Use the library database Gale Literature Literary Sources (link below) to find more book reviews. Search with the title keyword: When the Emperor was Divine.
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her house, 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 homes and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells the story of one Japanese American family from five flawlessly realized points of view—the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family’s return to their home; and the bitter release of the father after almost four years in captivity. 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.
Learn more from these interviews with the author of When the Emperor was Divine.
Read:
A Conversation with Julie Otsuka - Random House publishing
An Interview with Julie Otsuka - Book Browse
Six Questions for Julie Otsuka - Harper's Magazine
When the Emperor was Divine and Japanese Americans were Rounded Up - Asia Society
Listen:
Watch:
Writer Gene Oishi hosts novelist Julie Otsuka to talk about her novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, about the experience of a Japanese-American family incarcerated during the war. Otsuka's mother was interned, as was Oishi, and the two discuss the secrecy and the anger. Otsuka reads from the final chapter of the book, and explains its tone. "One day I heard this angry, angry voice in my head and it almost felt like I was channeling the father's anger, and also, ... the unstated anger of all of the other men who were unfairly arrested by the FBI."
“Exceptional. . . . Otsuka skillfully dramatizes a world suddenly foreign. . . . [Her] incantatory, unsentimental prose is the book’s greatest strength.”
–The New Yorker
“[A] gentle, understated novel . . . A story that has more power than any other I have read about this time.”
—Los Angeles Times
“While you’re reading this accomplished novel, what impresses you most is how much Otsuka is able to convey—in a line, in a paragraph—about her characters’ surroundings, about their states of mind, and about the mood of our country at a time of crisis.”
—The New York Times Book Review