When the Emperor Was Divine Author: Julie Otsuka ISBN: 0385721811 This is one of the 2006 selections for the Silicon Valley Reads program. This novel paints a portrait of the Japanese internment camps unlike any we have ever seen. About the Book About the Author Selected Reviews Questions for discussion

Julia Otsuka's quietly disturbing novel opens with a woman reading a sign in a post office window. It is Berkeley, California, the spring of 1942. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, the war is on, and though the precise message on the sign is not revealed, its impact on the woman who reads it is immediate and profound. It is, in many ways she cannot yet foresee, a sign of things to come. She readies herself and her two young children for a journey that will take them to the high desert plains of Utah and into a world that will shatter their illusions forever. They travel by train and gradually the reader discovers that all on board are Japanese American, that the shades must be pulled down at night so as not to invite rock-throwing, and that their destination is an internment camp where they will be imprisoned "for their own safety" until the war is over. With stark clarity and an unflinching gaze, Otsuka explores the inner lives of her main characters-the mother, daughter, and son-as they struggle to understand their fate and long for the father whom they have not seen since he was whisked away, in slippers and handcuffs, on the evening of Pearl Harbor.

Moving between dreams, memories, and sharply emblematic moments, When the Emperor Was Divine reveals the dark underside of a period in American history that, until now, has been left largely unexplored in American fiction.

Julie Otsuka was born in Palo Alto and studied art at Yale University. After pursuing a career as a painter, she turned to fiction at age 30. One of her short stories was included in Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998, edited by Carol Shields. When the Emperor Was Divine is her first novel. She lives in New York.

Author's website: www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0902/otsuka/

From Publishers Weekly
This heartbreaking, bracingly unsentimental debut describes in poetic detail the travails of a Japanese family living in an internment camp during World War II, raising the specter of wartime injustice in bone-chilling fashion. After a woman whose husband was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy sees notices posted around her neighborhood in Berkeley instructing Japanese residents to evacuate, she moves with her son and daughter to an internment camp, abruptly severing her ties with her community. The next three years are spent in filthy, cramped and impersonal lodgings as the family is shuttled from one camp to another. They return to Berkeley after the war to a home that has been ravaged by vandals; it takes time for them to adjust to life outside the camps and to come to terms with the hostility they face. When the children's father re-enters the book, he is more of a symbol than a character, reduced to a husk by interrogation and abuse. The novel never strays into melodrama-Otsuka describes the family's everyday life in Berkeley and the pitiful objects that define their world in the camp with admirable restraint and modesty. Events are viewed from numerous characters' points of view, and the different perspectives are defined by distinctive, lyrically simple observations. The novel's honesty and matter-of-fact tone in the face of inconceivable injustice are the source of its power. Anger only comes to the fore during the last segment, when the father is allowed to tell his story-but even here, Otsuka keeps rage neatly bound up, luminous beneath the dazzling surface of her novel.

"Exceptional. . . . Otsuka skillfully dramatizes a world suddenly foreign. . . . [Her] incantatory, unsentimental prose is the book’s greatest strength." – The New Yorker

"Spare, incisive. . . . The mood of the novel tensely reflects the protagonists’ emotional state: calm surfaces above, turmoil just beneath." – Boston Globe

"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

"Shockingly brilliant. . . . it will make you gasp . . . Undoubtedly one of the most effective, memorable books to deal with the internment crisis . . . The maturity of Otsuka’s. . . prose is astonishing." – The Bloomsbury Review

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

1. When the Emperor Was Divine gives readers an intimate view of the fate of Japanese Americans during World War II. In what ways does the novel deepen our existing knowledge of this historical period? What does it give readers that a straightforward historical investigation cannot?
    
2. Why does Otsuka choose to reveal the family's reason for moving-and the father's arrest-so indirectly and so gradually? What is the effect when the reason becomes apparent?
    
3. Otsuka skillfully places subtle but significant details in her narrative.
   
   When the mother goes to Lundy's hardware store, she notices a "dark stain" on the register "that would not go away" [p. 5]. The dog she has to kill is called "White Dog" [see pp. 9-12]. Her daughter's favorite song on the radio is "Don't Fence Me In." How do these details, and others like them, point to larger meanings in the novel?
    
4. Why does Otsuka refer to her characters as "the woman," "the girl," "the boy," and "the father," rather than giving them names? How does this lack of specific identities affect the reader's relationship to the characters?
    
5. When they arrive at the camp in the Utah desert-"a city of tar-paper barracks behind a barbed-wire fence on a dusty alkaline plain"-the boy thinks he sees his father everywhere: "wherever the boy looked he saw him: Daddy, Papa, Father, Oto-san" [p. 49]. Why is the father's absence such a powerful presence in the novel? How do the mother and daughter think of him? How would their story have been different had the family remained together?
    
6. When the boy wonders why he's in the camp, he worries that "he'd done something horribly, terribly wrong. . . . It could be anything. Something he'd done yesterday-chewing the eraser off his sister's pencil before putting it back in the pencil jar-or something he'd done a long time ago that was just now catching up with him" [p. 57]. What does this passage reveal about the damaging effects of racism on children? What does it reveal about the way children try to make sense of their experience?
    
7. In the camp, the prisoners are told they've been brought there for their "own protection," and that "it was all in the interest of national security.
   
   It was a matter of military necessity. It was an opportunity for them to prove their loyalty" [p. 70]. Why, and in what ways, are these justifications problematic? What do they reveal about the attitude of the American government toward Japanese Americans? How would these justifications appear to those who were taken from their homes and placed behind fences for the duration of the war?
    
8. What parallels does the novel reveal between the American treatment of citizens of Japanese descent and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany?
    
9. Much of When the Emperor Was Divine is told in short, episodic, loosely connected scenes-images, conversations, memories, dreams, and so on-that move between past and present and alternate points of view between the mother, daughter, and son. Why has Otsuka chosen to structure her narrative in this way? What effects does it allow her to achieve?
    
10. After the family is released from the camp, what instructions are they given? How do they regard themselves? How does America regard them? In what ways have they been damaged by their internment?
     
11. When they are at last reunited with their father, the family doesn't know how to react. "Because the man who stood there before us was not our father.
    
    He was somebody else, a stranger who had been sent back in our father's place" [p. 132]. Why do they regard him as a stranger? How has he been changed by his experience? In what ways does this reunion underscore the tragedy of America's decision to imprison Japanese Americans during the war?
     
12. After the father returns home, he never once discusses the years he'd been away, and his children don't ask. "We didn't want to know. . . . All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget" [p. 133]. Why do the children feel this way? Why would their father remain silent about such an important experience? In what ways does the novel fight against this desire to forget?
     
13. The mother is denied work because being a Japanese American might "upset the other employees" or offend the customers. She turns down a job working in a dark back room of a department store because she is afraid she "might accidentally remember who I was and . . . offend myself" [pp. 128-129]. What does this statement reveal about her character? What strengths does she exhibit throughout her ordeal?
     
14. Flowers appear throughout the novel. When one of the prisoners is shot by a guard, a witness believes the man had been reaching through the fence to pluck a flower [see p. 101]. And the penultimate chapter ends with the following sentence: "But we never stopped 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" [p. 139]. What symbolic value do the flowers have in this final passage? What does this open-ended conclusion suggest about the relationship between the family and the "strangers" they live among?
     
15. When the Emperor Was Divine concludes with a chapter titled "Confession."
    Who is speaking in this final chapter? Is the speech ironic? Why has Otsuka chosen to end the novel in this way? What does the confession imply about our ability to separate out the "enemy," the "other," in our midst?

Used with the permission of Anchor Books, a division of the Knopf Group, Random House, Inc., New York, NY.

The Souvenir Author: Louise Steinman ISBN: 1-56512-310-7 This is one of the 2006 selections for the Silicon Valley Reads program. Weaving together her father's raw, poignant letters with her own journey, Steinman presents a powerful view of how war changed one generation and shaped another. About the Book About the Author Selected Reviews Q&A with the Author

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When Louise Steinman was growing up in 1950s there were three rules: 1. Never cry in front of father 2. Never wear black in his presence and 3. Never ask questions about these rules. It was only after her parents' death, when she made a chance discovery that Louise Steinman began to understand why. Hidden among her parents' belongings was an old metal ammunition box. Inside were hundreds of letters her father wrote home during the Pacific War. "Dearest," he writes in one, "After months of dreading nighttime, it is so hard to change. You see I need you to help me get over that type of fear and use the nights for what they were meant for." He wrote this letter after 167 days of straight combat. Louise Steinman was astonished--here was a side of her father she never knew. To her, he was a gruff, practical man--a pharmacist, actually, who worked 13-hour days, and kept mostly to himself. She never knew that he fought in a campaign that set the record for consecutive days of combat in the war. He had never talked about it. He had never told her how, at 24, he was yanked from his young wife who was pregnant with their first child, to fight in a place that was completely foreign to him. His letters home were his only connection to all that he knew and loved--they were his lifeline. As Louise poured through them, she found a Japanese soldier's flag-a souvenir he later regretted sending home. Japanese soldiers carried these flags for good luck.

THE SOUVENIR is the heartbreaking and heartwarming story of a woman discovering her father, the men he fought with, and the men he fought against. Because of these letters and this flag Louise Steinman sets upon on a journey that takes her across the world, to the snow country of Japan, to a mountain top in the Philippines, and back home again forever changed. Over the course of that journey, she finds the family of the Japanese solider, Yoshio Shimizu, whose flag this once was, and returns it to his surviving family.

Finding her father's ammunition box was a gift--one that unlocked a part of him that was sealed by the trauma of war. And through the act of returning the flag she is able to bring about a kind of catharsis--for her father, herself, and the family of his enemy.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

louisesteinman.com

SELECTED REVIEWS:

From Publishers Weekly When Norman Steinman a member of the 25th Infantry Division, which fought in the Philippines in 1945 died in 1990, he left behind a box full of WWII letters (more than 400), later discovered by his daughter. Among the souvenirs was a small Japanese flag, inscribed with words Louise could not read. She had them translated and found that the flag had belonged to a Japanese soldier. Obsessed, Steinman began her search for him or his family. This small book, a moving memoir about reconciliation and honor, is her tale of her successful quest, her trip to Japan to return the flag and the friendships she forged along the way. Steinman visited the battlefields on Luzon in which her father battled the weather, jungle and Japanese. This volume contains many of his letters, published here for the first time, that show typical G.I. behavior, attitudes toward the enemy and longing for good food and friends back home. Steinman's visit to Hiroshima helped her to understand the war from the Japanese point of view. In coming to understand her father and his postwar behavior, Steinman discovers how real WWII can become to a survivor's family. From Library Journal Clearing out the family's storage locker after her father's death, Steinman discovered a rusted metal ammo box with hundreds of letters spanning the years 1941-45 that he had written to her mother and a manila envelope with a Japanese soldier's flag. Intrigued by these "souvenirs" of a time and an experience in her father's life that she had never really understood, Steinman, cultural programs director of the Los Angeles Public Library, set out on a quest to return the flag to the family of Yoshio Shimizu, the Japanese soldier. This book is the story of the entwined "gifts" resulting from that personal journey Steinman's discovery of a side of her father that she had never expected to share ("I never knew my father to cry") and the "softly uttered" words of the fallen soldier's mother: "You have given us back Yoshio. The government only sent sand in a box." Steinman comments that from the letters she wanted to "unravel the connection between my father's silence about the war and our family's home life." For many, her account could provide an understanding of how that war changed one generation and shaped the next. KIRKUS REVIEWS "An affecting memoir and a convincing plea for pacifism: Steinman's hypnotizing prose exposes the senselessness of war..." The New York Time Book Review "...an exceptional book that draws its strength from the complexities it explores." --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR

What most surprised you in your research for this book? Several things. I had no idea of the extent of racism that existed on BOTH sides of the Pacific War. The U.S. propaganda against the Japanese was horrendous-labeling them subhuman vermin-and on the other side, the Japanese people were told the Americans would practically eat them alive. The fighting in the Pacific was particularly brutal because the Japanese had been so thoroughly dehumanized to the Americans. (And also because the Japanese were not allowed by their commanders to surrender.) I was also amazed to hear some Japanese people say that they believed, sadly, that the only way to stop the Japanese military was for the U.S. to have dropped the bomb. I never thought I'd hear that from someone Japanese. But I did. They really thought that if there had been an invasion of the mainland, the country would have been led to a mass suicide. They were making plans for it. After making this long journey to find the Shimizu family and return the flag, what do you think is the most important thing to bear in mind about reconciliation between former enemies? I think you have to look at shared history together. It's not an easy thing to do, but it's absolutely necessary. It was such a missed opportunity when the 50th Anniversary of Hiroshima came along, for the Smithsonian not to have exhibited material about the effects ofa the atom bomb. And it's quite a problem that the Japanese don't teach the whole truth in their schools about Japanese militarism and Japanese aggression and brutality in Asia. The subject of the war is still very touchy in Japan. By letting the Emperor off the hook, MacArthur also made it more difficult for the Japanese to look at their own culpability. To look at history together can be very disturbing, but I think it offers an enormous opportunity to paint a more complex picture and to understand the other. I've also come to have a much deeper understanding of the complexity of apology and forgiveness. I was not apologizing to the Shimizu family, I couldn't even tell them for sure whether or not my father might have contributed to the death of their son/brother/uncle. And they did not apologize to me. But together, we acknowledged our bond and the gravity of what binds us together as human beings. Reconciliation often falls to the next generation. It may be beyond the power of the combatants themselves to forgive. But sometimes that moment of grace can also happen. How does your book relate to your past work in performance and theater? In a way, I see the process of trying to find the Shimizu family and returning the flag to be a long extended performance, intended for as wide an audience as possible. It's "life art" in that sense. The gesture is not created for a proscenium stage, but a world stage, so to speak. What binds the two together is the idea of a ritual gesture. Remember that all kinds of spectacles are "performance"-weddings, funerals, birth ceremonies. Witnessing is a powerful part of the theatrical process. The act of returning the flag, the ceremony if you will, was the most powerful performance I've ever attended. I was both actor and participant. How have American veterans responded to your book? That's been the most gratifying aspect of the book's publication. Numerous veterans have written to me. They express thanks but they also want to tell their own stories. Some of them have sent me stories and all of them have been eye-openers. What these men endured and suffered and in so many cases, never shared with anyone. If anyone thinks that the effect of war ends when the battle ends, they're quite mistaken.