Judith Mary Wilson - Quicklet on Julie Otsukas When the Emperor Was Divine

All throughout history, people have been rounded up and sent away into exile. The predicament of the family in my novelordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances beyond their controlis a very human one . ( Julie Otsuka ,The Asia Society )

At its core, Julie Otsukas novel When the Emperor Was Divine is a story about characters, and she portrays them beautifully. With simplicity, distance, and precise attention to the details of the era, she draws on universal human emotions to create individuals whose experiences, thoughts, and perceptions open a window to the history of a troubling time in Americas history.

The story begins in 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II, and it follows four members of one Japanese-American family as they leave their home in Berkeley, CA, and endure more than three years as internees in War Relocation Camps. Otsuka captures the guilt and shame, confusion and resignation that they feel, as they suffer indignities and loss resulting from the fears and prejudice of others, which theyve done nothing to deserve.

Although the book is fiction, it is based on fact and reflects the experiences of members of Otsukas own family. Her grandfather was accused of being a spy and was arrested the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Her mother, uncle, and grandmother spent three years in the Topaz Camp in the Utah desert, as do the characters in the story.

She says, however, that she had to do extensive research to get most of her information, because her mother, who was interned as a child, doesnt remember much, and those who did remember, such as her grandmother, were reluctant to talk about their experiences. I think, for them, it was a shameful episode, says Otsuka ( A Conversation with Julie Otsuka ).

Otsuka takes an unusual approach to portraying her characters, giving them generic namesthe woman, the boy, the girl, and the manin a device that demonstrates the loss of identity that comes when people are categorized solely by ethnicity, as were Japanese Americans after the United States entered World War II. Instead of naming them, she captures the individuality of her characters by writing each chapter from the point of view of a different family member. The book contains just five chaptersone each for the mother, daughter, son, and father, and one using the collective we to look at events through the eyes of the woman and her children.

Alfred A. Knopf published When the Emperor Was Divine in 2002, and Anchor Books released the softcover edition in 2003. The book has been translated into six languages and sold more than 250,000 copies. More than 35 university and colleges have made it required reading for freshmen.

The New York Times recognized When the Emperor Was Divine as a New York Times Notable Book, and The San Francisco Chronicle, named it a Best Book of the Year. It also received honors as Booklist Editors Choice for Young Adults and New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, as well as the ALA Alex Award and the Asian American Literary Award.

I like writing. I like words. And I love stories. And language . (Julie Otsuka, Goldsea )

Julie Otsuka was born in Palo Alto, CA, in 1962, the first of three children of a father who was an aerospace engineer and a mother who worked as a lab technician before having a family. She grew up in California and went east after high school to attend Yale University, where she graduated with a degree in fine art. She first studied sculpture, but then turned to painting, which she found more challenging.

After Yale, she attended the University of Indiana for a short time to further her studies in art, but she began to doubt her ability as a painter and dropped out. She returned to New York, where she worked at a series of unrelated jobs and also attended the New York Studio School. She was unable to build a career in art, however, and finally gave it up, considering herself a failure as a painter. I was not terribly interested in content, she says. I was really into the act of looking.

While in New York, she began to read works by famous authors and started writing humorous sketches, which put her on the path to becoming a writer. She discovered that she enjoyed writing and joined a class, then applied to Columbia Universitys M.F.A. program in creative writing. She began graduate school at Columbia in 1994 and graduated in 1999.

In a Goldsea interview, Otsuka says that she began writing When the Emperor was Divine when she was a graduate student and used part of it in her thesis. Columbia also submitted two chapters to an anthology, which brought her to the attention of an agent, who offered to represent her. The agent, Nicole Aragi, took the still-unfinished manuscript to Alfred A. Knopf, which secured the rights within days and published the novel in 2003.

Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, a story about picture brides who came to America to marry Japanese men in the early 1900s, was published in 2011. In an interview with Granta magazine, she says that she expects her next novel to be about dementia and swimming.

Otsuka lives in New York City and writes almost daily at a neighborhood caf.

She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and went home and began to pack.

Its spring, 1942 and a sunny day in Berkeley, CA, as an unnamed woman sets out to return a book to the library. The day starts out pleasant enough, but then suddenly, everything changes. Overnight, signs have appeared everywherein store windows, at the entrance to buildings, and stapled at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue. The woman looks at one in the window of the post office and goes home. She never reaches the library.

The woman is Japanese, and the United States is at war with Japan. The government believes that people of Japanese ethnicity who live in the coastal states of the western United States are a threat and is rounding them up and placing them in isolated internment camps inland.

The authorities had taken her husband into custody the day after the attack on Peal Harbor, and he had already been sent to a camp out of state. Now she has learned that the rest of the family is about to be relocated. She spends the following days packing, deciding what to keep and what to throw out, and attending to the details, as she gets her family ready to leave their home for an unknown destination and an undetermined period of time.

As the appointed day approaches, the woman and her two children prepare to report to a Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way as instructed, where They would pin their identification numbers to their collars and grab their suitcases and climb up onto the bus and go wherever it was they had to go.

Four months later, after a stint in an assembly center, the family is aboard a train bound for a camp in the Utah desert. When passengers are allowed to have the shades up, the girl notices the details of the world beyond the train: a sleeping dog, a dry riverbed, a man kicking a truck, and she also sees mustangs running free in the desert and points them out to her brother who is eager to see horses. She also perceives the hostility directed at the Japanese in the actions of some of the people they pass.

Queasy passengers unable to cope with the rocking of the railcars vomit, sleeping in the seats is difficult, and the train runs out of water, but eventually the family arrives in Utah to take up residence in a dry, dusty camp with endless rules and limited liberty.