On a sunny day in Berkeley, California in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her house, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family’s possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans, they have been reclassified as enemy aliens and are uprooted from their home and sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert.

In this evocative first novel published in 2002, Julie Otsuka tells this family’s story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. (Source: Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York)

“Exceptional…. Otsuka skillfully dramatizes a world suddenly foreign…[Her] incantatory, unsentimental prose is the book’s greatest strength.” –The NewYorker

“Prose so cool and precise that it’s impossible not to believe what [Otsuka] tells us or to see clearly what she wants us to see…. A gem of a book and one of the most vivid history lessons you’ll ever learn.” – USA Today

“The novel’s voice is as hushed as a whisper…. An exquisite debut…potent, spare, crystalline.” –O, the Oprah Magazine

 

Copies of When the Emperor Was Divine are available at the library, or may be purchased at Hastings (30 % discount); Waldenbooks, (20% discount); or the Chandler Booktique at the library.