Description

Jules Otsuka’s powerful debut novel paints a portrait of japan internment camps unlike any we've ever observed. With crystalline intensity and precision, Otsuka runs on the single-family to evoke the deracination—both bodily and emotional—of a generation of Japanese-Americans. In five chapters, each flawlessly executed from the different point-of view—the mother receiving the order to evacuate; the daughter on the long train ride to the camp; the son in the desert encampment; the family’s go back to their house; and the bitter release of the daddy after significantly more than four decades in captivity—she has generated a little tour-de force, a novel of unrelenting economy and suppressed emotion. Spare, intimate, arrestingly understated, Once the Emperor Was Divine is just a haunting evocation of a household in wartime and an unmistakably resonant lesson for the times.