Story Description:
Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group|October 14, 2003|Trade Paperback|ISBN 978-0-385-7281-3
The debut novel from the PEN/Faulkner Award Winning
Author of The Buddha in the Attic
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 homes and sent to a dusty internment 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 thick-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.
My Review:
Overnight signs appeared on trees, billboards, bus
stop benches, and store windows in Berkeley, California, in 1942 ordering
Japanese Americans to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert. They had been “reclassified” as enemy
aliens. This novel follows one family’s
story; Mom, Dad, and two young children, a girl and a boy.
The father had been taken a few months prior by the
FBI in the middle of the night in his bathrobe and slippers and imprisoned
leaving Mom and the children alone to face the internment camp.
Everyone was given an identification number to pin on
their shirt and boarded a bus that would take them to a train. The train was slow moving and old and hadn’t
been used in years. Broken gas lamps
hung from the walls and the train was fuelled by a coal burning broiler. Some of the passengers were sick from the
uneven rocking of the train cars. The
compartments were crowded and smelled of puke and sweat making the nausea
people felt even worse.
The train finally stopped in Delta, Utah where the
people were led off the train by armed soldiers and led onto a bus. The bus drove slowly until it reached Topaz
where the passengers saw hundreds of tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot
blazing sun. They saw nothing but
telephone poles and barbed wire fencing.
As they stepped off the bus they were assaulted by clouds of fine white
dust that choked them, which had once been the bed of an ancient salt
lake. The white glare of the desert was
blinding.
Each new day brought the smells of food: catfish,
horsemeat, beans, Vienna sausage. Inside
the barracks there were iron cots, a potbellied stove and a single bare bulb
that hung down from the ceiling. There
was a table made out of crate wood, an old Zenith radio and no running water
and the toilets were half a block away.
In early autumn farm recruiters arrived to sign up new
workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and
women to go out and help harvest the crops.
Some went to Idaho to top sugar beets, some went to Wyoming to pick
potatoes, some went to Tent City in Provo to pick peaches and pears. Some of the people returned wearing brand new
Florsheim shoes while others came back with the same shoes saying they were shot
at and spat on and would never go back.
They reported that there were signs posted all over the town that read:
NO JAPS ALLOWED.
Every week there were new rumors in the camp. They heard that men and women would be put in
separate camps; they would be sterilized; they would be stripped of
citizenship; they’d be taken out on the high seas and shot; they would be taken
to a desert island and left alone to die; they would all be deported to Japan;
and on and on the rumors went. The
people took these assaults on their mental and emotional health in stride.
In mid-October a school was opened in the barracks for
the children. Each morning they had to
sing: “Oh, beautiful for spacious skies” and “My country ‘tis of thee.”
After 3 years and 5 months the war was over and they
were finally home! The house had
changed; paint was peeling from the walls, it smelled, the window frames were
black with dry rot and their furniture was gone, probably stolen. Although many people had lived in their house
during their time away, they had not received one single cheque from the lawyer
who promised to rent their home for them.
It was a difficult readjustment for them to suddenly just pick up their
lives where they left off and try to continue on and reintegrate.
When their father finally returned home after more
than 4 years he looked much, much older than his age of 56. His face was lined with wrinkles, his suit
was faded and worn, his head was bare, he moved very slowly and carefully using
a cane. Their father never spoke about
his years in prison and never said what they eventually accused him of –
sabotage? Selling secrets to the enemy?
Was he innocent? He was a much
changed man who was suspicious of everyone, even the paperboy. He never returned to work. The company he had worked for before he left
had been liquidated and nobody else would hire him: “he was an old man, his
health was not good, he had just come back from a camp for dangerous enemy
aliens.”
At 144 pages this was an interesting and quick read
and gives a very good picture of a rather embarrassing part of American
history.
