Hazy Deja Vu

What if the woman, the girl, and the boy were taken to prison while the man was left alone at home? Chapter Two's introduction offers the audience a glimpse into this alternate reality. "Somewhere along the western edge of upper Nevada it passed a lone white house with a lawn and two tall cottonwood trees with a hammock between them gently swaying in the breeze," begins the narration. The deju vu here is hazy but strongly felt. Between "a small dog lay sleeping on its side in the shade of the trees" and the hedge's "perfect green spheres," it's like the family's home in Berkeley exists outside its original confines. It has been transposed to an entirely different locale with entirely different people, in this case "a man with a straw hat trimming hedges." In addition to conjuring subconscious but plaintively bared throwback memories in the girl - in fact, much of the chapter is as much dedicated to the girl's memories of living elsewhere as it is to living in the moment, as much about "tossing lemons out into the desert" as it is the girl telling Ted about her father buying shoes in Paris years earlier, "fancy ones with little holes punched in the leather" - could Otsuka be challenging the audience to speculate what would have happened to the family if the roles had been reversed, with the man taking on the roles of father, mother, groundskeeper, and child while the rest of his family was taken away? The prominence of the house in the introduction, the explicit mention of its "wooden picket fence" and "victory garden," as well as Otsuka's extensively uncharacteristic description of a seemingly unimportant object makes me think the idea wasn't far from the author's consciousness. Likewise, there is also the nostalgia angle to consider. Chapter 2 soaks in the girl's memories of past events; considering the girl's heavy notice of the house in the beginning, did spotting the house spur much of the girl's narration and experiences throughout the rest of the chapter? The girl does not make the connection, the reminders, between her "white stucco house" in Berkeley to the "lone white house" in Nevada explicit, but that is the point of minimalism. The two house share more than just similar colors. They share moods, tonalities, essences. Despite Berkeley's urbanity, the family's house - it's community - was as alone as the house in Nevada is. The family's uniqueness is what makes them alone in relation to their surroundings in Berkeley: their Japanese-American background, their wealth, even the woman's unusual individuality during a time when woman were rarely individuals, her smoking habit and habit of wearing dresses above her knees. Though the family was surrounded by people all the time in Berkeley, they were surrounded by few people they /connected/ with on the same level as their own experiences allowed. The family is a microcosm. This disconnect continues well beyond Berkeley and into the crowded Tanforan racetrack and onto the even busier train, and will likely continue for the rest of their lives. Further experiences in the internment camps will likely only push them farther away from others and closer to each other. We need to read between the lines here. In essence, the house is a literary MacGuffin, because while it doesn't seem to be all that important to the reader, it actually guides the girl's narration for the rest of the chapter - and in effect our reading experiences. The entire chapter seems to be a blatant meditation on earlier events as seen through the lens of the current moment: and a meditation on current moments as seen through previous experiences. Even something as minute as the girl not knowing what the word intermittent means is informed by having "been a good but not outstanding student who had learned the meanings of many words" in a past life. On a much wider scale, Otsuka is indicating the importance of time, of experiences, of accumulation. For a book with relatively little indication of time, When The Emperor Was Divine presents facts in a starkly linear fashion, with each past experience building onto current experiences. The opposite could also be said, as each recent experience can be clearly unfolded onto itself into a million pieces of a past moment. Time, like most of the themes in Otsuka's novel, is an important but understated device.

As most of our class discussions have reiterated, criticisms for Otsuka's novel are frequently levelled at the sparseness of her language, and the lack of outright passion in the words. After coming off reading a book as brazenly passionate as Push, the divergences can be especially jarring. I disagree. Though the audience may see When The Emperor Was Divine as "whitewashed" as the stable walls at the Tanforan racetrack where the family spent nearly the last half-year, the novel's emotion comes through in invisible waves: we are supposed to find emotion in what isn't stated, as well as what lies in between the lines, rather than in the barely-there language Otsuka evokes. We're challenged to ply deconstructive theory to glean anything but the most obvious and shallow bits of information from Otsuka's writing. That's the beauty of minimalism. While minimalism isn't for everyone, and in fact many people may outright hate the novel's disconnect, those with particularly vivid imaginations will feel the novel on a grander, heartwrenching scale than any other type of writing. The girl's character seeps through every conceivable pore in the second chapter, and even though Otsuka's writing style is exactly the same in the second chapter as it was in the first, the chapter is an entirely new experience for the audience. For example, let's look at one of the first scenes aboard the train: "Don't lose that arm," her mother said under her breath. "I wasn't planning on it," said the girl," moments after hurling a lemon out a train window." Otsuka has told us an abundance about these two characters, and their relationship with one another, in two short sentences. Two short sentences totally devoid of adjectives, inner thoughts, nor any indication of /how/ the characters say what they say. The author writes like a journalist - does she ever use a word other than 'said' to end a quote? - but thinks like a fiction writer. Regardless of the unadorned quotations, the audience can easily imagine the mother adopting a cautionary smirk, or the girl scoffingly looking at her mother. Otsuka doesn't need to clutter her writing with unnecessary description because our minds, and her sparse prose, evoke even more vivid descriptions without them. The burden lies as much on the author as it does on the audience; it's interactive storytelling at its finest.