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Average customer rating:

Fantastic!
Seems to be a lot like another book- to much so
sansei1
An excellent, succint novella - before, during and after - one family's internment experience
Sad But True

When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka
Manufacturer: Anchor
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0385721811
Release Date: 2003-10-14

Amazon.com

A precise, understated gem of a first novel, Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine tells one Japanese American family's story of internment in a Utah enemy alien camp during World War II. We never learn the names of the young boy and girl who were forced to leave their Berkeley home in 1942 and spend over three years in a dusty, barren desert camp with their mother. Occasional, heavily censored letters arrive from their father, who had been taken from their house in his slippers by the FBI one night and was being held in New Mexico, his fate uncertain. But even after the war, when they have been reunited and are putting their stripped, vandalized house back together, the family can never regain its pre-war happiness. Broken by circumstance and prejudice, they will continue to pay, in large and small ways, for the shape of their eyes. When the Emperor Was Divine is written in deceptively tranquil prose, a distillation of injustice, anger, and poetry; a notable debut. --Regina Marler

Book Description

Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka uses a single family to evoke the deracination—both physical and emotional—of a generation of Japanese Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from a different point of view—the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family’s return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after more than four years in captivity—she has created a small tour de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, When the Emperor Was Divine is a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for our times. It heralds the arrival of a singularly gifted new novelist.

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

Fantastic!.......2007-05-09

I really enjoyed this book. She writes the book in 3rd person and it really adds to the sense of invisibility of the family. The book is reflective in nature in that we are told what happens and how it feels to the characters as opposed to experiencing them as they happen. I found this book very thought provoking and timely.

Seems to be a lot like another book- to much so.......2007-03-18

As an elementary school teacher I read a book entitled, "Journey to Topaz". It was a fabulous book. As I began to read "The Emperor was Divine" I got the strange feeling I'd read it before. I am almost certain the author of "The Emperor was Divine" has too. There are way to many similiarities. I suppose it is entirely possible that they lived an almost identical life as it's a big world. Based on copywrite "Journey to Topaz" was written first. I enjoyed it more-perhaps because the characters were far better developed and the storyline was original. It makes me wonder?

sansei1.......2006-09-18

I had mixed feelings about this book before I read it. The title is NOT how most JA immigrants felt about the emperor of Japan. There was generally no love lost. Most, like my grandparents, left because of poverty, conscription, alienation, and to look for better oportunites in America, lika a lot of other immigrants. While reading the book, I give her kudos for her ability to describe events visually well. BUT...there are many problems with this book. There is this sterility in the manner in which she describes events.She can manage to paint a visually stunning picture with her words but there is no substance. Her characters seem as if she studied them from a textbook. A Nisei (second generation) young girl would NEVER talk in the manner in which she writes, to an elder!!! Its almost like she had Dakota Fanning in mind for this character. And the father character, an Issei (first generation)....Issei's used to swallow their pain. The Issei are known for their stoic strength and "gaman", quiet strength amidst adversity. I felt isulted by his mental confession in the book. I went to see the author at a local library and she did confess she NEVER interviewed ANY living internees. My god...they are dying off and she doesn't interview them? She said she wanted a more "pure" viewpoint. She said she did study books for her historical references. Indeed, there are some references in the book which I'm not quite sure if it is plagiarism, like in the description of the flies bothering her characters and then when they put up screens, it gets better. See Mine Okubo's book Citizen 13660, which Otsuka does reference. That scene is in there. I can see where the sterility feeling I got came from---if she only studied books and didn't get a feel for the emotional aspect that is buried in a lot of interness...she only did her homework half-baked.There are SO many heartbreaking stories that are dying and being buried with the internees. She confessed she didn't really listen when her parents and grandparents talked about it and they would shut up when she'd come around. But she said she didn't really ask them either, only marginally later. What IS her interest here? A book bestseller to be touted among the Asian community? I didn't really get from her interviewed she cared deeply for what happened, it was just a good base for her story. My parents told me everything and I am grateful. I am insulted by this book. It is like looking at a painting of a pretty scene but the artist who created didn't really care about anything but rendering a pretty scene. I was fairly disgusted by the time I left the interview from the library.
She's a grad of Columbia? She needs to study more. This is a great book if you think Snow Falling on Cedars is wonderful.

An excellent, succint novella - before, during and after - one family's internment experience.......2006-09-17

Approximately 50,000 Japanese born residents of America and 70,000 American born ethnically Japanese residents of America were sent to internment camps after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bringing America into WWII. Otsuka's (historical fiction) novella (which can be read by most in a couple of hours) follows the story of one family's experience with internment.

Using a fresh, concise style of writing, Otsuka wastes no words in telling the story of an average upper middle class Japanese-American family's three and a half year-long experience before, during, and after internment. When the story begins, it is April and the father is living at Fort Sam Houston, having been picked up after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the wife and two children are preparing to leave. The mother chooses the belongings they are allowed, packs away the important things, buries the silver, and "takes care" of the pets. The smart Mary Jane wearing Dorothy Lamour, boy and black licorice loving ten year old daughter (who does not speak Japanese) and the baseball playing, Joe Palooka comic book aficionado seven year old son go resignedly but without complaint. They travel by train to their destination, Topaz, a colony of barbed wire fenced, guarded, tar paper barracks in the middle of the Utah desert, which at its peak held 9,400 people. Called to meals by the sound of a bell, they are served odd foods like liver and horse meat. They spend most of their time waiting for meals, letters from their father and for each hot day of summer and cold day of winter to be over so the next day, same as the previous, can begin. They are not allowed to speak the name of the emperor, or practice Shintoism. All the real stuff happens at night. The mother worries, misses the sea and ages ungracefully. They receive censor-scarred letters from their father and wait and wonder. Eventually, they return to their home. The mother opens the door to their used, abused house with a well-cherished key. The house, the neighborhood, and their lives are forever changed. The absent father finally arrives home, bent, broken, aged well beyond his years, unable to work. The family tries to slip back into its, pre-internment world, barely muddling through as they try to be accepted in a world where they are mistrusted as war veterans return, sharing stories about their mistreatment at the hands of the Japanese.

The book ends with a chapter containing a forced confession, of which one particular sentence "I'm your worst fear-you saw what we did in Manchuria, you remember Nanking, you can't get Pearl Harbor out of your mind," should clang a loudly resounding bell in the reader's mind. Some companion reads to Otsuka's novel, The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Flyboys by John Bradley, Silence by Shusaku Endo, Race, Resistance and the Ainu of Japan by Richard Siddle, The Invisible Minority: Japan's Burakumin by Roger Yoshino and Japan's Hidden Apartheid: The Korean Minority and the Japanese by George Hicks.

Sad But True.......2006-03-06

When The Emperor Was Divine is a well written , tragic story. The story begins the day before a nameless,Japanese American woman and her two children are sent to an internment camp during World War II. The father was arrested shortly before on suspicion of being a traitor.The family's transportation,stay in the camp in Neveda,and their return home is told. This short book is very powerful. With concisness, the author captures the racism and injustices the family endured. The story is told without sentimentality and does not preach. I have read stories about the Japanese internment during WWII, but I never read what their return home was like. That was the most disturbing part of the book for me. When The Emperor Was Divine is a good book discussion book.

Average customer rating:

When the Emperor Was Divine
Julie Otsuka
Manufacturer: Anchor Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OP1IE8

Average customer rating:

When the Emperor Was Divine
JULIE OTSUKA
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OJHY4C

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