Rating: 
Summary: An Intense Little Gem
Review: Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine is an intense little gem, a beautifully crafted evocation of one family's experience in the WWII US internment camps. The prose is beautiful in its simplicity. Otsuka chooses, instead of giving us a big, long sweeping portrait of these camps, to focus on certain evocative details which nonetheless bring the experience home to the reader. The novel is quite moving and at times heartbreaking, but always well done. Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: a radiant read!
Review: Life in balmy Berkeley, California for the Mother & her family in 1942 was charmed. Then one dreadful winter morning the FBI took her husband away still in his slippers & robe, their telephone line was cut & their bank account frozen.Then the notices appear telling the Mother what she must do & where she must take her children. Along with thousands of strangers, they must journey by train into the middle of nowhere to a barbed wire internment camp to live through blazing summers & freezing winters with nothing to do in uninsulated, barren barracks. In a handful of flawless chapters, Julie Otsuka has drawn the mother, the daughter, the son & finally the father as they suffer & survive. Exquisite, infuriating, heartwrenching & unsentimental, WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE is an astonishingly moving testament to both the dreadful deeds a society can condone, & the impeccable dignity of the truly innocent. The parallels between what happened to the Jews, Gypsies & other "undesirables" in Nazi Germany & what is happening today to American Muslims makes WHEN THE EMPEROR WAS DIVINE a profound read.
Rating: 
Summary: A dishonorable moment in American history . . . in brief
Review: Lovely novel about the internment of Japanese ancestry but American citizens by the military during WWII. Something we said we would try to avoid doing again here in America but many Muslim American citizens were arrested without evidence and held for several months before being released. We have to break this cycle in America of judging human beings based on race or ethnicity. Novels liek Julie's will help us remember the mistakes of our past so maybe we won't continue to make them in the future.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic Debut Novel
Review: Lovely novel about the internment of Japanese ancestry but American citizens by the military during WWII. Something we said we would try to avoid doing again here in America but many Muslim American citizens were arrested without evidence and held for several months before being released. We have to break this cycle in America of judging human beings based on race or ethnicity. Novels liek Julie's will help us remember the mistakes of our past so maybe we won't continue to make them in the future.
Rating:
Summary: inventive and provocative, "Emperor" is spare and wrenching
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting Approach
Review: Perhaps my expectations were too high. "When the Emperor was Divine" is not a horrible book, I just feel it lacks substance. For instance, the characters remain nameless/faceless throughout the entire book. I understand Otsuka's reasoning for using this technique. It didn't matter if they were Americans, it didn't matter if they had been in this country for GENERATIONS, Japanese -- American or not -- were labeled the enemy, traitors, a threat. Not individuals, but a faceless, nameless group of "traitors". But, for me, the lack of identity made it impossible to have any sort of understanding of the characters.
On the other The story itself is gripping. I enjoyed how Otsuka alternated between the different perspectives of the mother, the daughter, the son, the children together, and the father in each of the five chapters. It is through these viewpoints that the story is revealed in dreamlike sequences. The narrators, however, are essentially the same person and speak with the same voice. I would have expected there to be more distinction in voice and focus amongst the different characters.
Overall "When the Emperor was Divine" is a visual tour, Otsuka lays the descriptions on thick, but I didn't feel any real emotion while reading or observe any real depth. The whole book reads like an extensive creative writing assignment on sight. With such an emotional topic, I feel like Otsuka just barely scratched the surface.
On a more positive note, "When the Emperor Was Divine" can be read in one sitting and, while not exactly my flavor, Otsuka takes an interesting approach to her writing. I will be keeping an eye out for her future works. However, if you're looking for an in-depth account of the Japanese internment camps [prisons] you might want to check elsewhere first.
Rating:
Summary: divine prose
Review: Terrific read ~ clearly more nonfiction than imaginary in text and scope. The effects of war are not devastating on soldiers only; war tears through the whole fabric of humankind. This is not a unique observation but this story is a unique perspective.
Rating:
Summary: divine prose
Review: Terrific read ~ clearly more nonfiction than imaginary in text and scope. The effects of war are not devastating on soldiers only; war tears through the whole fabric of humankind. This is not a unique observation but this story is a unique perspective.
Rating: 
Summary: Boring, and the Emperor Was Never Divine
Review: The book offers nothing much other than bits of historical information. The language is a little too plain, incapable of invoking any feeling from readers, no any click, no any spark. And the way the characters are addressed "the woman", "the boy", "the girl"... never feel good about that way...
The execution of dog at the beginning is indeed disturbing, unnecessarily odd.
Also, not sure what Emperor here means. If it means the Emperor in Japan during II world war, then it's never Divine. Just look at what that Emperor had done to people in Asia during II world war, how the people there were slaughtered, women were forced to be military prostitutes, etc., or even the suffering of this Japanese American family was somewhat contributed by that Emperor... So mention of that Emperor or any similar things or sayings for that concept certainly make it much harder for the book to collect sympathy from the readers, not even mention the plain language, choppy flow of the book... just not much feeling registered with the book.
Rating:
Summary: Don't miss out
Review: The day I received this book I read the first few pages, canceled my plans for the night and allowed myself to be taken by this book without any effort. "When the Emperor Was Divine" follows a Japanese-American family in 1942 as they are taken from their California stucco house to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah. Having months earlier watched their father be sent away to a camp ''for dangerous enemy aliens'', the mother, daughter and son are left to speculate their own fate. Plunged in to a world where mess halls are to be called "dining halls" evacuees are to be called "residents" and the word freedom exists only outside the barbed-wire fence, each spends their time fantasizing over the reunion with their father. Although you never learn the names of any of the main characters you learn their grief and you will value the impact of the line "now he'll always be thirsty" and how it took my breath away. Even if up until that point you are not as convinced, the last three pages alone are enough to guarantee that you will be suggesting this book as soon as you close it.
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