A family tale of universal experience

Published 10:00 am Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Julie Otsuka writes about one family’s experience during

the internment.

When Julie Otsuka put pen to paper to write about one Japanese-American family’s experience of the internment, she never expected the resulting novel to be met with such acclaim.

“I often wonder if ‘9-11’ hadn’t happened, if the book would have gotten this much attention,” said Otsuka, whose spare, haunting story is one she felt compelled to tell for personal reasons.

Her mother, grandfather and uncle were among 110,000 Japanese Americans forced into domestic exile during World War II, and although this part of their lives was seldom talked about, “I felt I had to work through it for myself,” Otsuka said.

In a visit to IslandWood at 7 p.m. Thursday, sponsored by the Bainbrige Library, Otsuka will talk about writing, the internment, and her novel “When the Emperor Became Divine,” this year’s choice for the Seattle Reads program.

Otsuka spent six years researching the internment during the writing of her debut novel. She soaked herself in it.

In the process, she discovered some of her grandfather’s censored letters to her grandmother, which provided details of camp life that give realism to her story.

Otsuka is aware that the Bainbridge Island School District implemented a curriculum on the tragedy of the internment, which a small group of parents found objectionable.

In Otsuka’s view, it’s a good thing that the kids on the island got to see the issue debated by people advancing such disparate views of a historical event.

“I do expect to get questions about the whole Bainbridge school controversy, because of what has gone on there,” she said during a phone interview this week. “To claim that the internment was an act of military necessity, well, that line of logic has been floated over and over again, and many, many scholars have proven it not to be true.”

The internment was the product of panic and racism, she said, pure and simple.

“It’s threatening even now to acknowledge the racism in our past,” she said. “If you believe there are spies in a population, you go after these people and you don’t target a whole particular group based on their ethnicity.

“Doing that is morally dubious and unconstitutional.”

Otsaka stresses that she is not an activist. She is a writer who had a story to tell. And it was the story and the characters that compelled her to write.

“What I want readers to come away with, is to know what it was like to go through” the internment, she said. “If you can imagine yourself as ‘the other,’ you can have empathy and that leads to change.”

She added, “I wanted to write a novel about real people. Their experience is universal not only for Japanese Americans, but for people of any ethnic group. All throughout history, people have been rounded up and sent away into exile. The predicament of the family in my novel – ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances beyond their control – is a very human one.”

Otsuka was graduate student writing comedy when the images of war kept recurring in her work. With the encouragement of classmates and professors at Columbia University, what began as a short story became the beginning of a novel.

“It was totally accidental,” Otsuka. “I wrote the first chapter as a stand-alone story. I thought I would just get it out of my system. I didn’t realize the importance of the story. I just had a story that needed to be told.”

Her book personalizes the internment by matter-of-factly chronicling the lives of a woman and her two children before, during and after they depart from their California home for three and a half years at an internment camp in the Utah desert.

It also tells the story of the father, who was incarcerated during the same period.

Otsuka’s story is told simply, quietly and powerfully. She does not embellish.

“I wanted to tell a story that people could read and sit with,” she said. “We all know what was happening was a terrible thing. I didn’t want to put off the reader with an overally bombastic story. The events reveal themselves.

“If you tell it quietly, maybe they will lean in, and listen closer.”