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Title: When the Emperor Was Divine: A Novel by Julie Otsuka ISBN: 0-385-72181-1 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (32 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Don't miss out
Comment: The day I received this book I read the first few pages, canceled my plans for the night and allowed myself to be taken by this book without any effort. "When the Emperor Was Divine" follows a Japanese-American family in 1942 as they are taken from their California stucco house to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. Having months earlier watched their father be sent away to a camp ''for dangerous enemy aliens'', the mother, daughter and son are left to speculate their own fate. Plunged in to a world where mess halls are to be called "dining halls" evacuees are to be called "residents" and the word freedom exists only outside the barbed-wire fence, each spends their time fantasizing over the reunion with their father. Although you never learn the names of any of the main characters you learn their grief and you will value the impact of the line "now he'll always be thirsty" and how it took my breath away. Even if up until that point you are not as convinced, the last three pages alone are enough to guarantee that you will be suggesting this book as soon as you close it.
Rating: 4
Summary: GOOD THINGS COME IN SMALL PACKAGES
Comment: WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE tells the gripping tale of a Japanese-American family sent away to an internment camp in 1942. Their devastation begins when the father was arrested while still in his slippers and bathrobe on the night of Pearl Harbor. Months later flyers are posted throughout Berkeley announcing the mandatory deportation of all individuals of Japanese hertitage. The mother and her two small children are sent on a long train ride and eventually settle in a camp in Utah for three years and five months.
Julie Otsuka's prose is excellent and convincing. She writes in a style that kept me fully engaged and I was anxious to find out what happened to this anonymous family. Will they ever see the father again? How will they be able to rebuild their lives when they are eventually released after the end of the war? I most enjoyed the insights of the little boy as he endured the time spent in the detention camp. His imagination and seriousness are beyond his years. Their return home was most sad.
WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE tells the story of one of the darker chapters in American history. The horrors that they have endured must have been awful. Their only crime was of being of Japanese hetitage. This book is small but don't let that fact put you off since Julie Otsuka packs a bunch in her debut novel. Simply put, this book is well worth reading.
Rating: 5
Summary: Dry documentary account handles this difficult subject
Comment: Throughout the reading I was very concerned with the names - or rather with the lack of names in the story. There is the Father, Mother, Boy and Girl. They have no names, as if no identity. I asked myself several times why the author has chosen to do so. Isn't it true we better understand a general story concerning a disaster that happened to many people when we hear the tale and hardships of one specific individual, one family? But maybe the author wanted to stress that this is not the story of one family but of many people the author knew, and the Father, Mother Boy and Girl are just four people amongst many whose fate was similar. The family members stand as symbols to many others. Or maybe she chose to do so in order to make the alienation and dehumanization experience more accentuated? The answer might be both. The alienation is a very central theme of this story and works also within the family as the members of the family seem to hold out a lot of feelings from each other (although they clearly love each other) as a self defense mechanism (or so I believe) and also as breaking down will not help the situation.
This is a story about the fate of the Japanese Americans during World War II, when each one of them was suspected as assisting the enemy. Although I am familiar with World War II stories this is an historical event I never heard about, which bears a bitter resemblance to the fate of Jewish people in Europe during same war. The Japanese were not sent to death camps but were closed in concentration camps from which they did not return the same people. There is clearly a large difference but the details of the earlier notices limiting the Japanese Americans actions, the long train rides where uncertainty prevails, the concentration camps - all sound like many Holocaust accounts, a fact that makes this story hard to bear.
It took me some time to understand the name "When the emperor was divine", which relates to the religious belief that the Emperor is a god; a belief the American Japanese had to hide during World War II.
The fact that neither the family (the children) nor the reader knows what the father underwent during his long confinement and seperation from the family (in spite of the last part "confession" that can give us a few hints) makes his missing for four years stay incomplete and unexplained. The children grew up in a very vague understanding of what happened, and probably had to fill up the rest of the information by their own. I can only imagine the conflict of loyalties created after the war when the country you live in is the one responsible to your family's suffering.
The power of the book is the fact that there is a shortage in overflow of emotions, which could have been a very easy way to deal with the very difficult subject. The author chose to tell her story in a dry, somewhat documentary language. The horrors are told very subtly and in a somewhat "side look" fashion - "she read the sign from top to bottom... she wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt." as if what the sign says concerns someone else and not the end of your life as you knew them. I believe that holding back your emotions is also a very Japanese way to which the author remained loyal. The language is a combination of a dry account with dreams and thoughts that sometimes turn the prose into lyrical poetry.
Not an easy read but a very good historical, important account.
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Title: Brick Lane: A Novel by Monica Ali ISBN: 0743243307 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason ISBN: 1400030382 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi ISBN: 081297106X Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: The Kite Runner (Alex Awards (Awards)) by Khaled Hosseini ISBN: 1573222453 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 29 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Casa Rossa: A Novel by Francesca Marciano ISBN: 0375726373 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 14 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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