When the Emperor Was Divine
by Julie Otsuka
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Book Summary Information
Author: Julie OtsukaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-10-14
ISBN: 0385721811
Number of pages: 160
Publisher: Anchor
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780385721813
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of When the Emperor Was Divine
Book Review: Soul-wrenching in its bleak reality
Summary: 5 Stars
Julie Otsuka, drawing from a number of first person narratives of the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII, brings us this tale of a Japanese American family wrenched from its home, separated and sent away.
Unsentimental, told in a combination of terse third person as well as first person narrative, almost as in a dream, or as if told by someone who was in shock, we follow a Japanese-American family which is split apart when the father is taken away, and his wife, daughter and son are taken away to an internment camp. Although the father is remembered wistfully in the first several chapters, the actual story of his detainment and the extent of his imprisonment and its possible effects on him are not brought to the story until much later on. And when he does return to the family, like the father in the Afro-American narrative Sounder, he is an aged, brutalized shadow of his former self - a walking dead man.
His wife, his young son and daughter, are taken to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in the alkali flats of Utah. In a dispassionate matter-of -fact sterile way the wife had packed for the trip - she buried her silver, she discarded the boy's precious posters, comic books, "non-essentials" - those items which give him character and are part of his life don't matter anymore in the de-personalized environment in which they will be staying for who knows how long. On the bleak train trip to their final destination, the boy and girl have an almost adventurous sense of discovery and on the way there, treat the trip and their detainment with varying degrees of adventure, resignation, fear, detachment, dreams and imagination. Children, being as they are, tend to me more resilient, but the harsh environment, the heat, the daily monotony, the guards with rifles, the barbed wire fence -make them withdraw ever more into a world of imagination, laced with grim reality. The boy has many dreams, awake and asleep - of huge white horses, ships on the sea beyond the desert, Father appearing in the Mess Hall. The girl, who tends to be more pragmatic, ("her watch had said 6 O'clock for weeks. She had stopped winding it the day she stepped off the train") has a wicked sense of humor which she uses to restore the perspective of things (when poking his thumb through the holes in the Surplus Pea coats, size 44, that they were given, the boy says "Moths", and the girl counters by saying "Try `bullets'". The mother calms the situation by taking out a spool of thread, saying "Let me have a look")
The turtle, at once a pet, as well as a symbol of detainment (made to live in a box outside the family's barrack - the boy could "hear the scrabbling of its claws" in the box at night), finally "dies" and is buried - but is it really dead, or is it one of those tortoises that lowers its body temperature to hibernate every winter? "The girl shoveled up spoonfuls of sand from beneath the barrack window but she could not find the tortoise"... "He left without us" she said.".......the slow plodding tortoise, representing the slow plodding days these detainees have survived in this bitter desert wilderness, is free of his confinement, one way or the other "And somewhere out there in the desert a lone tortoise was wandering slowly, steadily, toward the thin blue edge of the horizon." Is the tortoise a symbol of their hopes? If they stay in these barracks long enough, plodding about in this unreal world where their allegiance of 20 years is still in question, will they be able to return to what they left beyond the horizon?
And they do return to their house - but their homecoming is, in itself, another form of internment - their possessions, even their rose bush, are gone. They see their neighbors using their Electrolux, sitting on what was once the family's mohair sofa - "the spoils of war", perhaps. The family is treated with hostility, and using the same survival skills that kept them as sane as possible in the desert, they ignore, make fun of, silently rail against their tormentors- former friends, neighbors and schoolmates.
Soon Father returns home from his interment camp - a tormented, aged shadow of his former self. The neighborhood begins to revive. The war is over. Friends once again start calling to the children, who pretend not to hear them. This family, and so many others like them -- beaten, imprisoned, accused, deported, shunned - is back together, still survivors, patching up irreparably broken parts of their lives.
In the internment camp, a man had been killed - shot by one of the guards with a rifle -- because he was reaching for a rare flower on the other side of the barbed wire fence. Years later, " somewhere" ....in the family's neighborhood, "a rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after the other out into the later afternoon light."
How can such damage ever be undone?
Summary of When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka?s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination?both physical and emotional?of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view?the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family?s return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity?she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.From the Hardcover edition.
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
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