When the Emperor Was Divine

About this book

From the bestselling award-winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers 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. 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 familys possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified virtually overnight as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration 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 thin-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 todays headlines.