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When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsuka
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The debut novel from the PEN/Faulkner Award Winning Author of The Buddha in the Attic
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.
- Sales Rank: #12682 in Books
- Published on: 2003-10-14
- Released on: 2003-10-14
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .40" w x 5.20" l, .35 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 160 pages
- When the Emperor Was Divine
- Julie Otsuka
Amazon.com Review
A precise, understated gem of a first novel, Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine tells one Japanese American family's story of internment in a Utah enemy alien camp during World War II. We never learn the names of the young boy and girl who were forced to leave their Berkeley home in 1942 and spend over three years in a dusty, barren desert camp with their mother. Occasional, heavily censored letters arrive from their father, who had been taken from their house in his slippers by the FBI one night and was being held in New Mexico, his fate uncertain. But even after the war, when they have been reunited and are putting their stripped, vandalized house back together, the family can never regain its pre-war happiness. Broken by circumstance and prejudice, they will continue to pay, in large and small ways, for the shape of their eyes. When the Emperor Was Divine is written in deceptively tranquil prose, a distillation of injustice, anger, and poetry; a notable debut. --Regina Marler
From Publishers Weekly
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion. After a woman whose husband was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy sees notices posted around her neighborhood in Berkeley instructing Japanese residents to evacuate, she moves with her son and daughter to an internment camp, abruptly severing her ties with her community. The next three years are spent in filthy, cramped and impersonal lodgings as the family is shuttled from one camp to another. They return to Berkeley after the war to a home that has been ravaged by vandals; it takes time for them to adjust to life outside the camps and to come to terms with the hostility they face. When the children's father re-enters the book, he is more of a symbol than a character, reduced to a husk by interrogation and abuse. The novel never strays into melodrama-Otsuka describes the family's everyday life in Berkeley and the pitiful objects that define their world in the camp with admirable restraint and modesty. Events are viewed from numerous characters' points of view, and the different perspectives are defined by distinctive, lyrically simple observations. The novel's honesty and matter-of-fact tone in the face of inconceivable injustice are the source of its power. Anger only comes to the fore during the last segment, when the father is allowed to tell his story-but even here, Otsuka keeps rage neatly bound up, luminous beneath the dazzling surface of her novel.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Otsuka researched historical sources and her own grandparents' experiences as background for this spare yet poignant first novel about the ordeal of a Japanese family sent to an internment camp during World War II. Its perspective shifts among different family members as the story unfolds. We see the mother numbly pack up the family's middle-class belongings to leave behind in their Berkeley home. The dehumanizing train trip to the camp, and the bleak internment in the alkaline Nevada desert, as related by the young son and daughter, become mythic events. Their father, picked up for questioning immediately after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned throughout the war, returns a broken and bitter man. The family's humiliation continues beyond the war's end: after returning to their vandalized home, they are shunned for months by former friends and neighbors. The novel's themes of freedom and banishment are especially important as we see civil liberties threatened during the current war on terrorism. Otsuka's clear, elegant prose makes these themes accessible to a range of reading levels from young adult on. Highly recommended for all libraries.
Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Libs., Harrisonburg, VA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
this book will help us not ever repeat solutions like the internment of innocent Americans of any descent
By Ann Brown
There is no doubt that the internment camps are a stain on the history of the United States. I grew up during the war in Canada, where the Japanese were transferred inland, but not interred. They became a valuable part of our community, and our friends. They were hard working and kind and gentle, but never did I hear bitterness from them, although their losses were large.
I felt the suffering of the whole family in Julie Otsuka's book about the experience of her mother,and I was made more aware of the injustices they felt. The hardest to bear seemed to be the separation from their father. Hopefully, this book will help us not ever repeat solutions like the internment of innocent Americans of any descent.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Beautiful Sorrow
By Nikki
This was one of the most beautifully sorrowful books I've ever read. I can't even imagine what it was like for thousands of Japanese-Americans during WWII. Families who had made this their home, who were neighbors and friends, forced to leave their homes for years and never know if it would still be there when they came back. Or if they would even come back. No apologies, and things were lost that could never be given back. Vivid emotions of joy and sorrow dance across the pages of this book and an exquisite warning to not repeat the mistakes we've already made.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
inventive and provocative, "Emperor" is spare and wrenching
By Bruce J. Wasser
Participants in the literature of oppression carry unique burdens and responsibilities. They are translators of broken dreams, betrayal, brutality. As writer and readers, they recreate and relive the crushing pain of dispossession, abandonment and exclusion. Their world is a distorted polarity of what ought to be in life. Members of this universe ask themselves the question of how people can endure historical pain: genuine hurt of the here and now whose roots are tangled in the soil of prejudice, repression and complicity.
To this body of literature may now be added Julie Otsuka's incandescent "When the Emperor Was Divine." This spare, elegant and wrenching debut novel is destined to become a classic in any serious examination of the impact of the forced removal and relocation of over 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Otsuka's nameless protagonist family becomes representative, not only of the agonizing, degrading and damaging impact of racism but also of assault on racial identity. The family's coerced odyssey -- from forced removal to isolative segregation to bewildered return -- offers no happy ending, no comfort, no solace of redemptive suffering. The four members of this family, stripped of identity by a prejudice-saturated larger population, are victims and martyrs, made heroic by survival but not blessed or redeemed by enduring wrongful hardship, deprivation or ostracism.
Otsuka is so masterful at her craft tht practically each sentence, each phrase carries an explosive impact. Why the Japanese-Americans? Their "crime," Otsuka explains, is their being "too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud." Who are they? "I'm the one you call Jap ... Nip ... Slits ... Slopes ... Yellowbelly. .. Gook." Through the lens of Otsuka's analysis, the Japanese-Americans suffered the dual curse of invisibility and ubiquity. Their very insignificance led to their perceived danger; their complete assimilation proved their insidious disloyalty. From this cauldron of psychological terrorization can only come horrible results. Shame. Apology for being. Bewildered submission. Denial. Rejection.
By not permitting readers to know the names of the mother, father, son and daughter of her representative family, by enforcing a sense of anonymity, Otsuka creates a world of detached, impersonal horror, magnified by terribly real, painful, particular detail. The author's terse, precise and understated language intensifies imagery, metaphor and symbol. Even Otsuka's use of prepositional phrases shimmers. Topaz Relocation Camp is a city "of tar paper barracks behind a barbed wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert." Staccato one-sentence paragraphs hammer home the essence of this assualt on "time and space:" "No Japs allowed to travel..." or "No Japs out after eight p.m." In Otsuka's hands, the single-word epithet "Jap" embodies every indignity, slight and attack the Issei and Nisei faced.
Symbolism in "Emperor" is subtle, unobtrusive and compelling. The mother's willed euthanasia of a milkey-eyed, disregarded neighborhood dog foreshadows and intensifies her husband's abrupt disappearance and demise. Otsuka forces us to listen to the son's recitation of "My country, 'tis of thee" and the pledge of allegiance against the backdrop of incessant dust -- which creates its own unwelcomed bur irreversible scrim of shame. How could it ever be possible to come clean from this unbidden dirt, this grimy degradation? We are forced to witness the silent erosion of family coherence through obligatory meals in communal mess halls where Japanese customs are indelicately ignored. No painful detail escapes Otsuka's eyes, not even the distasteful practice of foods touching each other on dinner plates. Topaz is not only geographically sterile, but existentially barren. When asked what he had done one winter day, the boy responds, "Licked a stamp."
As necessary and brilliant as "When the Emperor Was Divine" is, it walks a dangerous line. Julie Otsuka's insistence on her family's anonymity risks that readers may not be able to identify and understand her protagonists' circumstances and pain. Namelessness risks distance, and distancing imperils connection. Yet because she takes that risk, her novel is even a greater triumph. "When the Emperor Was Divine" honors memory and invites reflection. It presents us with the greatest weapon available to fight oppression: an informed heart, one fashioned by exposure to wrong and an understanding of wrong's imapct.
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