When the Emperor Was Divine is the slim, but powerful, debut novel by Julie Otsuka set during World War II. About the book: “From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic, 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.”Spread over five chapters and with spare, precise, but evocative writing, When the Emperor was Divine takes place in Ut...

How do you write about trauma? Are you verbose and expansive? Terse and straighforward? In this case, you use elegant and spare prose that brings home the extent of the wrong by never quite stating it in so many words. Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

This is a powerful and well written novel about the internment of an unnamed Japanese-American family during the Second World War. Firstly the father is taken away in his dressing gown and slippers, a few months later his wife, son and daughter are sent to a different camp in the desert. Their experiences are told in a matter of fact way, but the trauma is obvious and their return home, over three years later is not really a happy ending.

“But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.” It's easy to make a story like this melodramatic, moralistic, overwrought with feelings. A less skilled writer would have done it. A story of an unnamed Japanese-American family banished from their quiet life in Berkeley to spend over three years in an internment camp for a s

Assuming you have read the book description, you already know this book’s theme is the treatment of Japanese during WW2 and Japanese internment camps in the USA. It is more a study of the psychological than factual treatment of Japanese. You will not get historical facts or precise, detailed descriptions of the camps. What you will learn is how the Japanese Americans felt and how their war experiences changed them. You will feel the discrimination they experienced. This very short novel reads as...

As of this moment, there are various rules and regulations being pushed through the US government regarding the formation of internment camps for refugees fleeing through the US-Mexican border from the drug wars of the USA's creation. There's nothing new under the sun here, nothing beyond the standard protocol of a country that has been at war for 214 of the 235 years of its existence and has only increased the size of its playground over time. What that last part translates to is the fire and t...

My, what a painfully raw, poignant, brief, yet eloquent period piece of story-telling, historical fiction, literary fiction, and ... social commentary (which, alas, is all too relevant today as the ugly head of populism and ignorant tribalism again rears itself and proclaims its message of hate and fear with a small-minded, yet full-throated, roar). Sparse prose ... but a clear vision ... a splendid, effective, humane work. To the extent that research suggests that reading fiction enhances our c...

When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie OtsukaWhen the Emperor was Divine is a historical fiction novel written by American author Julie Otsuka about a Japanese American family sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert during World War II. The novel, loosely based on the wartime experiences of Otsuka's mother's family, is written through the perspective of four family members, detailing their eviction from California and their time in camp. It is Otsuka's debut novel, and was published in the Uni...

I love Otsuka’s voice, judicious metaphors, and understated emotional hooks in this child’s eye view of the Japanese internment in World War 2. I have already had the pleasure of her 2011 gem, “The Buddha in the Attic”, which covers the same subject from an adult perspective that often breaks into powerful incantation in a broad “we” mode. In this novella eight years earlier, the narrative tends to be more conventional, yet it still has fresh and lyrical approaches for portraying this sad chapte...

I recognize that the terse language, namelessness of the characters, and relatively uneventful plot in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor was Divine are all aesthetic choices. They’re just not choices that I agree with.Otsuka details the experiences of a family of Japanese Americans placed in an internment camp during World War II. It’s an engaging topic, one not overly explored in American historical fiction, but her methods of conveying the important story only serve to undermine the urgency of t...

The reasons I can pick up or purchase a book veer from recommendation and suggestion, which seems normal and sensible, through its association or appearance in a previous read, understandable and explicable, or its fabulous title, thank you Dan...up to it's being a lovely looking book. Whenever i go to Hay on Wye, a marvelous town on the welsh/english border containing 37second hand book shops, I cringe at the shops that sell leather bound books by the foot or metre so as to populate some wealth...

When the Emperor Was Divine is a powerful book that portrays the internment of those of Japanese ancestry after the bombing of Pearl Harbor during World War II and is told from the perspective and point of view of the father who is taken from their Berkley, California home by the FBI and imprisoned in New Mexico for the duration of the war. We also get the points of view of the mother, the 11-year old girl and the 8-year old boy as they are transported to an internment camp in a desert in Utah a...

This historical novel is both gorgeous and heartbreaking. It follows a Japanese-American family that is sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert during World War II. The story follows the family as they get the news of the forced relocation, the trip to the camp, how they lived in the barracks, and finally, after more than three years of incarceration, their return home. I appreciated this novel because the Japanese internment is a dark chapter of U.S. history, and one that seems overlooked...

I finished reading When the Emperor Was Divine a couple of days ago, and I was at a loss for words for my review. Everything that I noticed, felt, and appreciated about the denseness of this sparse little book was neatly encapsulated in the synopsis of this edition. Check it out if you haven't already.Anyway, part of my goals this year is to review every single book I read, and so OCD got the better of me, and here I am now. How can I sum up this book without being redundant? Simply this: this i...

I am back for another taste of Julie Otsuka's writing. It's another trim one! She certainly has the knack of saying much with brevity and skill- and making her point (s)!************************************Many books have been written about the outrageous internment of Japanese Americans during WW II. There have been respectable treatments of this topic, such as Farewell to Manzanar, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Snow Falling on Cedars, to name a few. Julie Otsuka had given us a taste...

As I was pondering what to write about this slim, impressionistic book about America's internment of Japanese, including citizens, the leading candidate for one of the two major parties in the United States praised that painful and wrong-headed moment in our history. It is astonishing to me that anyone can think it acceptable for the national government to take any action on the basis of race or religion, and Julie Otsuka's book is a primer, not just on the venality but on the ineffectiveness of...

With already so many wonderful reviews -- I'm going to just add one quote I thought about (something Jewish people often think about)"You can't remember everything", she said."And even if you can you shouldn't", said the girl"I wouldn't say that", said her mother"You didn't", said the girlnote: Sometimes ....you find yourself reading a novel --its taking a lot of your concentration -- then you see a Goodreads friend post a beautiful review of a book you 'must' read....(you might even own it, whi...

Of all the books I've read about the Japanese-American internment camps, this one wasn't my favorite. But I'd still recommend it. It focuses on a family - mom, dad, girl and boy - and how they dealt with the ordeal before, during and after. The family is forced to leave their home in California and stay in a camp in a Utah.The writing style was unique: unsentimental, simple and poetic. The story was gripping, but it was a bit choppy and left some holes. It's a short read, just under 145 pages, a...

3.75While not as lyrical as The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka’s first novel achieves much of the same cumulative power. The penultimate chapter, written in first-person plural, is, of course, most reminiscent of the former and perhaps in its writing Otsuka discovered the style she would later use for The Buddha in the Attic. But it is the last and shortest chapter that packs the hardest punch, pointing out even more so the absurdness, danger and sadness of this time (a time that could come again i...

This is a difficult book to read, as well it should be, a book of loneliness, deep sadness and alienation during an episode of fairly recent history. During World War II, in fact, mere months after Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese residents of the United States were labeled enemy aliens and removed from their homes, transported across country to camps set up in the middle of the desert, inhospitable spots of searing heat in the summer and terrible cold in the winter. This book is the story of...