![]() ![]() It was the fourth week of the fifth month of the war and the women, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules.’ She knew only that tomorrow they had to go.’ At this point in time, Otsuka notes: ‘It was late April. She did not know where they were going or how long they would be gone or who would be living in their house while they were away. The first chapter follows the unnamed mother, as she spends all of her time packing up their lives: ‘Tomorrow she and the children would be leaving. All of these narrative voices are part of the same family, and include the daughter’s experience of the long train ride to the camp, to the family’s return to their Californian home. Otsuka uses five different perspectives to tell her story, and has based the happenings on real events. It was stapled to the door of the municipal court and nailed, at eye level, to every telephone pole along University Avenue.’ On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. ![]() ![]() The novel opens: ‘The sign had appeared overnight. ![]() At the outset of this slim novel, a Japanese-American woman learns from posters plastered all over the city that she and her family have been ‘reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens’, and face expulsion to the Utah desert. First published in 2002, When the Emperor Was Divine begins in 1942 in Berkeley, California. ![]()
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