"When the Emperor was Divine" (by Julie Otsuka)

A carefully researched little novel, Otsuka’s first, about the US internment of Japanese citizens during WWII that’s perfect down to the tiniest detail but doesn’t stir the heart.

Shortly after the war begins, the father of an unnamed Japanese family of four in Berkeley, California, is taken from his home—not even given time to dress—and held for questioning. His wife and two children won’t see him until after war’s end four years later, when he’ll have been transformed into a suddenly very old man, afraid, broken, and unwilling to speak even a word about what happened to him. Meanwhile, from the spring of 1942 until the autumn after the armistice, the mother, age 42, with her son and daughter of 8 and 11, respectively, will be held in camps in high-desert Utah, treeless and windswept, where they’ll live in rows of wooden barracks offering little privacy, few amenities, and causing them to suffer—the mother especially—greater and greater difficulty in hanging on to any sense of hope or normality. The characters are denied even first names, perhaps as a way of giving them universality, but the device does nothing to counteract the reader’s ongoing difficulty in entering into them. Details abound—book titles, contemporary references (the Dionne quints, sugar rationing), keepsakes the children take to the camp (a watch, a blue stone), euthanizing the family dog the night before leaving for the camps—but still the narrative remains stubbornly at the surface, almost like an informational flow, causing the reader duly to acknowledge these many wrongs done to this unjustly uprooted and now appallingly deprived American family—but never finding a way to go deeper, to a place where the attention will be held rigid and the heart seized.

Earnestly done, and correctly, but information trumps drama, and the heart is left out.

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Every month a distinguished writer picks one of their favourite books for discussion and comment by readers on our website. Monica Ali introduces her choice for June: Julie Otsuka's 'When the Emperor Was Divine'

I heard Julie Otsuka being interviewed on Radio 4 when this book was first published, three years ago. I went straight out to the bookshop and bought a copy because I thought that her subject matter - the Japanese experience of internment in America during the Second World War - would speak directly to the times we're living in now, when questions of loyalty and allegiance and suspicion of 'the other' have once again been heightened.

More than 110,000 Japanese Americans were stripped of their civil liberties and forced into camps for a period of three and a half years. When the Emperor Was Divine examines this dark history through an intimate portrait of one family. In the opening chapter, the mother (the characters are never named) reads a sign in the post office window, writes down a few words on the back of a bank receipt and goes home to pack. The novel has an unusual structure, moving from the mother's perspective to the daughter's for the train journey to the Utah desert camp, then the son's for the duration of the internment, and then on into the first person plural (encompassing only the children) when the family finally returns home. I had the feeling when I was reading it of moving deeper and deeper into the family, of gradually being taken into their confidence. It is halfway through the book and in the boy's chapter, that we're finally allowed to know the humiliations they have already had to endure before being interned - no more rice balls in their lunch pails, pretending to be Chinese, a curfew for the Japanese - because it is only by this stage, through the accumulated weight of detail, that we are intimate enough to be trusted with this knowledge.

Otsuka's writing is gorgeous, precise and filled with resonance. The horror of the internment camp is captured beautifully, not through a cataloguing of horror but by capturing the pathos of the family's attempts at normality. 'His sister lay on her cot for hours, staring, transfixed, at white majorette boots and men in their bathrobes in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. She wrote letters to her friends on the other side of the fence, telling them all she was having a good time. Wish you were here.'

Her understated style deepens the emotional impact of the novel. She uses two motifs to brilliant effect. One is that of animals. In an incredibly powerful scene in the opening chapter the mother lovingly feeds her pet dog, tells him repeatedly that he has been a good dog, asks him to play dead and then kills him with a shovel. Otsuka never tells us anything about her characters' state of mind; she does far better than that and shows us. The boy keeps a tortoise in the camp and when it seems to be dead he blames himself (just as he blames himself for the plight of the whole family).

When the family comes out of the hibernation of the camp, another motif which has been steadily building - that of flowers - shows its force. The children see their old furniture in local houses, the neighbours having pilfered whatever they could. Their mother's rose bush is missing too, and though they never see it again, 'we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger's backyard, our mother's rose bush was blossoming madly…' What has been lost to them, what has been taken from them, is more than can be seen.

The father is a powerful absence throughout the book, having been arrested 'in his slippers' before the general internment order. When he returns he is a broken man, 'a stranger', who hardly goes out of the house. But the last chapter gives him voice and it is a short, sharp burst of anger which divided the critics' opinion as to whether or not it is out of step with the rest of the novel. Personally, I think it works perfectly, but read it for yourself and decide.

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Over 60 years ago, the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 – “a day that will live in infamy” as then-President Roosevelt named it – eventually led to the signing of Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. Through misguided patriotic paranoia, 9066 caused the incarceration of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps scattered through the West. These prisoners – U.S. citizens, for the most part – lost their homes, their possessions, their communities and their guaranteed, inalienable rights. All because they physically resembled the enemy.

The family in Julie Otsuka’s shockingly brilliant novel debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, represents four of those prisoners – a mother, a father, a daughter and son. Historically accurate, there are no surprises or plot twists in this slim volume – but it will make you gasp as it exposes the truth. It is undoubtedly one of the most effective, memorable books to deal with the internment crisis.

The title is an indirect reference to life before World War II, a time when the Japanese still believed that their emperor was descended from the gods. When the very human voice of the defeated emperor announced the Japanese surrender, the illusion of divinity was shattered forever. For the American family in Otsuka’s title, pre-WWII was a time of relative normalcy, of freedom.

Divided into five tense chapters, Otsuka’s novel gives voice to each of the four members of an unnamed family who survive the incarceration, only to return to a hostile home. Otsuka’s decision not to name her imprisoned family underlines the dehumanization 9066 wreaked upon citizens’ lives.

The novel begins with the mother, who reads the posted evacuation order on “a sunny day in Berkeley [California] in the spring of 1942,” with the new glasses that ironically allow her to see clearly for the first time in weeks. Her husband has already been taken in the middle of the night, in bathrobe and slippers – his crime unnamed, his sentence unknown.

The mother packs away her life and prepares her family for an unknown other existence far away from all that is familiar. She detachedly buys a hammer, refusing the credit the storeowner offers because she does not want to leave with unsettled accounts. She writes a note to herself that no pets are allowed and goes home to deal with the cat, the chicken, the lame dog and finally the talking bird. Her methodical, controlled movements are frightening in their helpless precision – she has no choice but to obey.

Six months later, the family rides a dusty overcrowded train after being kept captive in hurriedly converted, rancid horse stalls. The girl’s voice describes the monotony of the journey, heading toward their desert destination, a camp in a barren stretch of Utah called Topaz.

As their new life begins, the son’s voice emerges to describe a life within barbed wire fences, of freezing nights and parched days, of endless lines waiting for meals, water and open latrines. As the war rages on, the War Relocation Authority swoops in to procure cheap labor to harvest crops, but the world beyond the fence is even more hostile: “They said they’d been shot at. Spat on. …They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.”

Three years later, the war is over and mother, daughter and son return home, a home they barely recognize in a neighborhood that doesn’t want them, to friends who refuse to remember them. Their newly reinstated, so-called freedom is an ironic slap in the face. Post-war reality is harsh, but clear: “We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of the enemy.”

But for the first time, the three become “we” as the father is finally reunited with his family – yet reunion is heartbreaking: “Although we had been waiting for this moment, the moment of our father’s return, for more than four years now, when we finally saw him standing there before us on the platform we did not know what to think, what to do. … Because the man who stood there before us was not our father. He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father’s place.”

In the final pages, we’re given a glimpse of the ordeal that turned the father into that stranger. Entitled “Confession,” and written in first person, the “I” admits to ridiculous accusations – “It was me. I did it. I poisoned your reservoirs. I sprinkled your food with insecticide …” and so on with each admission becoming wilder. And in frustration, the “I” continues with “I’m the one you call Jap. I’m the one who call Nip. I’m the one you call Slits. … I’m the one you don’t see at all – we all look alike.” After four grueling years of having everything taken from him, including his individuality, his dignity and his freedom, he only wants to sign on the dotted line and go.

The maturity of Otsuka’s first prose is astonishing. In a sparse 160 pages, she captures the bewilderment, the cruelty, the inexplicable experiences of a group of Americans punished for what they look like. The urgency in her voice is especially poignant, given life post-9-11 when again, the innocent continue to be punished, even killed because of a mistaken resemblance to the so-called enemy. Otsuka is a remarkable witness – read her testimony and help ensure that the mistakes of our past are not repeated again.