50books_poc | #14: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

When the Emperor Was Divine begins in 1942 with a Japanese woman seeing a sign in the post office window. Without pause, she begins to matter-of-factly prepare for her and her two children-her husband was recently arrested in the middle of the night under suspicion of being an enemy-to be relocated to an internment camp in Utah.

The story is told in five chapters and five distinct voices. None of the family is named. They are simply the mother, the boy, the girl, and the family, each almost completely lacking an individual identity. I usually don’t do well with the “Everyman” approach to characters, as I tend to prefer individuals to group representations, but this is an exception. Otsuka isn’t telling the story of this Japanese-American family, but of all Japanese-American families who were relocated.

Otsuka doesn’t focus on the physical conditions-whether or not the people were treated well, if they had enough to eat or wear, if the living conditions were good, etc.- though those are there. Instead, her focus is on the emotional toll of the experience, and what it did to their sense of identity and self. When the family returns home three years later, they are as unrecognizable as the world they are returning to is to them.

There is, however, on thing I should warn about.

As part of the mother’s preparation for relocation, she kills the family’s lame dog with a shovel-presumably because there was no one who would take in a lame pet-and buries it under a tree. I actually tried reading this book about four-five months ago and bounced off it when I got to that part. While I could understand why it was there, like many people, I react negatively to fiction when terrible things happen to pets and small children. So that’s one thing this challenge is good for: it provided incentive for me to get past an event that normally would have turned me off, and helped me to read a good book as a result.