From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times.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 … 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 incarceration 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.
Don’t miss Julie Otsuka’s new novel, The Swimmers, coming in February 2022!
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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.
Read 6.26.2016
This book delves into a very shameful part of America’s past – the Japanese interment camps. We as American’s do not always respond in a way that is smart or healthy or even productive; we let fear rule us and never is this more present than after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. This book is a good example of what happened to many Japanese-American families during that time. It is written in such a way that anyone can get what is going on and you have to be a pretty cold soul to not be moved by it.
The only part of this book I didn’t enjoy was the end [it is what took it from a 4 star read to a 3 1/2 star read for me]. It did fall rather flat for me; but it was a late night read and that might have contributed to it. But I talked with the person who recommended the book to me and she had vague remembrances of the ending so I think that I am correct in my assessment of how it ends.
I still do recommend this book however; it is a good place to start if you are looking into that time period of America. It made me sad that we have [and continue to] treat people in such a way.
This novel stayed with me for months after I read it. The cruelty we human beings can inflict on each other merely because we look different or come from a different background is at the heart of this book. During WWII, a Japanese American family living in Berkeley, California, is sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert (along with other California families). The father is separated from the family and sent to a different camp. Each family member feels the impact differently and chronicles the experience in her/his own chapter of the novel. In some ways, it’s harder for the family to come back to their home after the war, having to face neighbors whom they previously regarded as friends but who turned their backs on the family once they were labeled as the “foreign enemy.” This important novel gives us a lot to think about since this kind of forced separation could happen again–and does happen to a certain extent every time we perceive a terrorist threat against our country.
Our local community was part of the NEA’s Big Read for this book, and they were giving it out for free, had a Q&A and book signing with the author and everything. It’s a small book, but it is a nice literary attempt to tackle the feelings Japanese-Americans felt during the internment period.