Treadmill: A Documentary Novel

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Treadmill claims to be the only novel written about life in the American
camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. It comes
out of the memories and journals that Hiroshi Nakamura (b.1915) recorded
during the war years spent in camps with his family, first in Salinas
Assembly Center, Salinas, California; and later in Camp II of the Poston
Relocation Center, Parker, Arizona; and Tule Lake Segregation Center,
Newell, California, where he married.

An attempt to publish this novel in the late 1940s failed when
publishers found it “too sensitive.” Nakamura died in 1973. The
manuscript was discovered in 1991 by Professor Peter Suzuki. Mary Sato
Nakamura, the author’s wife, contributes a biographical foreword.

During his life, Nakamura was a translator, a photographer, a
journalist, and a budding literary writer. Most nisei (second-generation
Japanese) were afraid to voice their deep-seated feelings about life in
the camps in the United States or Canada because of their longing for
acceptance. Treadmill has the ring of truth, both in historical fact and
in the depths of human emotion and experience. The novel reminds us that
we must not forget.