Heart Mountain (book)

The novel's protagonist is McKay Allison, a 24 year-old rancher who lives in the shadow of the Heart Mountain concentration camp. As the novel begins just prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor both of his brothers are in the armed forces serving in the Pacific, leaving McKay—who is ineligible for service due to a horse accident that has left him with one leg shorter than the other—in charge of the family's ranch. McKay is assisted at the ranch by longtime family cook Bobby Korematsu, an Issei who has been with the family for seventeen years, and Pinkey Coleman, a perpetually drunk but kindly cowboy. His neighbor and close friend, Henry Heaney, has also been inducted, and McKay and Madeleine—Henry's wife and McKay's childhood sweetheart—combine their ranching operations during the war as sparks between them inevitably fly again. In a parallel story, Kai Nakamura, also 24 and a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of California Berkeley, arrives at the Heart Mountain camp with his parents. He befriends his next door neighbors—Will Okubo, a Kibei who had lived in France; Mariko Abe, Will's wife and a talented artist: and Mariko's grandfather Abe. There is also a third set of characters in the fictional town of Luster, the closest town to the camp. When McKay accidentally shoots Mr. Abe when the latter was birdwatching, the local and inmate communities intersect as McKay and Mariko fall in love at first sight. As the war drags on, McKay and Mariko pursue their affair as various characters comes in and out of their parallel communities.

Most of what we learn about Heart Mountain comes through excerpts from Kai's journal. Though angered by his treatment, he initially delves into community life, becoming a staff member on the Heart Mountain Sentinel and helping to build furniture for his barracks. But Mr. Abe's shooting followed by the loyalty questionnaire episode—along with dissident stances taken by Will and another friend, Ben Iwasaka, a law student at Berkeley—fuel Kai's discontent, and he ends up as a leader of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee advocating draft resistance . While in camp, he learns that he has an older brother. But his elation of this revelation turns to bitterness when the brother—whose back story is based on famed Nisei tail gunner Ben Kuroki —clashes with him over the meaning of loyalty and resistance. All the while, Kai also develops a growing attraction for Mariko.

Author Gretel Ehrlich (1946– ), an essayist known for her writings on nature, the West and travel, was born in Santa Barbara, California and grew up in nearby Montecito. After stints at Bennington College in Vermont and at UCLA, she became a documentary filmmaker. In 1976, she made a documentary film on sheepherders in Wyoming; after a personal tragedy, she decided to stay on there, learning herding and the ins and outs of working on a ranch. She eventually married a local and settled on a ranch in Shell, Wyoming. After publishing two earlier volumes of poetry, her book of essays titled The Solace of Open Spaces (1985) based on her life in Wyoming brought her much acclaim.

As a child, Ehrlich had had Japanese American friends born in the concentration camps. As she told interviewer James Wackett, "I couldn't imagine why anyone could be frightened of a person with an Asian face; it's such an ordinary thing for me." Given that she could see Heart Mountain from her ranch, "it just suddenly made sense, that here I could write about one of the loves of my life, which is things Japanese and Japanese-American, and something I know about, in a Western setting," she told Wackett. "I was really interested in writing about issues of racism, war, and peace. It's a pretty natural evolution for me." ^[1]

Earlier versions of several chapters of Heart Mountain were written in the winter and spring of 1985 and appear in her 1986 collection of short stories, Wyoming Stories . ^[2] Pinky, one of the major characters in the novel, is actually introduced in her earlier collection of poems, To Touch the Water (1981). After the publication of Heart Mountain in 1988, she continued the stories of several of its characters in her 1991 collection Drinking Dry Clouds: Stories from Wyoming . ^[3] In subsequent years, Ehrlich has written books on Yellowstone, a biography of John Muir, on her travels in China and Greenland, and a memoir based on her being struck by lighting while living at the ranch, among other topics. Heart Mountain remains her only novel for adults to date. ^[4]

Heart Mountain appeared in the fall of 1988, shortly after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. No doubt due in part to this fortuitous timing, it was widely reviewed, with the reception being mixed. Writing in the New York Times , poet Garrett Hongo called it "... a richly textured and grandly romantic work about individual alienation and sexual loneliness, a novel full of immense poetic feeling for the internal lives of its varied characters and the sublime high plains landscape that is its backdrop." ^[5] Merle Rubin in the Christian Science Monitor wrotes that "[b]y focusing on the links between nature and the individual and on the complicated connections between the individual and the forces of history, Ehrlich has achieved a sweeping, yet finely shaded portrait of a real West unfolding in historical time." ^[6] Kirkus Reviews also praised its incorporation of nature and the seasons, while Publishers Weekly and Dean Willms in Library Journal cited Ehrlich's knowledgeable portrayals of life on a Wyoming ranch. ^[7]

The novel's many characters proved to be a point of contention. Some reviewers cited this as a strength. In the Chicago Tribune , Charles R. Larson cites "25 memorable characters in the novel, of which nearly a dozen are major," calling them a "a panorama of believable characters." ^[8] Kathy Roe calls them "a motley, vivid crew imbued with the power only a good writer can give." ^[9] On the other hand, David Kishiyama in the Los Angeles Times writes that "[t]oo many minor characters occupy the spotlight far too long," while Publishers Weekly notes that "her characters are often only wafer-thin." ^[10] While praising her "fine touch" in showing "all the loneliness, courage and humor of rural people," UPI notes that "Japanese-American characters are not given the same depth." ^[11] Other reviewers make this point, with Roe finding fault with the portrayal of the Nakamura family and Kishiyama and Hongo both taking issue with elements of the central love story. In perhaps the most serious criticism of the book, Hongo cites the "sorely inadequate" portrayals of the two main Nisei male characters and writes that the novel "approaches its Japanese characters, for all its earnest sympathies, as still the exotic Other." Kishiyama finds some plot elements far fetched, Will Nixon knocks the shallow depiction of white racism of the time, and psychologist Donna Nakata, while praising the depth of the research, laments the lack of historical background that would allow readers to place the events in the novel into proper context. ^[12]

In the early 1990s, producer Patrick Markey along with actor and director Robert Redford began developing Heart Mountain as a feature film, with Ehrlich writing the screenplay. The project has not come to fruition to date. ^[13]

Might also like: The Sun Gods by Jay Rubin; Woman With a Blue Pencil by Gordon McAlpine; Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson