Julie Otsuka's 'When The Emperor Was Divine'

1. In the book, “When the Emperor Was Divine,” in Chapter 4, Julie Otsuka switches the narrative perspective from an individual to the plural “we.” The plural “we” is meant to represent the perspective of both the girl and the boy. With the dual perspective, the audience gains a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of the events in the chapter. When a story is only recounted from one perspective, the reader loses the viewpoints of the other characters. Furthermore, the scene appears stronger in the reader’s mind, when there are two narrators recounting the same story. Additionally, the first person plural pronoun, “we” can be viewed by the reader as a more reliable interpretation of events, coming from two people. Julie Otsuka could …show more content…
To me, the father’s homecoming was surprising. I was astonished the physical effects of the camp on the father and how he had significantly aged in over four years. “The man who came back on the train looked much older than his fifty-six years” (Otsuka 132). The father’s suit is faded and his face is wrinkled. I had predicted the children would be excited to see their father and run to him, but instead they stood in front of him stunned. “Although we had been waiting for this moment, the moment of our father’s return for more than four years now, when we finally saw him standing there before us on the platform we did not know what to think, what to do” (Otsuka 131). To the children, the man moving towards them seems different from their own father. Their mother has to push the children forward to embrace their father. “He [their father] uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him” (Otsuka 132). Without a doubt, I was astounded the father lost both his youth and his identity to the children. Furthermore, the boy and girl’s father is not the fatherly, role model, and loving parent they remember him as. Instead, their father seems suspicious of the world and loses his original qualities. The father’s handwriting “grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether” (Otsuka 137). The fading of the father’s handwriting symbolizes how the father’s own identity has disappeared. The father never sings and reads stories to the children, like he did in the past. I believe the father has returned to their family as a ghost-like figure, on who the United States government has stripped of his identity, culture, and personality. The changed father permits the reader to comprehend the detrimental impacts the Japanese internment experience had on Japanese American citizens and how even upon their release the internees suffered with psychological remnants of the internment