Booking It: When The Emperor Was Divine

When the Emperor Was Divine is slow. That is not to say that it is boring or disengaging. To the contrary, its slowness is a powerful stylistic choice by author Julie Otsuka. The novel follows the lives of four members of a Japanese-American family struggling through the racism and gross injustice of the internment camps during and immediately after World War II. While it is in some senses a war novel, there are no explosions, no firefights, no daring espionage or close calls, no heroics. Otsuka tells the story of an entirely different kind of war, one fought against prejudice, injustice, racism and the conflict of loyalty to two different countries. In this war, the family does not fight back, at least not in the way we tend to think of fighting. They simply continue, day by day, to try and live their lives as best they can while the U.S. government tears their world down around them.

A great deal of the book is occupied with waiting: waiting for the move-out day, waiting for a train to arrive, waiting for the war to end. The family’s struggle to fill the empty hours is matter-of-fact and mundane. Yet, whenever you may be on the verge of forgetting the family’s new reality, Otsuka delivers a reminder all the more jarring for being said in the same pragmatic manner as the rest of her book. Their time in the internment camp is largely characterized by passages such as the following:

“Now when the girl undressed — always, the quick flick of the wrists and then the criss-crossing arms and the yellow dress billowing up over her head like a parachute in reverse — she asked him to turn away. She told him about the seasons and hibernation. She said that any day now she’d be bleeding. ‘It’ll be red,’ she said. She told him that Franklin Masuda had a terrible case of athlete’s foot — ‘He showed me’ — and that someone had stuffed a newborn baby into a trash can in Block 29.”

Passages like this are the essence of what makes Otsuka’s writing so affecting. She reminds us that life never stops – that despite the camps and the war, people continue struggling through. Girls grow up and get their periods for the first time. Children gross each other out with infected feet. Events such as these would be happening to everyone all over the country and the world. The difference is that to the girl and her brother, a baby in a trash can is no more or less interesting than any of these other occurrences. It is simply part of their life. The juxtaposition between the ordinary and the grotesque brings the novel and its characters to life in all its heart-breaking, gritty detail.

Another element that makes this novel quietly brilliant is its refusal to stop at the end of the war. It would have been easy to end with the reuniting of the family and a hopeful look to the future now that the war is over. But Otsuka’s novel struggles, more than anything, to tell the story how it really might have been lived, by those who were never anywhere near the front lines, and yet had the war brought to them all the same. So it continues, past what we expect to be the happy ending. It explores not only the hardships of wartime itself, but also the aftermath of neighbors never coming home, slurs scrawled on the walls of homes and sidelong glances from people who used to be friends. It drives home to both readers and characters that life can never be what it was before.

The story is told from five different perspectives: the mother, the daughter, the son, the children together and, briefly, the father. Yet, while almost all of the side characters have names, none of the family members do. They are rich, vibrant characters, effortlessly brought to life by Otsuka’s attention to detail, and yet they remain nameless and largely faceless. The narration also shifts, about three-quarters of the way through the novel, from third to first person. It is an upsetting, unexpected transition that wrenches you closer and deeper into these characters’ lives. The characters themselves are oddly dichotomous: somehow simultaneously Every Person, and yet also particular, highly empathetic characters. Like the plodding mundanity, interrupted by moments of shock, that characterizes Otsuka’s style and sets the atmosphere of her novel, these characters are a powerful stylistic choice. A cursory glance leaves them characterized as nothing more than nameless, faceless Japanese-Americans, numbers on a camp roster. However, even a few minutes of closer reading reveals dozens of details and unique qualities for each character. When the Emperor Was Divine is not a novel for plot and action. What little action there is passes slowly. It is, however, rich with detail and extraordinarily real.