When the Emperor was Divine
“Mesmerizing … [Otsuka has] lyric gifts and narrative poise, [a] heat-seeking eye for detail [and] effortless ability to empathize with her characters.”
Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times. READ MORE
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Awards& Recognitions
Asian American Literary Award • Winner
American Library Association Alex Award • Winner
Children's Literature Association Phoenix Award • Winner
Booklist Editor's Choice for Young Adults • Winner
New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age • Winner
Orange Prize for Fiction • Longlist
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award • Finalist
New York Times Notable Book
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
Selected for Common Reading at over 60 Colleges and Universities
Selected for Common Reading by over 35 Communities
About This Book
Julie Otsuka’s commanding debut novel paints a portrait of the Japanese American incarceration camps that is both a haunting evocation of a family in wartime and a resonant lesson for our times.
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family’s possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert.
In this lean and devastatingly evocative first novel, Julie Otsuka tells their story from five flawlessly realized points of view and conveys the exact emotional texture of their experience: the thin-walled barracks and barbed-wire fences, the omnipresent fear and loneliness, the unheralded feats of heroism. When the Emperor Was Divine is a work of enormous power that makes a shameful episode of our history as immediate as today’s headlines.
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