When the Emperor Was Divine
Books | Fiction / War & Military
3.6
(287)
Julie Otsuka
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, this commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times.On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today's headlines.
World War 2
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More Details:
Author
Julie Otsuka
Pages
160
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published Date
2007-12-18
ISBN
0307430219 9780307430212
Ratings
Google: 2.5
Community ReviewsSee all
"I liked the book as a whole and it it was beautifully written, but Julie Otsuka has a sort of detached omniscient writing style that follows characters and tells stories through their perspective without ever actually defining the characters. It was pretty slow and a bit hard to follow. The characters were the woman, the boy, and the girl so the narration came off as a bit cold and distant. I’ve liked it in her other books but this is a story about how the characters perceived internment so I didn’t like how detached it felt. It fell flat because these stories have always been so emotion and people hold them close, so to see it form an unnamed perspective felt like if I were a European reading about Japanese internment. I read the book to understand how my family felt and I got an almost monotone retelling of events rather than experiences. Not my favorite of her work "
K
Katie
"Incredibly moving."
Maria Paula
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