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

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Loss of Identity

The loss of identity is a key theme in the book, which the reader confronts on every page, as the narrator refers to the characters throughout the book simply as the woman, the girl, and the boy. They are also assigned numbers, instead of identities, as part of their processing as they go to the internment camp.

This loss of identity is highlighted not only in the gradual loss of material possessions, but also in the ways that the characters attempt to cling to their identities: the mother’s attempts to continue wearing make-up, so as to continue controlling the appearance of her face; the daughter’s attempt to maintain old friendships just as they were before this experience, assuring her pen pals that the camp is fine, and all is well; and the boys whispering Hirohito, as an attempt to keep his own identity as an “Emperor-worshiping Shinto.” The attempts are not entirely successful. After asking her children to help her remember whether or not she had a stove, the mother laments: “I used to be quite the cook once, you know” (80), which implies that she has surrendered or lost that part of her old identity.

Arguably the biggest loss of identity belongs to the father, who not only experiences the erasure of the camps, but also loses himself even when he returns. When he comes back, he is lost and seems to have difficulty remembering items in his own home. He never goes back to work and finds himself fitting poorly into his old life, unable to reconnect to his old identity. His loss of identity is not limited to his experience during the war: the trauma of his experience has lasting effects that takes his old identity away from him permanently. The family, by extension, loses its old identity as a happy family and must come to terms with its new reality and new identity.

The Displacement and Alienation of Immigrants

The theme of displacement, and the related theme of alienation, are embodied in the camp itself, which physically removes the family members from their lives, but also in Otsuka’s choice to refer to her characters without using their names. This conveys their estrangement from the American community. As long as the American community refuses to use their names and see them as individual people, they will suffer displacement and alienation.

The theme is articulated subtly throughout the camp section, when the boy thinks about the war as a distant and abstract thing, and he tries to comprehend the distance between himself and his father. The more he clings to simple objects and snippets of memory from his life before the camp, the more the reader senses his displacement from his home.

The theme of alienation becomes most acute when the family returns home and finds that they are still subject to discrimination, which creates a barrier between them and their neighbors, leaving them alienated in their own hometown.

Internal and External Powerlessness

The book drives home the theme of struggling against an overwhelming experience of powerlessness from the first scene to the last. The mother, upon seeing the sign, doesn’t struggle against the order: she simply packs and goes, making incredible sacrifices that break her heart. At the end of the first section, she can only laugh. By the end of her time at the camp, she is struggling with an overwhelming sense of meaninglessness and powerlessness. She cannot even control the cream she uses on her body, for even her small struggle to maintain her beauty regimen has caved to her powerlessness in this situation.

Powerlessness is evoked again when the family returns from the detention center. They try to regain the life that they lost but this is a struggle. At first, they don’t fully appreciate the extent of this struggle, and they proceed as if they will be able to fully recapture everything they had. But, as the mother tells her son in the camp, some lost things are simply lost and stay that way. This concept is reified in the mother’s dead rosebush, which cannot be regrown or even rediscovered when the children end the chapter by searching for the lost plant. It is also evoked in the mother’s intense cleaning of their home, attempting to return it to its pre-war condition. It is impossible for her to make it like the way it was, no matter how hard she scrubs the floors. It is evoked each time someone mentions the white dog, who is dead, buried irrevocably beneath the ground in their back yard. And it ultimately becomes apparent when the children realize that there is nothing that will bring their old father back to them, even when he is home. They are powerless to recoup their losses, and so they must retreat into the fantastical thinking that allows them to believe that they will rediscover their mother’s rosebush in someone else’s yard. Even this fantasy reveals their powerlessness. They do not succeed in even imagining that they have recouped the loss of the flower. Even their dream-life shows signs of their real-world powerlessness.

The father drives home the theme of powerlessness in the final section, “Confession,” when he points out that he is powerless to have prevented the horrors of his family’s detention. It doesn’t matter whether he tells the truth of how he did nothing wrong, he has already been judged guilty by virtue of his race, and so he might as well confess since he is powerless to claim the truth anyway.