Anchor Books When the Emperor Was Divine

WOW... artfully written, beautiful delivery of an ugly period of American history. Otsuka's second book 'The Buddha in the Attic' is equally as great a read.

Maenner, Frauen und Kinder weggesperrt nur wegen ihrer Herkunft. Klingt bekannt? War auch in den USA moeglich, trotz Verfassung. Und ware auch heutzutage moeglich. Leider. Sehr lesenswert. Amazon, vielen Dank, dass man auch solche richtig gute Buecher bestellen kann.

El libro es bastante interesante aunque es mejor conocer un poco la historia entre Estados Unidos y Japón, que facilitará la lectura. No es muy difícil de leer, lo recomiendo para la gente que tiene un nivel de B1.

C'est la suite de son roman "Picture wifes" (que j'avais lu en français). C'est une partie de l'histoire de l'Amérique et la 2e guerre mondiale que j'ignorais (et que beaucoup ignorent, les Japonais étant tellement discret). Les deux romans sont écrit d'un style bref et concis, comme si les protagonistes écrivaient leur propre journal. A lire absolument!

Participants in the literature of oppression carry unique burdens and responsibilities. They are translators of broken dreams, betrayal, brutality. As writer and readers, they recreate and relive the crushing pain of dispossession, abandonment and exclusion. Their world is a distorted polarity of what ought to be in life. Members of this universe ask themselves the question of how people can endure historical pain: genuine hurt of the here and now whose roots are tangled in the soil of prejudice, repression and complicity.To this body of literature may now be added Julie Otsuka's incandescent "When the Emperor Was Divine." This spare, elegant and wrenching debut novel is destined to become a classic in any serious examination of the impact of the forced removal and relocation of over 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II. Otsuka's nameless protagonist family becomes representative, not only of the agonizing, degrading and damaging impact of racism but also of assault on racial identity. The family's coerced odyssey -- from forced removal to isolative segregation to bewildered return -- offers no happy ending, no comfort, no solace of redemptive suffering. The four members of this family, stripped of identity by a prejudice-saturated larger population, are victims and martyrs, made heroic by survival but not blessed or redeemed by enduring wrongful hardship, deprivation or ostracism.Otsuka is so masterful at her craft tht practically each sentence, each phrase carries an explosive impact. Why the Japanese-Americans? Their "crime," Otsuka explains, is their being "too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud." Who are they? "I'm the one you call Jap ... Nip ... Slits ... Slopes ... Yellowbelly. .. Gook." Through the lens of Otsuka's analysis, the Japanese-Americans suffered the dual curse of invisibility and ubiquity. Their very insignificance led to their perceived danger; their complete assimilation proved their insidious disloyalty. From this cauldron of psychological terrorization can only come horrible results. Shame. Apology for being. Bewildered submission. Denial. Rejection.By not permitting readers to know the names of the mother, father, son and daughter of her representative family, by enforcing a sense of anonymity, Otsuka creates a world of detached, impersonal horror, magnified by terribly real, painful, particular detail. The author's terse, precise and understated language intensifies imagery, metaphor and symbol. Even Otsuka's use of prepositional phrases shimmers. Topaz Relocation Camp is a city "of tar paper barracks behind a barbed wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain high up in the desert." Staccato one-sentence paragraphs hammer home the essence of this assualt on "time and space:" "No Japs allowed to travel..." or "No Japs out after eight p.m." In Otsuka's hands, the single-word epithet "Jap" embodies every indignity, slight and attack the Issei and Nisei faced.Symbolism in "Emperor" is subtle, unobtrusive and compelling. The mother's willed euthanasia of a milkey-eyed, disregarded neighborhood dog foreshadows and intensifies her husband's abrupt disappearance and demise. Otsuka forces us to listen to the son's recitation of "My country, 'tis of thee" and the pledge of allegiance against the backdrop of incessant dust -- which creates its own unwelcomed bur irreversible scrim of shame. How could it ever be possible to come clean from this unbidden dirt, this grimy degradation? We are forced to witness the silent erosion of family coherence through obligatory meals in communal mess halls where Japanese customs are indelicately ignored. No painful detail escapes Otsuka's eyes, not even the distasteful practice of foods touching each other on dinner plates. Topaz is not only geographically sterile, but existentially barren. When asked what he had done one winter day, the boy responds, "Licked a stamp."As necessary and brilliant as "When the Emperor Was Divine" is, it walks a dangerous line. Julie Otsuka's insistence on her family's anonymity risks that readers may not be able to identify and understand her protagonists' circumstances and pain. Namelessness risks distance, and distancing imperils connection. Yet because she takes that risk, her novel is even a greater triumph. "When the Emperor Was Divine" honors memory and invites reflection. It presents us with the greatest weapon available to fight oppression: an informed heart, one fashioned by exposure to wrong and an understanding of wrong's imapct.