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Forgiveness (2014)

por Mark Sakamoto

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14312189,788 (3.94)49
Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML:

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people's land for a dollar a day.

By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph's daughter and Mitsue's son fell in love.

Although the war toyed with Ralph's and Mitsue's lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.

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Mostrando 1-5 de 12 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
The difference between the first half and the second half of the book is striking! - as someone on here has aptly called it: two books under one cover. It seems like they forgot to edit or proofread the second half - some very awkward sentences. ( )
  kgsi | Jun 2, 2023 |
Mark Sakamoto’s grandparents were on two different sides of WWII. His maternal grandfather fought in the war and was captured and spent years as a prisoner of war, first in Hong Kong, then in Japan. Mark’s paternal grandmother, a Japanese-Canadian, and her family lost their home and livelihood in BC and were sent to rural Alberta to farm. Mark and his brother were born and raised in Medicine Hat, Alberta. After Mark’s parents marriage ended, his mother had a really hard time (to put it lightly, but trying not to give too much away in my summary).

The summaries of this book make it sound like it’s all WWII, but it’s not. I found the book to be an entire biography of his grandparents, then his own – with a focus on his relationship with his mom. I really liked this. A little “bonus” for me was that Mark’s wife is from Assiniboia, Sask, a small town about 45 minutes from the town I grew up in. ( )
  LibraryCin | Jan 5, 2022 |
Add this to the long list of books I want every Canadian to read. ( )
  yulischeidt | Jun 1, 2020 |
It seems every year I need to have one bad Canada Reads experience, and this year it was Forgiveness.

This might be too harsh. It's not a terrible book. It's just that in its current incarnation, it is two badly connected books unhappily inhabiting a single set of covers, or one book missing badly needed connective tissue, written by someone who I really think needs counseling.

The narratives of his grandparents during World War II was the book's standout. The details were impressive, the stories were amazing, the people he paints were incredible. This is one of the books, and it was, on the whole, well done. Mark Sakamoto is not a fantastic writer; his sentences are often clumsy and, as other reviewers have pointed out, there were basic factual errors and typos that really ought to have been caught before publication. But on the whole, I enjoyed--if that's the right word for such tragic material--this section enormously.

The part about his mother was just weird. It didn't belong with the rest of it at all.

1. One of the forgiveness-heroes of the narrative, Ralph MacLean, never forgave his own father for being an abusive drunk. This should have been Sakamoto's clearest clue that the ties he was trying to draw between "forgiving a harmless representative of an ethnic group that did you enormous harm" is 100% completely different than "forgiving a person who themselves did you enormous harm." The result is a book in which Ralph MacLean goes off to war in part to get away from his abusive drunkard father who (at least according to the book) he never forgives nor reconciles with, experiences terrible injustice and deprivation, is able to forgive the Japanese people and/or individual Canadian-Japanese people (is it just the Japanese in Canada that he forgives, or all of them? It's never stated), and this inspires Mark Sakamoto to ... forgive his abusive drunkard mother. What?

2. Sakamoto relays a whole lot of damaging, codependent, problematic ideas in the section about his mother without any apparent awareness that they're damaging, codependent and problematic. *It is not a child's job to save an abusive alcoholic parent.* Ever. Period! Yet right up until the end of the book he wonders how his mother "forgave" him for "abandoning" her--he didn't abandon her! This is such a boilerplate enabling mindset and if he'd come to terms with that story as much as he seems to think he has, he'd have some awareness of it. There is *one* instance in that part of the book where he visits Al-Anon with his father--one! And if he ever went back, it's not described, nor does he show any evidence of participation in that kind of program in the way he reflects on and relates his story of growing up with his mother.

3. His apparent belief that it's required for children of abusive alcoholic parents to forgive those parents in order to be good parents themselves--his idea at the end that it would have been great for his mother to be in his kids' lives if only she hadn't killed herself with excessive drinking--I just. No. What a horrifyingly awful idea. She still would have been an abusive alcoholic, but with much more vulnerable baby humans to scar and hurt. What kind of father would bring his babies around to visit an abusive alcoholic, or speculate that this would have been a good or even moderately ok idea?

I think the author will find, if he ever cares to look into it, that most adult children of alcoholics and/or abusers find that they are more effective parents when they accept, move on, draw and enforce boundaries, protect their kids, and get help. Maybe forgiveness is a part of that, and maybe it isn't.

Oy.

So this book is one pretty good story of World War II heroics and overcoming, and one hot-mess of an abuse memoir, with some pretty thin and rotten strings connecting them. If you're going to read it, my advice is to put the book down when he starts talking about his mother. ( )
1 vote andrea_mcd | Mar 10, 2020 |
The only forgiveness in this book happens in the very last chapter when the author buries his mother’s ashes in a park in Medicine Hat. She died very young from her addiction to alcohol and his forgiveness for her abandonment of her children, her husband and a good life is a brief and not very well described moment of emotion.
The book is about Sakamoto’s grandfather Ralph MacLean and his grandmother Mitsue Sakamoto.
Ralph grew up on a farm on the Magdalen Islands and lived an almost idyllic life until he enlisted in WWII at the age of 18. He ended up in Hong Kong in a Japanese POW camp for 4.5 years and returned to Canada badly damaged mentally and physically from his ordeal. He ends up near Calgary and marries Phyllis and has a family including a daughter Diane.
Mitsue Sakamoto grew up in a small Japanese family in Vancouver. They ran a successful fishing operation, were well respected within the small Japanese community and endured subtle white racism.
Once Pearl Harbour is bombed, all Japanese citizens and immigrants are sent to farms in Alberta or elsewhere for the duration of the war. Their possessions are confiscated and their lives are very difficult. Mitsue has three children, one of whom is Sakamoto’s father, Stan.
Stan Sakamoto marries Diane MacLean and they have two sons.
The book, although mildly interesting, could have used some very good editing. This is the Canadian immigrant story and it has been told in better ways by other authors. What is missing is a description of the emotional trauma that Mitsue and Ralph endured, the prejudice in an interracial marriage and the bullying the Daniel and Mark May have endured. Even when they first meet, how did Ralph feel about his daughter marrying a Japanese Canadian.
Another Canada Reads miss. ( )
  MaggieFlo | Aug 29, 2019 |
Mostrando 1-5 de 12 (seguinte | mostrar todos)
This domestic violence serves as a prologue and epilogue to the great parallel tragedies of Forgiveness — the brutal treatment of Canadian POWs by their Japanese captors in Hong Kong, and the internment of Japanese families in British Columbia....So Forgiveness is not a novel. At the same time it doesn’t feel like a memoir, mainly because there is no dominant point of view — no subject of a memoir. The heart of the book are the prison camp portions and the internment segments and in these portions the memoir writer is totally absent...The result is a readable account of one of Canada’s darkest moments, but an account still begging for adequate imaginative treatment.
 
Pieced together through Sakamoto's interviews with his maternal grandmother, Mitsue Sakamoto, and paternal grandfather, Ralph MacLean, these wartime recollections from contrasting sides of a human tragedy offer a unique perspective on the idea of a Canadian family. It also links two families together through compassion and understanding, which is the stimulus for Sakamoto's own process of recovery...Sakamoto writes of in vivid detail – deferring, generously, to lived memory over history books ...In this war story, Canada isn't an innocent bystander or righteous do-gooder but actively complicit in the death and oppression of its own citizens, both white and Japanese. Sakamoto writes about forgiveness through the lens of Canada's political foibles, a noble sentiment coming from someone with close ties to a partisan agenda. But in doing so he resurrects the troubled past of this country at a time when the government (national, and municipal, in the case of Toronto) is being accused of being more brutal, restrictive and intolerant than any other point in recent memory. Forgiveness is a personal journey but it also reminds us not to forget.
 
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Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML:

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people's land for a dollar a day.

By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph's daughter and Mitsue's son fell in love.

Although the war toyed with Ralph's and Mitsue's lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.

.

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