Japan after the war, hiding his ability to speak En-
glish and his identity as a Canadian.
The novel raises issues of “belonging” and
“home,” illustrating the complexities of being
a Japanese-Canadian nisei, at a time when both
Canada and Japan were highly xenophobic, and
a nisei was not recognized as a full citizen in ei-
ther country. Japanese Canadians were interned
in Canada; ironically, as the novel reveals, if
someone was discovered to be a nisei in wartime
Japan, he or she was beaten and ostracized for
being foreign-born. The extreme desire to belong
and the deep betrayal felt by the nisei when the
Canadian government interned them is exempli-
fied by the ultimate sacrifice of Setsuko, the nisei
second wife of Miyo’s father, who decides to give
up her daughter Hana for adoption in Japan in
an attempt to give her daughter the one thing she
and her husband never had as Canadian nisei: a
sense of belonging. She wants her daughter to be
Japanese, not excluded from both Canada and
Japan, not lost between the two identities. How-
ever, Hana becomes obsessed with uncovering the
truth about her absentee Canadian nisei father
and the past. Reconstructing her version of the
past through her art, she strings together traces
and images of the past into a jigsaw puzzle that
does not fit together.
The truth that Hana seeks is the self-same
quest for truth that drives the novel. Sakamoto
does something bold and political in One Hun-
dred Million Hearts. She shows the complexities
of loyalty to country, to ethno-cultural group, to
family, to partner, and to oneself. She explores the
human emotions that bind us and divide us, rais-
ing more questions than answers. Most impor-
tant, she asks her readers to question stereotypes
that, while creating an illusion of safety, become
sources of real dangers.
This book is simultaneously a product of its
time and a challenge to it. After the Japanese-Ca-
nadian community gained redress in September
1988 and produced many internment narratives,
Sakamoto pushes the limits of the historical Japa-
nese-Canadian identity. She builds on the narra-
tives that have come before hers, introducing new
identities to the pantheon of Japanese-Canadian
literary and cinematic figures meant to debunk the
myth of communal homogeneity and to help ar-
ticulate a more nuanced Japanese-Canadian iden-
tity that transcends simplistic stereotyping and
categorization. Sakamoto’s rendition of history in
this transgressive novel emphasizes that if people
are to actually learn from history then they must
understand it in all its complexities, not simply
have a vague notion of the reduced versions avail-
able for easy consumption.
Sheena WilsonOng, Han (1968– )
Han Ong was born and raised in Manila, the Phil-
ippines, and immigrated to the United States at the
age of 16. After settling briefly in Los Angeles, he
moved to New York City, where he currently lives.
He is the author of nearly three dozen plays, includ-
ing The L.A. Plays, The Chang Fragments, Swoony
Planet, Play of Father and Junior, and Watcher.
Some of his plays have been produced in the-
aters across the country and abroad, including the
Public Theater in New York City and the Almeida
Theatre in London. In 1997 Ong was awarded the
prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and, at
the age of 29, became one of the youngest people,
as well as the first Filipino American, ever to have
received the honor. He has also written two novels:
Fixer Chao and The Disinherited.
While Ong has certainly accumulated acclaim
from audiences and critics from within the theater
community, his plays have not enjoyed any com-
mercial success, presumably because of their ex-
perimental, avant-garde quality. Stage directions
sometimes call for absolutely no set at all, and the
disruptive, episodic nature of some scenes can
make his plays hard to follow. Ong also sometimes
inserts bizarre imagery; for example, in Middle
Finger, a flock of birds fly out of one character’s
hair. Some critics would describe such a gesture as
an example of magic realism, but Ong hesitates to
agree with such a label, opting instead to empha-
size the stark realness of the statements he wants230 Ong, Han