Deep gratitude, love and bows to Dalia Kandiyoti and Susan Maggi for narrative epiphanies, the long view and for being there in my desperado hours of revision.
I am grateful to Bruce Kuwabara who, many years ago, told me about Buckminster Fuller’s proposed floating neighbourhood for Toronto Harbour. Thanks also to my skyscraper-building father-in-law, Fedor Tisch, for his many insights.
Thank you Ezra’s Pound as well as the much-missed Wagamama Cafe and its owner, the late Miwa Yamada, for providing lovely tea and espresso laden havens. Thank you, Lisa and Tim McCaskell, for offering me your cottage as a writing retreat with its inspiring vista of Lake Simcoe.
For funding during the lean years, I am grateful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, including the Chalmers Arts Fellowship program.
Thank you to my agent, Chris Bucci, for finding a home for my book, and for waiting patiently and faithfully.
I am deeply indebted to my brilliant editor, Craig Pyette, for his belief in my manuscript when it was adrift in choppy waters. Thank you for guiding me toward clarity in my sentences and for helping to bring propulsion and resolution to the narrative. I truly couldn’t have done it without you! And thank you for loving Bucky as much as I do.
Finally and apart, I am grateful to my mother, the late Teruko Matsui Sakamoto, for the stories she told me, for the way she looked at the world and helped me find my place in it.
KERRI SAKAMOTO debuted as a novelist in 1998 with The Electrical Field, a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Canada-Japan Literary Award. Her second novel, One Hundred Million Hearts, appeared in 2003 to critical acclaim. She lives with her family in Toronto.
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