When the Emperor Was Divine

Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine is a novel treating the experiences of one Japanese-American family during the internment of World War II. Most of the novel is told in the third person without names, perhaps to emphasize that internment happened to thousands of Japanese-Americans, all turned into numbers, all considered to be exactly the same treason risk, no matter the age.

The novel begins with the mother and two children packing to leave Berkeley, California by train. The mother gives away the cat, kills the old White Dog, frees the macaw, buries the silver, and locks up all the family’s precious possessions in one room of the house.

The mother and children spend three years and five months at the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. Although they are not subjected to physical torture--except wrongful imprisonment, loss of their home and possessions, separation from the father, and the heat and cold in the alkali desert--all three seem to disappear into the despair associated with oppression, inactivity, and waiting. At one point, the boy grows a tulip he names Gloria, but the potential beauty associated with this new life is immediately undercut by his sister’s failure to find the shell of the tortoise they expected to be reborn in the spring. She says, “’He left without us’” (100), which suggests the emptiness of their lives, the loss of the world, passing by without them, and maybe even the failure of a savior to redeem them from this hell.

When the mother and children return to their home, the narrative shifts into the first-person plural from the children’s perspective as they attempt to readjust to life in Berkeley. Because their home has been trashed and all their possessions stolen, because they have no income until their mother takes menial jobs, and because racism in the community still causes a barrier between them and their community, the children have difficult re-acclimating. This sense of alienation is exacerbated when their father returns home an old man, unrecognizable and incapable of providing for his family. The children go seeking their mother’s red rosebush but never find it, as if the promise of life, liberty, and happiness has been utterly denied them.

The end of the novel is told in the first-person singular from the father’s perspective. It reads partly as a transcript of a tortured man admitting to anything that would get his captors to stop and a kind of unified voice of all Japanese-American men who lost their manhood during internment, reacting to the racism with utter bitterness, with irony admitting to all of the crimes believed of them: “And I’ve been living here, quietly, beside you, for years, just waiting for Tojo to flash me the high sign” (143). The deep anger lacing this false admission of guilt is ultimately justified and painfully difficult to read.

I think this is an important book. It’s not long, a quick read, but it’s weighty and disturbing. It’s difficult to imagine Americans putting up with such treatment of other human beings, but we’re surprisingly passive today with the continued existence of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Maybe each generation has its horrible secret, like the child locked away in Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” whose mistreatment makes happiness possible for the rest of the townspeople. And, then, there are all the poor and disenfranchised who live in our towns, on the edge of our awareness. Sadly, we don’t really see them either and would rather blame them for their condition.

Works Cited

Otsuka, Julie. When the Emperor Was Divine. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print.

Image Source

"When the Emperor Was Divine." Book Cover. amazon.com. 16 Feb. 2012. http://www.amazon.com/When-Emperor-Divine-Julie-Otsuka/dp/B005EOZ7VO/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1329450260&sr=8-4