Asako Saito stands at her living-room window looking across a field of electrical towers and into the undraped front window of an opposing house. Upstairs, her invalid father moans and cries, but never moves. Her sullen younger brother leaves for work in the morning, returning each evening in time for supper. Things continue this way for years. And not a great deal else happens in Kerri Sakamoto’s unusual first novel, except inside Asako’s perceptive but strangely confused mind, where memories from 30 years ago are more vivid than this morning’s breakfast, and nothing is quite what she wants to believe it to be.

Asako’s calm is disturbed, from the novel’s beginning, by the intrusions of her neighbours, Japanese-Canadians like herself. Their visits leave her with inexplicable and disturbing images: A pubescent girl, Sachi, appears on her porch, filthy and hysterical, then runs away. Chisako, the beautiful wife of the ugly, aggressive Yano, gingerly lifts her blouse to show Asako a bruise that isn’t there – “It’s not as painful as it looks.” But these images never link up into the chain of a conventional narrative. Rather, as they accumulate, and as Asako’s disjointed mind returns to the same memories again and again – a swim with her elder brother when they were children, a cup of green tea spilled on an ivory rug – they shift and change, grow more detailed, and gradually form a complete picture. We realize that both Asako and the menacing Yano have been shaped by childhoods spent in Canadian internment camps during the Second World War. Yano obsessively lobbies for reparations, to the disgust of Asako, who sees his desire to blame external forces for his unsatisfactory life as pointless, even “cowardly.” Both characters eventually disintegrate, albeit in very different ways. In any group of people who have been wronged, these same opposing responses will surface: the desire to seek some form of justice, and the desire to forget the past. Sakamoto shows us the ultimate futility of either strategy; it seems that both ways, madness lies.

There are terrible acts of violence at the core of The Electrical Field, but it would be a mistake to approach it as a murder mystery – a reading the publisher’s promotional bumpf seems to encourage – because it lacks both the suspense and the satisfying resolution necessary to a successful thriller. It’s an unsettling, intellectually interesting, and oddly affecting book, but it will only reward the reader prepared to accept its quiet pace and fugue-like structure.