This little novel is the story of a Japanese-American family who suffers forced internment during World War II.

Otsuka does a wonderful job of helping the reader understand what it was like for these people, who felt so torn between love for their adopted homeland and their heritage. I especially liked the different perspectives of parents and children.

Can you imagine feeling the need to deny your heritage? Being asked "what kind of 'ese' are you?" and saying "Chinese" because you don't want to be looked down upon. Can you imagine being forced to leave your home and your possessions, knowing full well, that all will not be as you left it when you returned? If you returned? Can you imagine, after the war, after you've shown America that you were loyal, only to have your neighbors deny you work and tell you to leave town?

This quiet, little unassuming book really packs a big punch.

When the Emperor Was Divine is the debut novel of Julie Otsuka. Only 144 pages, it brought to life for me a period of history about which I knew only the facts--and none of the feelings, which this book makes clear. Otsuka chooses to have each segment told by a different narrator--the mother, the son, the daughter, the husband.

The Amazon blurb says:
"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."

Here are a few of the images that made these people so human:

1. This segment refers to the painting "The Gleaners": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gle...
"She took 'The Gleaners' out of its frame and looked at the picture one last time. She wondered why she had let it hang in the kitchen so long. It bothered her, the way those peasants were forever bent over above that endless field of wheat. 'Look up' she wanted to say to them. "Look up, lookup!'"

2. They have been told they cannot bring pets, so the woman takes their old White Dog into the garden and tells him to "play dead". "The woman picked up the large shovel that was leaning against the trunk of the tree. She lifted it high in the air with both hands and brought the blade down swiftly on his head."

3. "They had been assigned to a room in a barrack in a block not far from the fence. The boy. The girl. Their mother. Inside there were three iron cots and a potbellied stove and a single bare bulb that hung down from the ceiling. A tin clock. A jar of paper flowers. A box of salt. Tacked to the wall beside a small window, a pciture of Joe DiMaggio torn from a magazine. There was no running water and the toilets were half a block away."

4. They were interred for three years and five months, and then went back to a house that had been completely vandalized. "The War Relocation Authority had sent each person home with train fare and twenty-five dollars in cash."

5. The last chapter, "Confession" is the father in a tirade of a very different tone from the sparse, careful language of the rest of the book. He is the character who finally lets all the vitriol explode on the page--and as a reader, I was fiercely glad that Otsuka finally broke through the reserve with which the rest of the book is written.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune blurb on the back of the book says: "Her writing cuts like jagged glass". I totally agree.

A truly heartbreaking book that opened my eyes to a part of history I did not know about before: US internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII.
The book exemplarily shows us the fate of a family - the father taken away by the FBI, mother and two children brought to an internment camp in the Utah desert. They lost everything because they were suddenly the enemy. It didn't matter if you were perfectly assimilated into the American culture. It was so heartbreaking to see former relationships to friends, neighbours and in the family destroyed through an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Also the unjust treatment overall...

I couldn't help but see some slight parallels to the deportation of Jews by train and their internment in ghettos. (Of course the comparison stops here, but still these images come to mind..) Another parallel would be concerning the atmosphere of suspicion and the overall image of the enemy - reminds me of the Cold War and McCarthyism with the Soviets as the enemy "within" and overall. (Again: very different situations, excuse my chaotic brain haha)


I read this book for a university class on American identity and self-representation and must say that I really liked this short but heartbreaking read! Definitely opened my eyes.

That anyone can rate this novel lower than 5 is just pure insanity. This novel is phenomenal!

Spare prose leaving much unwritten & interpretation between the lines. This worked for me but only because I have read other fictional accounts of Japanese internment camps. Five chapters with different narrators telling a chronological story of their internment. I was surprised to read of the camp in New Mexico. The emotions are understated but felt by the reader. The Japanese families suffered silently & this suffering continued into their return post camp internment. A quiet but quick read.

Avevo già avuto modo di apprezzare lo stile della Otsuka in Venivamo tutte per mare, ma in questo breve romanzo, secondo me, fa un notevole salto di qualità. Narrando con frasi essenziali, ma meno telegrafiche del precedente romanzo, accende i riflettori su una vergognosa pagina di storia americana : l'internamento da parte del governo americano dei cittadini di origine giapponese che seguì l'attacco di Pearl Harbour. Quelli che fino al giorno prima erano cittadini americani a tutti gli effetti - buoni vicini di casa, piccoli commercianti, uomini d'affari, studenti- furono reclusi in vari campi, sparsi in mezzo al deserto (il più famoso quello di Topaz nello Utah) con l'unica colpa di essere giapponesi e furono costretti a vivere in baracche di lamiera in condizioni al limite della decenza. Alla fine della guerra questi prigionieri tornarono alla normalità, per scoprire però di aver perso tutto, dalla casa ai propri risparmi di una vita, oltre alla dignità. "Quando l'imperatore era un dio" è la storia dolorosa di una delle tante famiglie che dovettero subire questa umiliazione. Molto bello.

I admit upfront that my review is based on the first half of the book, because I couldn't get through it. Julie Otsuka has a bad habit of never getting inside the heads of her characters. She just describes their behaviors and reactions to things, but we never really get to feel their emotions at all or delve deeply into their thoughts. It makes for a very boring read, because I could not bond with any of the characters. Same thing happened with her other book, "Buddha in the Attic" (I think it was called) about paper wives coming from Japan to California - she told the entire book from a "we" point of view, which allowed absolutely no depth and no single character to take center stage.

This book has also been criticized on Amazon by Japanese-American readers familiar with internment camps and Japanese culture, who were dismayed that Ms. Otsuka misportrayed the Japanese family and the experience of the internment camps.

I will not try reading any more of her books.

Berkeley, California, 1942.
Prima le regole sugli orari, sugli spazi, sui negozi.
Poi un avviso, scritto molto piccolo, affisso ovunque, "invita" i cittadini americani di origine giapponese a riunirsi presso un centro di raccolta, con poche essenziali cose come bagaglio.
Inizia così un viaggio allucinante: dall'abbandono forzato (a volte cruento e doloroso) dei propri averi, al lunghissimo viaggio in treno, fino ad un campo di baracche nel deserto dello Utah, recintato da filo spinato, dove si respira solo polvere., dove l'acqua e l'ombra sono sogni sognati.
La storia di una donna e dei suoi due bambini evacuati e ricollocati; un marito catturato di notte in vestaglia e ciabatte... una storia che evoca altre storie di cui sicuramente conosciamo meglio i fatti.

Poi: "scusate se siamo tornati".

Già, finita la guerra c'è chi ha la fortuna di tornare, di ritrovare ancora qualcosa di suo, di ricostruire la famiglia, ma sa anche di avere ancora tutti gli occhi puntati addosso, perché la diffidenza è colei che distrugge e annienta i rapporti e la vita.

Questa storia è presa da vicende realmente vissute (a detta della scrittrice).
Ed è veramente duro - per trovare finalmente un po' di pace, se mai pace c'è in tutto questo - dover dire, alla fine:
"Mi dispiace. Ecco. Ho finito. L'ho detto. Ora posso andare?"

Una denuncia dura, cruda, dolorosa, che ci apre gli occhi sull'operato di un popolo, quello degli Stati Uniti, cui non avremmo mai pensato di dover accomunare la parola "deportazione".
Eppure...

Scrittura lineare, senza sussulti, ma che grida ed emoziona.
Bellissimo!

This is a small book that packs a punch. At first, I wasn't sure I liked it. It's got a literary bent, which is not my favorite style, but the subject - Japanese internment - was intriguing to me since I knew little about it.

This is not a book full of dramatic moments or witty dialogue. It's *very* subtle. But then I realized that its subtly is *exactly* the point. If there were big moments that horrified or appalled the reader, then the reader would stay at an arm's length - there's something that happened to *them*, and it's that too bad.

But the fact that this is the story of a typical American family where the mom likes to tend her rosebushes and the kids like milkshakes and playing with their classmates, where the father likes to amuse his kids with jokes and tricks, we realized - this could be any one of us. And these things could happen to any one of us.

There is no "them" in the book. It is "us". And when we realize that all it takes is a shift in politics or a rise in fear to send a whole population to a desert and keep them under lock and key, we understand that the next tide could do that to "us" - and that should make us care and advocate for the current "them".

So in the end, I was moved by the book, and with its gentle prose, I think it will stay with me for a long time.

This showed up in my Little Free Library and I had never heard of it but the synopsis grabbed my attention immediately so decided to try it. If I had known about this book earlier, I absolutely would have made my homeschool high school students read it in American Literature. Most people in the US know very little about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. When it came up in conversation with someone who lived in California roughly during that time period, they told me “that was done for their protection”. Um, no. That was the government’s spin on it and it was totally immoral.

I thought it was interesting how none of the characters had names, and the situation was often viewed through the eyes of a child without much direct historical explanation initially. The prose is unflowery and simple and direct; sometimes the simplicity bothers me and other times it’s incredibly effective. Sparse prose sometimes perfectly and bleakly portrays what was a time of uncertainty, hardship, suffering, upheaval and pain. This one will stick in my mind.

I loved how different this book is from many others I've read. It's written from the point of view of several characters, whose names are never mentioned. It almost seems like the author excluded the names to make them appear generic, as if they could be any Japanese person living in America during World War Two.
This book explores the thoughts and feelings of members of one Japanese family before, during, and after they've been shipped off to a desert camp during WW2. I was left at the end with feelings of both intrigue and satisfaction.
I've always wondered why this book hasn't won a Pulitzer Prize lol.

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