When the Emperor Was Divine

I am back for another taste of Julie Otsuka's writing. It's another trim one! She certainly has the knack of saying much with brevity and skill- and making her point (s)!

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Many books have been written about the outrageous internment of Japanese Americans during WW II. There have been respectable treatments of this topic, such as Farewell to Manzanar, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Snow Falling on Cedars, to name a few. Julie Otsuka had given us a taste of this situation in her more recent book, The Buddha in the Attic . In this earlier novel, the reader learns about a family, whose names are never divulged, but whom we get to know well, from the period prior of their "exile" to their return home.

Otsuka has applied her unique, lyrical style to the telling of this tale. With spare elegance she conveys the indignities, the unconscionable treatments and the sense of total loss and despair that is felt by the victims of the internment. The attitudes of the general public, the government, neighbors and purported friends are all shockingly revealed. The fact that she is able achieve this so well in her slim offerings and also evoke emotional responses, such as tears, is admirable and a wonderment.

I eagerly look forward to reading future books written by this unique and gifted author.

Assuming you have read the book description, you already know this book’s theme is the treatment of Japanese during WW2 and Japanese internment camps in the USA. It is more a study of the psychological than factual treatment of Japanese. You will not get historical facts or precise, detailed descriptions of the camps. What you will learn is how the Japanese Americans felt and how their war experiences changed them. You will feel the discrimination they experienced.

This very short novel reads as a prose poem. Each sentence has more than one meaning. The writing is very straightforward and simple, except that you know without a doubt that what is being said is more than the straight forward, the obvious.

Here is one example. In school, when the children had returned home after the war they were asked, as all kids are asked: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And the reply? “I’d like to be you.” So little is said, but so much is meant. The words are so simple and yet they have a huge impact.

At the beginning the writing presents the characters in a detached manner. We are not even given the names of the mother, father and two children. They are spoken of as the girl, the boy, their father, the mother. I did not like this. I even thought this was perhaps a young adult novel. Were we being spared the grisly truths? However in the book, after the war, when the family was released from the internment camp and when the father was reunited with his family, that is when all the accusations and fears were shouted out. The contrast hits the reader like a slam in the face. When they returned to their old house and their old way of life, they are confronted with rampant discrimination. In the internment camps the barbed wire fences had separated them from it. The earlier detachment and now the honest truths were slammed up against each other. The author did this through her skill of composition. The tension you feel at the end is tremendous, the reader feels it all the more since so much has been suppressed in the earlier sections.

That I give such a short novel four stars is remarkable. It says something about the writer’s skill.

This is a powerful and well written novel about the internment of an unnamed Japanese-American family during the Second World War. Firstly the father is taken away in his dressing gown and slippers, a few months later his wife, son and daughter are sent to a different camp in the desert. Their experiences are told in a matter of fact way, but the trauma is obvious and their return home, over three years later is not really a happy ending.

This reads like an MFA thesis project. It's competently written at a technical level, but curiously flat and uninvolving because it always remains on the surface. Whatever weight or gravitas it has comes from the historical aspect (internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, for no reason other than their ancestry). The characters are not sharply drawn, and it feels like every time the author approaches any truth or insight, she scampers back to trivial surface detail. Which is a shame, because the subject seems very rich. On the large scale, the reactions one must have to having four years of life taken away and how would you re-integrate into a still racist society...while on the smaller scale, how would a society of internees organize itself and adapt, what would people do all day, how would children coming of age adapt to four years of unwarranted incarceration, etc.

Wanted to like this book, but came away with very little additional insight into the internal lives of these characters, or into the historical period.

While the tragic and shameful removal/internment of Japanese in the U.S. during WWII is a factor in Otsuko's other two books, it is at the center of this, her first novel. In When the Emperor Was Divine, we learn about the affect this had on Japanese Americans (and the rest of society for that matter) through the eyes of members of one unnamed family in California. It is heartbreaking as the mother tells us about learning they were going to be removed from a notice at the post office, then scrambling to pack up their home and deal with their pets. No pets allowed where they are going! So many questions that she has to face alone as her husband has been previously arrested and is incarcerated in Texas. The teenage daughter and young son tell of traveling to Utah and living there for four years, basically prisoners in barracks. Finally, when they're back in their home, the father is released and returns. He voices the additional tragedy of men accused of spying and working for the enemy, Japan, men who came home greatly diminished. This was a beautifully written book about a horrific incident in U.S. history, made all that much more palpable given the focus on a particular family and how their lives were not just disrupted, but almost erased, and how they now face racism and lack of opportunity stirred up by this policy. A policy that made ordinary citizens the enemy.

I'm glad to have now read the three books written by Otsuko, each ten years apart. The rhythm that permeates Buddha and Swimmers shows up in the last part of this book, giving us a preview of things to come.

.Why I'm reading this: I recently finished Otsuko's The Swimmers and thought to read this, her first book, to see how her writing has evolved over the years. I had this in print, but saw the audio was available so thought I'd listen as I've done with The Swimmers and The Buddha in the Attic.

n  
"شبی که دستگیرش کردند، ازم خواست براش یه لیوان آب بریزم. تازه رفته بودیم به رخت خواب. خیلی خسته بودم، خیلی. برای همین بهش گفتم خودش بره برای خودش آب بریزه. اون هم گفت: "ولش کن." بعد گرفت خوابید. چند ساعت بعد، اومدن و بردنش. همه ش فکر می کنم یه وقت تشنه نباشه."
"حتما تو ایستگاه بهش آب دادن"
"باید خودم براش آب میبردم."
"خب آخه تو خبر نداشتی."
"حتی حالا هم، توی خواب می بینم آب میخواد، تشنه است."
n

روایت تلخ اسارت و اجبار، روایت سال های دور از خانه و پدر، روایت احساس تلخ تبعیض...
خوندن از تاریخ، خوندن از تاریخِ وحشی گری انسان ها میتونه خیلی وحشتناک باشه... درست مثل این کتاب.

داستان از دوره ی جنگ جهانی دوم مینویسه، از اسارت شهروندان ژاپنی-آمریکایی... از روزهایی در سال ۱۹۴۲ که هزاران ژاپنی باید خونه و زندگی‌شون رو رها کرده و به اردوگاهی میان بیابان‌های یوتا برن.
وحشتناک نیست؟ اینکه از هم نوع هات خنجر بخوری، اینکه ارزشت بعنوان یک انسان گم بشه میون رنگ پوستت... میون خون توی رگ هات.
این قصه یه قصه ی تلخه... قصه ی دلتنگی یه مادر برای آشپزخونه ش؛ قصه ی دلتنگی یه پسر برای پدرش، قصه ی پدری که حتی اگه برگرده سال ها پیر شده و زخمیه، و قصه ی دلتنگی آدم ها برای درخت، برای سایه، برای زندگی...

I love Otsuka’s voice, judicious metaphors, and understated emotional hooks in this child’s eye view of the Japanese internment in World War 2. I have already had the pleasure of her 2011 gem, “The Buddha in the Attic”, which covers the same subject from an adult perspective that often breaks into powerful incantation in a broad “we” mode. In this novella eight years earlier, the narrative tends to be more conventional, yet it still has fresh and lyrical approaches for portraying this sad chapter in American history.

The boy of focus in the tale is eight at the time after Pearl Harbor when his father gets taken away from his Berkeley home by the FBI in the middle of the night. Because he was known to have a Shinto shrine with a picture of Emperor Hirohito, he was treated as a likely spy and later interned in a high security camp in New Mexico. The rest of the family--the boy, mother, and sister —is shipped to a camp in the high desert of Utah. The confused packing for the unknown and the shock of suddenly leaving friends and a beloved dog behind are touchingly presented from the boy’s perspective. The families are housed for the next three and a half years in austere barracks surrounded with barbed wire fencing manned by armed guards.

That members of the family are not named makes them stand in for all American Japanese. The family makes do the best they can, enduring the heat in the summer, the cold in the winter, maintaining their dignity despite underground rivers of shame and sense of unjust treatment by their adopted country. At first the rules for the boy are simple:
On their first day in the desert his mother had said, “Be careful.”
“Do not touch the barbed-wire fence,” she had said, “or talk to the guards in the towers.
“Do not stare at the sun.
“And, remember, never say the Emperor’s name out loud.”

(The rest of the review gives samples of their experiences with quotes of Otsuka’s succinct and often poetic prose. Some may consider that a spoiler. If so, skip to the last paragraph.)

In subtle ways, Otsuka reveals their sense of erasure:
Always, he would remember the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. Only the alkaline made your skin burn. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting. It took your voice away. The dust got into your shoes. Your hair. Your pants. Your mouth. Your bed.
Your dreams. …
One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls.
By morning his name was gone.

Part of the key to survival is through imagination:
All night long he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea. …
On the morning he woke up longing for a glass of Coke. Just one, with lots of ice, and a straw. He’d sip it slowly. He’d make it last a long time.
A day. A week. A year, even.

The family gets periodic letters from the father, but most of the writing is blanked out by censors. The boy tries hard to keep his father’s memory alive—it choked me up pretty effectively:
He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. …
Sometimes he thought he was dreaming, and he was sure that when he woke up his father would be downstairs in the kitchen whistling “Begin the Beguine” through his teeth as he fried up breakfast in the skillet. “Here it comes, champ,” his father would say, “one hobo egg sandwich.”

Eventually able bodied men in the camp are recruited to help with the harvests in the western states. Despite a bit of normalcy in the work, there was more stigma to face outside:
They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.

And every week they heard new rumors and final solutions for their fate:
The men and women would be put into separate camps. They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be taken out onto the high seas and shot. …

No wonder the families were susceptible to such thoughts, given the distortions and contradictions of the official statements of justification for their treatment:
You’ve been brought here for your own protection, they were told.
It was all in the interest of national security.
It was a matter of military necessity.
It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty.

When the war was over, I can’t imagine how things could ever be normal again for the families returning to their communities. Former acquaintances pretend not to see them. The boy can barely recognize his father when he returns months later, as he seems so aged and broken. Still, they persist with brave resilience, and a new resolve emerges:
Nothing’s changed, we said to ourselves. The war had been an interruption, nothing more. We would pick up our lives where we had left off and go on. …We would join their clubs, after school, if they would let us. We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. …We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

This slipping into first person plural is a great breakout and preview to "The Buddha in the Attic". The "we" for me evokes the whole human race for all the expedient but inhumane solutions committed around the world to deal with the mistrust between peoples. Even in the case of genocides, it helps me a lot to think that we all are responsible for committing these acts and not give in to distancing ourselves from them by thinking in terms of "they" and "then".

When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka
When the Emperor was Divine is a historical fiction novel written by American author Julie Otsuka about a Japanese American family sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert during World War II. The novel, loosely based on the wartime experiences of Otsuka's mother's family, is written through the perspective of four family members, detailing their eviction from California and their time in camp. It is Otsuka's debut novel, and was published in the United States in 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf.
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز شانزدهم ماه جولای سال 2015
عنوان: امپراطور هراس؛ نویسنده: جولی اوتسوکا؛ مترجم: روشنک ضرابی؛ مشخصات نشر: تهران، کتاب کوله پشتی، 1393، در 120 ص، اندازه 21 در 14 س.م.، شابک: 9786006687957؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان ژاپنی تبار امریکایی - سده 21 م
داستانی درباره ی زندگی مهاجران ژاپنی در آمریکا در جریان جنگ جهانی دوم است. کتابی با متنی ساده، اما پر از هیجان است. نگارنده «جولی اُتساكا» این رمان را با تجربه‌ ها و حقایقی که از نزدیک‌ترین خویشاوندان خود شنیده، بی‌هیچ کم و کاستی بازگو می‌کند. سوله‌ ها، سیم‌های خاردار، ترس و تنهایی آمیخته در شجاعت و شهامت، از مهم‌ترین ویژگی‌های شخصیت‌های کتاب است. «امپراطور هراس» از شاهکارهایی‌ ست که تاریخ شرمگین انسان‌ها ،و سیاست‌شان را به تصویر کشیده است، و یادآور این گفته «ژیل دلوز» است: «شرمسار از انسان بودن»؛ چه برهانی از این بهتر برای نگاشتن؟ نقل از متن: «در رؤیاهایش همیشه یک در چوبی زیبا وجود داشت. اندازه‌ ی این در خیلی کوچک بود. اندازه‌ ی یک بالش یا یک کتاب دایرة المعارف. پشت این در چوبی زیبا، در دیگری بود و پشت در دوم، تصویر امپراطور بود. هيچ کس اجازه‌ ی دیدن آنرا نداشت. چون امپراطور مقدس بود. او رب‌ النوع بود. به چشم‌هایش نمیشد نگاه کرد. پسر در رؤیاهايی میديد، در اول را باز کرده و دستش روی دستگیره‌ ی در دوم است. مطمئن بود. به محض بازکردن در، او را میبیند.» پایان نقا. ا. شربیانی