When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2003 Anchor Books
ISBN: 0385721811

Based on the author's grandparents' experiences in US Japanese Internment camps.

Life in balmy Berkeley, California for the Mother & her family in 1942 was charmed. One dreadful winter morning the FBI took her husband away still in his slippers & robe, their telephone line was cut & their bank account frozen.

Then the notices appeared on every public surface, telling her what she must do & when & where she must go with her children. So she goes home to pack, close up her home & to take care of her family's pets.

On the appointed morning, with her daughter & her son & the only belongings they're allowed to take -- what they can carry, they leave the house they have known all their lives & go to the Civil Control Center at a nearby church. For four empty months they are crowded into a racetrack near San Francisco, until they are herded with thousands of others onto a train headed toward the salt desert of Utah. There they are incarcerated behind barbed wire fences, surrounded by armed guards in towers in the middle of nowhere in rows of uninsulated barracks with nothing to do for three blazing, dustfilled summers & three freezing, muddy winters, all because they are of Japanese origin.

Julie Otsuka has written a story of immense & minute radiant detail: of what a wife & mother must do after her husband is arrested without notice; of watching neighbors withdrawing; of preparing to abandon all she has known; of taking her children into the unknown; of surviving. Of the daughter's struggles with schoolfriends, the inexplicable loss of her father, her home, her identity. Of the younger son's struggles with the insults, the dreams filled with violence, the loss of purpose in his life.

When The Emperor Was Divine is about a family once as proud of their heritage as they were of being American. Both children had hardly heard of who or what was “the emperor”, however, everyone else knew.

Julie Otsuka has painted the landscape of the Japanese internment camps in stark, complex & precise images as seen through the eyes of the four family members. In simple strokes she evokes the eradication of the prosperity, mental health & pursuit of happiness for an entire generation of Japanese Americans.

In a handful of flawless chapters, Julie Otsuka has drawn the mother, the daughter, the son & finally the father -- their evacuation, their train ride, their years of internment & their return to their abused home, where at last their father comes home, a ruined & damaged man.

Exquisite, infuriating, heartwrenching & unsentimental, When the Emperor Was Divine is an astonishingly moving testament to both the dreadful deeds a society can condone, & the impeccable dignity of the truly innocent.

The parallels between what happened to the Jews, Gypsies & other “undesirables” in Nazi Germany as well as to what is happening today to American Muslims makes When The Emperor Was Divine a read that will resonate through every reader's soul. Lest we have forgotten.

Another rewarding read on the subject of WWII Japanese internment camps is Imprisoned Apart.
(01/18/04)

Rebecca