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

The reasons I can pick up or purchase a book veer from recommendation and suggestion, which seems normal and sensible, through its association or appearance in a previous read, understandable and explicable, or its fabulous title, thank you Dan...up to it's being a lovely looking book.

Whenever i go to Hay on Wye, a marvelous town on the welsh/english border containing 37second hand book shops, I cringe at the shops that sell leather bound books by the foot or metre so as to populate some wealthy non-readers library and yet every now and again I have to recognize that i have bought books purely because of how they look or feel in the hand. This long intro is to explain why I came to be reading this first novel of Julie Otsuka speaking of the little known action by the American Authorities after Pearl Harbour in which they forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned in desert camps japanese americans for the duration of the war. All I can say is i am so pleased i like nice looking things. Great, great book. Goes to prove you can judge some books by their covers.

The unnamed family, quiet, unassuming and industrious, is suddenly ripped apart by the high-handed panic of the Government. The husband/father taken off in bathrobe and slippers for interrogation and, as we would guess from his state five years later, abuse and shortly afterwards his wife and two young children are herded onto trains with other prisoners, guilty of nothing more than having differently shaped eyes, different coloured skin and taken to concentration camps in the deserts of Utah.

This is the story. Nothing more happens then their being taken away, imprisoned and then returned and yet everything does change. The cruel brutality of prejudice and rejection seen through the eyes of two children growing to maturity with the over-riding feelings of unstated guilt and blame for being different, the way in which certainty and acceptance can be dragged from under the feet of a woman previously secure in her comfortable lifestyle by her simply having been born in the wrong country; the future and humour and repsect of a man being drained or washed out of him simply because he isn't white.

Otsuka does not dwell on vicious violence or discrimination. She does not hold forth at great length on the behaviour of 'the other', all she does is simply, quietly and very movingly place before the reader the hidden results of prejudice and blind fear by allowing us entry into the tragedy of one hidden family. It is beautifuuly understated and incredibly moving for that.

The relationship of the brother and sister is wonderfully real. At one point the boy who adores wild horses watches them as they run by the side of the train taking the family to their prison. Weeks later, as they eat their stew and he wolfs it down enthusiastically he asks his sister where the cooks have got the meat. She answers drily. 'You rememeber those mustangs we were watching .....its them'. This sort of natural digging and teasing Otsuka does well. The girl is a great creation, dry, cooly witty and yet very vulnerable. She also communicates the burden of guilt the children take on as they think it must be their fault, something they did or even they begin to look to the memory of their father and wonder whether he is the guilty party.

Yet it is the relationship of the mother and father that breaks your heart. They hardly meet in the novel because it covers their enforced seperation but you feel their love. You see his guilt for failing to fulfill his marital promises, you know of her sorrow at her casual indifference to a request he made for a glass of water hours before he was taken and how this indifference cripples her but it is the beautifully simple reunion on the train station that tears you.

'He put down his suitcase and looked at her.
"Did you...." she said
"Every day," he replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him'

This probably seems nothing but Otsuka moves to this moment and it is a stroke of genius

Ero in biblioteca per riportare il Conte di Montecristo, ho fatto un giro tra gli scaffali e lo so, non dovevo, ma non ho resistito e l'ho preso ^^
Questo libro è un pugno nello stomaco. E anche se di poche pagine ho fatto fatica a "digerirlo".
Lei è sempre delicata, e pungente nello scrivere. A me piace molto la sua scrittura, anche se ammetto che è particolare, e all'inizio ci si deve fare un pò l'abitudine.
Mentre nello scorso libro abbiamo una visione corale (il libro è scritto sempre in prima persona plurale) qui si alternano i punti di vista di una famiglia composta da madre e due bambini, un maschietto e una feminuccia di 108 anni, il cui padre, una notte dopo Pearl Harbor, è stato portato via dall'FBI. Il libro inizia con la lettura dell'ordine di evacuazione per tutti i giapponesi dalle città.
E' straziante davvero leggere queste pagine che danno voce soprattutto ai pensieri dei due bambini. A come vedono e vivono quello che gli succede.
Straziante le ultime due pagine con il racconto del padre.
Non sappiamo come si chiamano. Ma non importa. E' una storia che riflette la storia di molte famiglie.
In realtà sono tre stelle e mezzo. Non sono riuscita a dare le quattro stelle perchè anche se mi ha toccato molto, non mi ha rapito come lo scorso libro. Forse perchè mi ha dato sui nervi leggere la vera e cruda realtà. Queste storie mi fanno davvero arrabbiare. Possibile che l'uomo non impari mai?
Gli Americani hanno preso parte alla guerra per combattere contro Hitler e che fanno? fanno la stessa cosa in casa loro? Vi giuro sono inca...nera!
Da leggere per ricordare e non dimenticare.

How do you write about trauma? Are you verbose and expansive? Terse and straighforward? In this case, you use elegant and spare prose that brings home the extent of the wrong by never quite stating it in so many words.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

My, what a painfully raw, poignant, brief, yet eloquent period piece of story-telling, historical fiction, literary fiction, and ... social commentary (which, alas, is all too relevant today as the ugly head of populism and ignorant tribalism again rears itself and proclaims its message of hate and fear with a small-minded, yet full-throated, roar).

Sparse prose ... but a clear vision ... a splendid, effective, humane work. To the extent that research suggests that reading fiction enhances our capacity for empathy, this book seems to be an excellent anecdote for such a conclusion.

It's an easily digestible, short/quick book, but it's a slender package well worth your time.

I'm so pleased that I finally read this (even if I was late to the party), and I'd love to see it re-gain popularity and readership.