When the Emperor Was Divine

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapter 3

Chapters 4-5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “Evacuation Order No. 19”

The mother of the family at the heart of the book sees an evacuation order posted around town when she goes out to complete her errands. The order (though it is not explicitly stated in the text) requires Japanese Americans to pack up their homes and report to a central location. As an emergency wartime measure, the United States government has decided to detain all Japanese Americans, ostensibly for their own safety, to protect them against discriminatory violence from prejudiced neighbors, but actually for the purpose of controlling any persons potentially involved in Japanese sabotage operations, or other forms of wartime spying.

The woman’s husband was arrested a few months prior to Evacuation Order No. 19, and the woman does not resist the mandate to pack up and go to the detention centers. She aborts her initial plan for the day and goes to a store where she buys some supplies for packing up her home instead of the grocery items she initially set out to purchase. She considers purchasing a shovel, without explaining for the reader what she intends to do with a shovel.

That afternoon, she packs up the entire house, feeds her dog, then kills him with a shovel from her shed, burying him in the back yard with the same shovel. She does this because no one will be around to take care of him once they evacuate. She releases the pet bird for the same reason. She then carefully goes through and cleans each room, before packing away all the family’s belongings into one room on the upper floor of the house, which she padlocks. She packs a bag for her son and her daughter, who are still in school.

When the children come home, her daughter mentions that people have been staring at them all day, just as the shopkeepers stared at the mother when she was out in town. She asks her mother if there is something wrong with her face. Her mother assures her there is nothing wrong with her face. She knows that her daughter was stared at because all their neighbors know about Evacuation Order No. 19, too. The boy asks about the whereabouts of their old dog, but the woman does not tell him what she did. After dinner, once the children are asleep and she has packed up her home entirely, she finds herself alone downstairs in her empty living room, and she can only laugh.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Train”

In this chapter, the point of view shifts to the daughter. The scene takes place a few months after their evacuation. After a few months in Californian detention center, she, her mother, and her brother are being transported by train out of California, to a camp in Nevada. The girl is aware of this, but she is more immediately preoccupied with the people she meets on the train. She meets a soldier, who asks her to lower the window shade when she tries to look out the train window. She observes that the soldier seems kind, and she observes that he is handsome. She repeatedly reflects throughout the chapter on the question of beauty, as it preoccupies much of her attention.

She spends some time with an older Japanese gentleman, telling him about the blue scarf her father brought her as a souvenir the last time he visited Paris. She also tells him about the shoes her father brought home. The old man listens to her in a kind and patient way. When he speaks Japanese, the girl cannot understand him, so he addresses her in English. The girl notices that her mother has stopped using lipstick, and the mother tells her that she’s used it all up. The boy comments that he left a few possessions behind in their first detention center, including an umbrella, and the mother replies that they cannot remember everything.

At night, when her brother is asleep, the girl looks at the collection of postcards that her father has been mailing from the series of detention centers he has lived in over the past few months. The detention centers are scattered across the country. His writing is censored by the people who bring the mail out of the camps. Later that same evening, the girl wakes up to the sound of breaking glass: someone has thrown a brick through the window of the train. Later still, she looks out the window at the landscape and catches a glimpse of a herd of horses crossing the plains. She wakes her brother to share the sight with him.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

The narrator uses a very distant tone to describe the actions in these sections, rarely dipping in to the feelings and interior lives of the characters and never once even referring to them by their names. The characters are only called the woman, the girl, and the boy, capturing very quickly the way in which the evacuation order has effectively erased their individual identities within society. Otsuka extends the theme of the loss of identity when she points out at the end of the first chapter that the family will have to pin identification numbers on their collars when they arrive at the gathering point for Japanese Americans. Instead of being seen as individuals with real names, they will be referred to as numbers, a bureaucratic erasure of individuality that carries eerie similarities to the simultaneous Nazi practice of tattooing Jewish concentration camp prisoners with identification numbers, in ink on their forearms.

The passage of time in this portion of the book is marked both directly and indirectly: the change of the seasons, the details in the father’s postcards, and the fact that the mother has gone through an entire tube of lipstick are details that accumulate to convey the passage of time.

The mother might be seen, in this segment, to be a cruel figure, when she kills the dog and releases the bird into the wild. On the one hand, it might seem unnecessary to kill the dog, and the violence can be read as an act of wanton killing. On the other hand, the mother’s act can be read as an example of strict practicality. The mother, already aware that the society around her is not going to do anything to help Japanese Americans in their community, makes a defensible guess that no one will do her the favor of looking after her dog while she is gone. In this light, her murder of the dog takes on the cast of a mercy killing: a way of giving the dog a quick death after a good meal, instead of allowing him to suffer a slow death of starvation on the streets of his town.

Throughout the initial chapter, the mother accepts her lot. If she ever thinks of attempting to evade the evacuation order, the reader is never privy to those thoughts of rebellion. She has already seen her husband dragged off in the middle of the night, and she seems to take it for granted that the family is helpless in these circumstances. This feeling is best captured in the scene when she is reduced to a fit of laughter in her empty living room, in the middle of the night before boarding the train in the morning.