When the Emperor Was Divine
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, 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 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With unabashed accuracy and poignant emotional force, Julie Otsuka’s deeply affecting historical novel recounts a dark moment in America’s history. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an unnamed Japanese family is violently ripped away from their Berkeley, California, home and forced to spend the remainder of World War II in internment camps. With a spare storytelling style that starkly captures this one family’s terror and heartbreak, Otsuka makes us understand what it’s like to suffer countless indignities, armed with nothing but sad resignation and the will to survive. Shifting POVs give the narrative an extra-personal feeling, but the real knockout comes when Otsuka depicts the soul-crushing aftermath of the family’s ordeal. This story of prejudice and injustice is a quick read, but one that will leave you floored.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion. After a woman whose husband was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy sees notices posted around her neighborhood in Berkeley instructing Japanese residents to evacuate, she moves with her son and daughter to an internment camp, abruptly severing her ties with her community. The next three years are spent in filthy, cramped and impersonal lodgings as the family is shuttled from one camp to another. They return to Berkeley after the war to a home that has been ravaged by vandals; it takes time for them to adjust to life outside the camps and to come to terms with the hostility they face. When the children's father re-enters the book, he is more of a symbol than a character, reduced to a husk by interrogation and abuse. The novel never strays into melodrama Otsuka describes the family's everyday life in Berkeley and the pitiful objects that define their world in the camp with admirable restraint and modesty. Events are viewed from numerous characters' points of view, and the different perspectives are defined by distinctive, lyrically simple observations. The novel's honesty and matter-of-fact tone in the face of inconceivable injustice are the source of its power. Anger only comes to the fore during the last segment, when the father is allowed to tell his story but even here, Otsuka keeps rage neatly bound up, luminous beneath the dazzling surface of her novel.
