Lost Liberties

Novels about the discrimination suffered by Asians in America tend to be melodramatic affairs calculated to get readers reaching for tissues rather than insight. Julie Otsuka's first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, is a crisp departure from the Asian-American sobfest. Otsuka's tale of the disintegration of a Japanese-American family during World War II offers a powerful indictment of government-sponsored paranoia that has implications for today's U.S. war on terror.

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The book's backdrop—the injustices suffered by Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during the war—is familiar material. But Otsuka, through various devices such as the use of characters without names, manages to make universal the psychological torment of wartime prejudice without wallowing in sentimentality. Starting with the arrest of the father of the clan in a midnight FBI raid, Otsuka spins out the story from the perspective of each family member. First, the characters lose their freedom as they are trucked off to a camp in desolate Utah. Ultimately, they lose their identity, returning to their vandalized home some three years later simmering with self-loathing: "We looked at ourselves in the mirror and did not like what we saw: black hair, yellow skin, slanted eyes. The cruel face of the enemy. We were guilty."

Threading together deceptively simple details of prison life, Otsuka describes the tightrope that the characters must tread between loyalty to their adopted country, loyalty to family and loyalty to race. It is a balancing act rigged to end in alienation: they are doomed to demonization simply by being Japanese. As the civil liberties of Middle Eastern immigrants in today's America are eroded by the war on terror, When the Emperor Was Divine serves as a cautionary reminder of the damage governments inflict when they indiscriminately punish the innocent in the name of national security.