Kerri Sakamoto follows up her first novel, The Electrical Field, with a novel that revolves around a timely subject: men who fly planes into enemy targets, killing themselves in the process.

The narrative follows Miyo, a young woman whose Canadian-born Japanese father, Masao, returned to Japan during the Second World War to serve as a kamikaze pilot. For reasons unknown to Miyo, her father never fulfilled his ultimate sacrifice to the Emperor and lived to raise Miyo in Toronto as a single parent. After his sudden death, Miyo travels to Japan with Masao’s estranged second wife and is introduced to Hana, the half-sister she never knew. A charismatic artist obsessed with the history of the kamikaze pilots, Hana slowly unveils the truth about their father’s service in the war.

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. It is only near the end, when the focus drifts away from Miyo in favour of new characters – the widow of a kamikaze pilot and her second husband – that Sakamoto’s research becomes more intrusive.

This foray into Japanese history, however, is not fruitless. Hana tells us: “One thousand schoolgirls each sewed a tiny bundle of red on his white sash that he tied around his belly.” The Western stereotype of the kamikaze as a bloodthirsty villain falls apart when one imagines those thousand hearts and wishes cradling the pilot on his final dive. This is not to say that Sakamoto’s story should be taken as a justification for war – the tension between her characters covers the spectrum in the conflict over duty and sacrifice.

Sakamoto’s writing, which occasionally flirts with greatness, tends to rely too much on melodrama, as if every paragraph must carry the weight of the novel’s climax. A novel needs spaces, rests between the notes. On the other hand, a symphony at the peak of its crescendo, though often overwhelming, still shakes the heart in its cage.