Customer Reviews

When the Emperor Was Divine

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3 star:		(6)
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1 star:		(4)

 

 

When people--any people--cease to be seen as individuals, they become "them"--the faceless, nameless "enemy." In this exquisite short novel, a shameful episode of American history is re-examined--the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. It was a time when everyone of Japanese descent was somehow "them"--the enemy. And in becoming "the enemy" they lose much of what it means to be human.
The tiny family--mother, son, daughter--is devastated when their father is suddenly taken away in his robe and slippers, suspected of who knows what. A few months later they are forced to give up everything and move to a dusty prison camp somewhere in Utah.
After more than three years they return home, changed and traumatized. Eventually they are reunited with the father, but he too is changed, a broken shadow of himself.
The story is told in eloquent, simple, spare prose, in small but telling details, in the fragmented but powerful insights of the two children and their mother. It is never over-stated, never sentimental, yet it will bring you to tears.
The book concludes with a short but powerful epilogue, a fierce and powerful essay on what it means for anyone to be "them," to be "the enemy."
This is a painful book, but it is important for you to read it. I cannot recommend it too strongly. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber.

The day I received this book I read the first few pages, canceled my plans for the night and allowed myself to be taken by this book without any effort. "When the Emperor Was Divine" follows a Japanese-American family in 1942 as they are taken from their California stucco house to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. Having months earlier watched their father be sent away to a camp ''for dangerous enemy aliens'', the mother, daughter and son are left to speculate their own fate. Plunged in to a world where mess halls are to be called "dining halls" evacuees are to be called "residents" and the word freedom exists only outside the barbed-wire fence, each spends their time fantasizing over the reunion with their father. Although you never learn the names of any of the main characters you learn their grief and you will value the impact of the line "now he'll always be thirsty" and how it took my breath away. Even if up until that point you are not as convinced, the last three pages alone are enough to guarantee that you will be suggesting this book as soon as you close it.

I had mixed feelings about this book before I read it. The title is NOT how most JA immigrants felt about the emperor of Japan. There was generally no love lost. Most, like my grandparents, left because of poverty, conscription, alienation, and to look for better oportunites in America, lika a lot of other immigrants. While reading the book, I give her kudos for her ability to describe events visually well. BUT...there are many problems with this book. There is this sterility in the manner in which she describes events.She can manage to paint a visually stunning picture with her words but there is no substance. Her characters seem as if she studied them from a textbook. A Nisei (second generation) young girl would NEVER talk in the manner in which she writes, to an elder!!! Its almost like she had Dakota Fanning in mind for this character. And the father character, an Issei (first generation)....Issei's used to swallow their pain. The Issei are known for their stoic strength and "gaman", quiet strength amidst adversity. I felt isulted by his mental confession in the book. I went to see the author at a local library and she did confess she NEVER interviewed ANY living internees. My god...they are dying off and she doesn't interview them? She said she wanted a more "pure" viewpoint. She said she did study books for her historical references. Indeed, there are some references in the book which I'm not quite sure if it is plagiarism, like in the description of the flies bothering her characters and then when they put up screens, it gets better. See Mine Okubo's book Citizen 13660, which Otsuka does reference. That scene is in there. I can see where the sterility feeling I got came from---if she only studied books and didn't get a feel for the emotional aspect that is buried in a lot of interness...she only did her homework half-baked.There are SO many heartbreaking stories that are dying and being buried with the internees. She confessed she didn't really listen when her parents and grandparents talked about it and they would shut up when she'd come around. But she said she didn't really ask them either, only marginally later. What IS her interest here? A book bestseller to be touted among the Asian community? I didn't really get from her interviewed she cared deeply for what happened, it was just a good base for her story. My parents told me everything and I am grateful. I am insulted by this book. It is like looking at a painting of a pretty scene but the artist who created didn't really care about anything but rendering a pretty scene. I was fairly disgusted by the time I left the interview from the library.
She's a grad of Columbia? She needs to study more. This is a great book if you think Snow Falling on Cedars is wonderful.

The imprisonment of American citizens of Japanese descent, post Pearl Harbor, remains one of those open, gaping wounds of despicable behavior in our country's history. Most of the historical tomes and novels of WWII fail to address the country's overreaction to the Japanese Empire's aggression and terrorism. And, indeed, our government's "protection" of these citizens may have saved some of the Japanese populace from civilian attacks. Still, the actions of the government, and the silent response of the American people closely parallel the rise of McCarthyism in the next decade, and also harken some of the less-publicized aspects of today's Patriot Act.

Otsuka has chosen a more delicate approach to her tale than that of nonfiction writiers. "When the Emperor Was Divine" tells its story from the viewpoints of a family of four, torn apart by Evacuation Order #19. A young Japanes mother in Berkeley, left alone with an 11 year-old girl and an 8 year-old son begins to pack and to close her house as soon as she sees the order posted. Saddest of her tasks is how she must deal with the family's pets, all the while maintaining an air of normalcy for her children that masks her fear.

The children's father has been spirited away by the FBI in his bathrobe and slippers in the middle of the night, questioned endlessly, and imprisoned in Texas.

Otsuka's tale focuses on the journey of the mother and the children; an intermediate holding facility at the Tanforan race track in California is couched in memory as the family is transported by train to the deserts of Utah.

In stark passages - poetry in the form of prose, Otsuka conveys the pain and hopelessness of the three and a half years the family spends imprisoned. From the third person she writes primarily from the viewpoint of each child as the mother retreats into herself. Long days without hope mingle with cruel weather conditions in the desert...

" Summer was a long hot dream. Every morning, as soon as the sun rose, the temperature began to soar. By noon the floors were sagging. The sky was bleached white from the heat and the wind was hot and dry. Yellow dust devils whirled across the sand. The black roofs baked in the sun. The air shimmered..."

Their days are punctuated with memories of the father, small incidents of camp life, endless waiting for the war to be over, with cold and shortages, and with the endless alkaline wind and dust of their surroundings. Desolate in the summer, frigid in the winter, it seems that the desert mirror their souls as their hope for the future dies.

Otsuka uses the writer's convention of never naming her protagonists ("the girl", "the boy", "the mother", "his father"). In using this language she is able to convey the dehumanization effort they have undergone in a way that mere words cannot usually describe.

It is with a sense of wonder and letdown that the reader observes their return to Berkeley, their reunification with the father, and the semblance of life that remains to them after America has stolen their souls.

Otsuka, in her first novel, astonishes you with her ability to capture not only the hearts and minds of her characters, but also that of her readers.

A marvelous debut that will break your heart.

When the Emperor Was Divine was one of the required readings in a college English Lit. class I took last semester. It's well-written, touching, and revealing: each chapter gives us a view of the repercussions the internment had on the members of the Japanese-American family we follow throughout the short novel.

I would like to point out to "a reader" from Appleton, Wisconsin (2/22/04) that the author, Julie Otsuka, is narrating what happened to her own mother, who was the inspiration for the girl's character, and her family in the years between Pearl Harbor and the end of WWII. In that sense Otsuka becomes the voice of a first-person witness of the events.

This book sparked very lively discussions and a lot of research on the subject among the students; most of us, while understanding the war-time heightened need for security, agreed on the injustice of depriving thousands of people of their liberty without just cause: most internees had no contacts with the enemy, had never set foot in Japan, and were loyal Americans. For many of us this book represented a different view on a seldom talked-about period of our history.

I plucked this book off the shelf at the library yesterday, flipped it open to see if I liked the writing style and almost forgot to pick the kids up at school half an hour later because I had completely fallen into the world of this novella and lost track of time.

When the Emperor was Divine is the literary equivallent of ikebana -- elegant in its spareness and revealing great beauty beneath the simple balance of form and substance. Author Julie Otsuka doesn't miss a step in this compelling, disturbing story of a Japanese American family torn apart, interred in separate camps; mother, daughter and son in one, father in another.

Confused, helpless, longing for each other, yearning for the comforts of home, hearth, and happier days, the family spends three and a half years waiting. Waiting for release, waiting to be reunited, waiting for a tulip to grow in an old tin can. Ms. Otsuka doesn't give us the details -- she walks us right into the bodies, hearts and minds of each of her characters and makes us live with them. And in the end of the endless waiting we return with them to the scattered remains of a life that is less than what is normal, necessary or desirable. My heart broke a hundred times in the few short hours it took to read this slim book.

It is particularly compelling to think of the men interred in Cuba right now and wonder if a future generation will tell their story as poignantly. I recommend this book for the quality of the writing and the timliness of the story.

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.

A national embarrassment that I suppose seemed justified at the time is behind When the Emperor was Divine. Never diving into melodrama, the book follows the story of a woman and her 2 children who move to an internment camp after her husband is arrested on conspiracy charges. Enduring the filth and cramped quarters of the camps for 3 years, she eventually returns to Berkeley to a hostile welcome and a home that has been vandalized.
It's the matter-of-fact tone of the writing (in the face of blatant injustice) that is so compelling. Anger has no place in the voice of the author; she leaves it to her readers to experience the passion of her unspoken rage for her.
Superb.

This spare, important book, so elegant in its simplicity, should be read by everyone (at least) who grew up in the 60s and 70s without the knowledge that Japanese internment camps ever existed. The day- to-dayness of its details is stunning and Otsuka (or a brilliant editor) seemed to know just how many to include. Definitely on my list of best fiction of 2002.

When the Emperor Was Divine will definitely be one of my top ten reads for the year 2002. The book written by Julie Otsuka engaged me from the first page and left me wishing for more when the book ended.

The book is divided into five chapters, each one told by a different Japanese - American family member at the beginning of America's entry into WWII. Each of these voices, from the youngest family member to the oldest, resonates with the sounds of isolation and despair. From the earliest days of the posters summoning Japanese - Americans to the return of this family to their homes, readers are held captive by this book. All too soon we learn how dramatically life changed for these United States citizens who in most cases were interned for no other reason than they were Japanese and therefore thought to be the enemy. While the woman's husband and her children's father is detained under suspicion in a prison, she relates the first story of coming upon the notice of the camps and then packing up her house for departure. The daughter relates the train trip to an unknown destination while the son tells us what their lives were like when they lived among others in the camp. Then the mother's voice is heard once again as the war ends and they are allowed to return home. But they return home to find that life as they once knew it may never be the same. Their house has been looted and when the husband and father returns home he is a changed man. It is this last chapter, the voice of the father, which is so haunting and remains with me still. As I read the words more than once, I couldn't help but see Edward Munch's painting, Scream, before my eyes or think about the emotional intensity in Alan Ginsberg's poem, Howl.

In this rather short title, Ms. Otsuka presents us with a magnificent debut novel. We come to feel for her characters fate as the book begins rather quietly and then reaches a resounding crescendo by the end. This is a wonderful reading experience by an author who I will surely read in the future.