Julie Otsuka
Our classes begin today and this past Friday our orientation activities were geared towards exciting the entering first-year students about our academic mission. (The other days of orientation were geared towards their social lives.) For summer reading we assigned them Julie Otsuka’s novel When the Emperor Was Divine, and I moderated one of the small groups discussing the novel.
To further prime the pump, we invited the author to speak at our opening convocation. Otsuka held us all riveted as she recounted how she became aware of her grandparents and her mother’s experience in World War II Japanese-American internment camps. Although the novel has an autobiographical feel, I did not realize how closely the author was basing the action on her own family.
The small group discussion was everything I could have hoped for, exciting me as much as the students about the upcoming semester. I began by asking how many of them had learned about the internment camps in school and was heartened to discover that most of them had. I then asked each of them to share something about the book that had stood out.
I can’t do full justice to our discussion, but here are some of the high points. Students were divided by the book’s tone, which underplays the emotions. For instance, when the mother kills the old family dog, the account is matter-of-fact, and one has to pick up small cues (like the whiskey that she is drinking) to realize how traumatic it is for her.
Some found this style dry and therefore boring, with one future psychology major saying that she prefers direct exploration of feelings. Others, all male, said they liked the way that the book doesn’t overwhelm the reader with emotions, thereby allowing readers to have their own own reactions. (To imagine an alternative way of recounting the story, I mentioned the righteous indignation that is common in Dickens novels.) But of course, the more we talked about the book, the more we found that it was filled with emotions, and it was the psychology major who picked up on the shame that the family feels upon returning home. Why would they be ashamed, she wondered, when they were the victims? By the end of our discussion, she acknowledged that the book was emotionally deeper than she realized.
This discussion led to one of the most profound insights of the discussion. After the family returns to their California home, the novel offers up a last word. They have been separated from the father, who is imprisoned in Arizona under suspicion of being a spy, and until the final pages he is a shadowy figure, remembered by his young son mostly for the humiliating way he is dragged off in the middle of the night. He returns a broken man and we aren’t given direct access to his thoughts.
Not until the final chapter, that is, at which point the book shifts to his voice, although he appears to be talking for all imprisoned Japanese-Americans. His anger explodes off the page as he confesses (sarcastically) to every paranoid accusation that was directed against Japanese Americans, from sharing defense plant secrets to directing Japanese bombers to sullying American wives and suffocating their children.
“So go ahead and lock me up,” he says.
Take my children. Take my wife. Freeze my assets. Seize my crops. Search my office. Ransack my house. Cancel my insurance. Auction off my house. Hand over my lease. Assign me a number. Inform me of my crime. Too short, too dark, too ugly, too proud.
And then:
And if they ask you someday what it was I most wanted to say, please tell them, if you would, it was this:
I’m sorry.
There. That’s it. I’ve said it. Now can I go?
In her convocation address, Otsuka read us this chapter and talked about it. She said that her editor had warned her against including it and that the the New York Times reviewer, while otherwise loving the book, found it didactic.
The book could have ended a chapter earlier, with an image of a rose bush that one of the neighbors has stolen while the family was in camp. The children imagine a lovely rose blooming somewhere, a symbol of hope:
[W]e never stoped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.
.At one point Otsuka even excised her last chapter and ended with the rose bush but then put it back in. She is glad that she did.
Most of my students agreed. As one put it (this is the profound observation I had in mind), it’s as though there is a smoldering fuse burning throughout the book and, in the end, it blows up. For the student, this made the book easier to relate to.
Another line of discussion touched on the children and how they don’t impose adult judgments on what is happening. This led to a fascinating conversation about the discussants’ own Pearl Harbor-type experience, which was, of course, 9-11.
Many were seven when the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were attacked, and as they talked about the impact of the event on their own lives, it was from a child’s perspective. One had been unhappy because television cartoon shows were preempted, another had celebrated school being let out early (she wasn’t told why), a third had been unhappy because outside recess was suspended for a month (she lived near the Naval Academy). They came to appreciate the book’s handling of point of view, which in turn helped them understand how the book handled details which, while seemingly incidental, would have been important to a child. After our discussion, reality didn’t seem quite so obvious or quite so fixed.
I told them that they would be encountering versions of this realization in every class they took, not only literature classes. I said that knowledge is like a loose thread and that, as they start to pull it, they will become aware of an intricate fabric. I told them that, given what I had seen in our discussion, they were more than capable of holding their own in a college class.
I didn’t inform them how much work and mental effort it would take. They’ll discover that soon enough. But they will also do just fine.
