station, like Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. The once brilliant billboard oversees all poverty and destruction to every person who lives in this valley, but it now seems unconnected from society. This disconnection is representing God’s separation from every problem that has been created.