About the Book

When the Emperor was Divine

Julie Otsuka’s quietly disturbing novel opens in Berkeley, California, the spring of 1942. Pearl Harbor has been attacked, the war is on, and a woman must prepare herself and her two young children for a journey that will take them to the high desert plains of Utah. Their destination is an internment camp where they and other Japanese-Americans will be imprisoned “for their own safety” until the war is over.

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.

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.