When the Emperor Was Divine

There is a dramatic change in the mode and the tone of the narration at this point of the book. In the early sections of the book, the distant third person narrator documents the incessant indignities and suffering of the family in a cool and detached tone. However, this makes the shift into the warm first-person narration of “In a Stranger’s Backyard” and the heated first-person narration of the final section, “Confession,” all the more dramatic. Suddenly the reader gets true and intimate insight into the characters’ experience.

The screed of the fake, sarcastic confession that constitutes the final section of the book drives home the theme of how the internment camp process was predicated on the erasure of individual identities. After hours of interrogation, the speaker snaps and gives the interrogators the answer they want to hear—a confession of every crime—and the answer to their unspoken question of his identity—a list of every stereotype white Americans see in Japanese Americans. This rhetorical device makes the point that what he did is irrelevant, and who he is has also become irrelevant. In the context of this interrogation, the interrogators have already decided that he is guilty. It doesn’t matter who he actually is or what he has actually done. By virtue of his race, he has already been judged guilty, leaving the truth useless to him, as long as he is under their power to detain him.

Ironically, he suffers from a similar paranoia. In the previous chapter, his children document his descent into a universal suspicion of his neighbors: “He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer” (142).

But the father isn’t just addressing his interrogators and his neighbors. The chapter opens with an assertion: “Everything you have heard is true. I was wearing my bathrobe, my slippers, the night your men took me away” (140). His interrogators wouldn’t “have heard” that he was taken away in his bathrobe and his slippers. They would have observed it first hand, if they were present for the arrest, or they would simply not have asked about it, if they only encountered him later at the station. The question of what the man was wearing when he was arrested is both too obvious and too irrelevant to be a subject of his interrogation. This should lead the reader to ask: who has, in fact, heard about what the father was wearing on the night of his arrest? And who, therefore, is the father addressing with his angry monologue? One answer to the question is the reader themselves. When the father says “your men,” he is referring to the police force of the reader’s community. With this rhetorical maneuver, Otsuka implicates the reader in everything the family has suffered in the previous 140 pages of the text. Thanks to the father’s monologue, the reader must look inward and interrogate him or herself about how he or she has participated in allowing cruel treatment within his or her community, turning a blind eye like the family’s neighbors to problematic exercises of government power when the pain is not inflicted upon them directly.

The intensity of his decision to address the reader is underscored by a passage at the end of the previous chapter, when his children say: “He never said a word to us about the years he’d been away. Not one word. He never talked about politics, or his arrest, or how he had lost all his teeth. […] He never told us what it was, exactly, he’d been accused of” (133). The contrast between his silence to his own family and the intensity of his expression of his politics to the reader, through the vehicle of the final chapter, is striking. The father, although not indulging on a daily basis in a recitation of his hurt and his injuries, nonetheless cannot but help but address the reader, indicating that this address is especially urgent.