"When the Emperor Was Divine," by Julie Otsuka

I just finished a small but very powerful novel about the interning of Japanese Americans during World War II. "When the Emperor Was Divine" (Anchor, 2002) is a still, compressed, distilled telling of the story of one Berkeley family whose lives were turned upside down by the war and its accompanying terribly unjust treatment of those of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. The story is told from the points of view of each of the family members: the mother, the daughter, the son, and the father. The father is taken away from the family home in his bathrobe and slippers (the indelible image remembered by his children as so unfair to their dignified father); soon after, the mother and children are evacuated, first to the horse stables of Tanforan, near San Francisco, and then to an internment camp in the flat and dusty Utah desert. The author never raises her voice, but just lets readers hear her characters in their quiet detailing of what their new lives are like, and how they feel. The very quietness and compression of the telling is what gives this book such power, such descriptive and emotional force. Although we have all learned about and read about this terrible time in American history, this book makes it more real and thus even more intolerable than any other publication I have seen. Highly recommended.