29 pages • 58 minutes read
Julie OtsukaWhen the Emperor Was Divine
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
Blindness
Otsuka creates a motif related to diminished or obstructed sight, including the mother’s new glasses in the first chapter, the window shades on the train, and the recurring scenes of night and darkness in the long chapter at the camp. The family members are always trying to improve their vision, reclaiming their ability to see by using the corrective lenses, sneaking peeks through the train shades, and focusing on the light of the moon.
Otsuka also poses the question of whether the white Americans in the community are similarly struggling against blindness. They certainly ignore the suffering of their Japanese American neighbors, as exhibited in refusing to object when they are initially taken away to the camps and in refusing to even make eye-contact with them when they return. It’s an open question as to whether this blindness of the white Americans is willful or not.
A related theme to the theme of blindness is invisibility: the family, and Japanese Americans more broadly, have the experience of being invisible to their own society when they are the objects of the white American’s blindness. Being invisible is tied to the erasure of their identities, as captured in both their numbering as detention center residents, and in their daily erasure into the string of stereotypes that the father enumerates in the final chapter of the book. Because the white Americans are averting their eyes, the Japanese Americans remain unseen, and as long as they are unseen, they can be shipped off without anyone raising a fuss.
The Scarcity of Water
Otsuka makes the scarcity of water a powerful motif throughout the book. On the train ride to the internment camp, the girl notices a salt lake that comes and goes depending on the weather. Later, when the family has arrived at the camp, the girl observes how the landscape is not what it appears: “The mountains were farther away than they seemed. Everything was, in the desert. Everything except water. ‘Water,’ she said, ‘is just a mirage.’ A mirage was not there at all” (58).
The precious quality of water is highlighted shortly thereafter: “All night long he dreamed of water. Endless days of rain. Overflowing canals and rivers and streams rushing down to the sea” (59).
Water is a necessity for life. Its scarcity and the family’s longing for it tells us about the physical conditions of the camp, which is so hot that it parches them, but it also represents the general restriction of life’s necessities that the family experiences. The disappearing bodies of water symbolize the disappearing social and emotional resources that the family, being cut off from the broader society, no longer has access to.
Censored Letters
The censored letters that the family receives from the father are a symbol of the complete control that the government is exerting on its Japanese citizens. When the censors cut so many holes in the letters that the children can barely read the kind and simple sentences that the father wants to send, the letters convey and embody the sheer totality of the invasion of the government into this family’s life.
The Lost Rosebush
The final image of “In a Stranger’s Backyard” is a symbol that captures the emotional arc of the chapter, and indeed, the first three quarters of the book. This image is rendered in the last paragraph of the chapter, when the children recollect their rosebushes:
In May, when the heat settled in and roses everywhere burst into bloom, we wandered the streets every day after school in search of the rosebush our mother had once planted in front of our yard. At first we saw it wherever we looked […] but upon closer inspection none of these rosebushes turned out to be ours. They were too big, or too small, or their petals too pale, and after a while we gave up and turned our attention to other things (138).
This search mirrors the arc of their longing for their father throughout the story. In fact, the children have transferred the emotions of longing for their father into a quest and a longing for the rosebush. The initial moments in the quest, when they mistake other rosebushes for their own rosebush, echoes the language at the beginning of the third chapter, when the young boy looks around the detention center and accidentally mistakes other men for his father. Eventually, the children give up hope in finding their rosebush and, by extension, their father. Their only way to retain hope in the face of these tragic and irreversible losses and transformations of their pre-war life is to engage in wishful thinking, as when they say: “We never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light” (138-39).
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By Julie Otsuka
