Family Ties That Bind

When The Emperor Was Divine has its foundations in color and its criticisms highlighted through the many shades of prejudice associated with color.
"Nobody will look at you," the sister says to the boy as they enter the concentration camp, "if your face is too dark." "Nobody's looking at me anyway," replied the boy." His sister is showing her young age here. She assumes darker is a horrendous plight, a handicap, perhaps because she has succumbed to whatever views her mother, her peers, and her country might have told her about darker skin - but from the boy's younger, more immature, more fresh-faced perspective, color does not matter. Apparently, color matters very little to the Japanese-Americans the family is surrounded by, because nobody pays attention to the boy even when his skin eventually darkens from the skin. He’s as much a prisoner as everyone else is regardless of whether his skin is a leathery tan or an ivory white. Excusing the white horse imagery, the boy's impressions have yet to be completely destroyed by whatever influences American culture would normally exert on him, and it shows in the way he describes everything throughout his chapter. Look at his description of one of the camp’s guards: "He had brown hair and green eyes, or maybe they were blue, and he had just come back from a tour of the Pacific." While the boy’s offhanded statement about the guard’s eyes may imply reverse racism – for example, him assuming that all white people have light eyes – I see this more as a devil-may-care expression. Color simply doesn’t matter to a child when they haven’t been indoctrinated to believe color has certain connotations within a society.

Likewise, color extends beyond uniting people together. It also tears people apart from one another. "The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window" furthers previous claims that, despite every Japanese-American being in the camp for roughly the same reason - "they all looked alike, black hair, slanted eyes, high cheekbones, thick glasses, thin lips, bad teeth" - they are all bitterly alone in their struggles. All the family has is each other, if that, but even if they don’t, at least the desert’s dust prevents one static constant.

"Always, he would remember the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting,” says the boy. Not everything white is a positive thing, and it takes away your persona. Your cultural identity. “It took your voice away,” the boy says. It literally prevents you from speaking out. The whiteness strips you of everything that makes the boy, everything that makes a person who they are, everything that makes you, 'you'. However, the color is simply a symbol for cultural degradation. Otsuka is not implicating all white people, or even white people in any capacity, small or large, as the catalyst for bastardizing the family's values. In fact, Joe Lundy and the soldier on the train are portrayed sympathetically; they're as much victims of a "whitewashed" culture as the Japanse-Americans are. I mean, just look at what the dust is, as well as what it does. Dust is cultureless, homogenized, ugly. It's beyond the realm of human color. It's the basic element of so many greater sums, dirt and sand and grains, yet those small specks of dust are all it takes to completely wash away any trace of the boy's presence in the desert. "One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls. By morning his name was gone," notes the narration. Like all traces of the family getting removed from their home after they are imprisoned, and the father’s forced removal in his slippers and bathrobe, identity is a fragile entity prone to being erased by forces beyond the family’s control.

"The shoes were black Oxfords," begins the boy as he describes a paternal heirloom he took to the camp. Remember the umbrella the boy was unable to fit into his suitcase when he was packing? He never mentioned bringing along his father's shoes instead of the umbrella. The umbrella would've been a far practical object for the boy to take along, yet he must have felt his father's shoes were the more important heirloom to bring along than a thing which grants purely physical comfort during times many people find discomforting. It's a willing disregard for practicality. However, he anticipated the shoes would be more useful to him, reminding him of his father and boosting his "mental climate" better than any umbrella ever could. And unlike his sister, he does not blame his father for being absent in the family's life. "You know what bothers me sometimes? I can't remember his face sometimes," complains the girl to her brother. "Me." It bothers /her/ that /she/ can't remember what /her/ father looks like. The sister is only thinking about her father in relation to herself. Although the family's circumstances may lend some sympathy to the girl's way of thinking, it's still selfish for her to see her father as paternal object, especially when the boy does not let his situation interfere with his adoration for papa. While the boy continuously wonders how Papa (notice how he only refers to the father as "papa" rather than "his/her father" like the girl does?) is doing throughout his chapter, the girl defers to papa as "her father" only. The boy's seethingly obvious lack of age - he's only eight years old at the beginning of the novel - has this bizarre way of making him more mature than both his mother and sister. He does not need a father figure present in his life to know he's loved when all he needs to do is close his eyes and reminisce. To hold his father's shoes is enough reassurance. "He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father's toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers. Tonight they smelled like nothing." Though the days when the father used to refer to the boy as his “absolute numero one” (this co-opting of a Spanish phrase by a Japanese-American family strikes me as ironic) are over, the boy still has not forgotten the face of his father like his sister may have, and his father’s lessons – “when to leave the boy’s mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream,” for example – are not something even dust can erase.

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.

Gothic Pallor

The man went to the library and walked over to the online catalog. The weather had chilled, so the leather jacket he wore for warmth hissed as he sat on the chair. It felt good to sit down, he thought. Typing a few words into the keyboard, he found what I was looking for, a book called When The Emperor Was Divine, and wrote down where the novella was located and went to retrieve it promptly. The library's floorboards crackled in time with the rustling of his leather coat.

Do I sound like Julie Otsuka yet?

Forgive the patronizing tone, because I absolutely love Otsuka's minimalism, but just look at the bottom of the first page: "She no longer had to squint but she squinted out of habit anyway. She read the sign from top to bottom anyway and then, still squinting, she took out a pen and read the sign from top to bottom again. The print was small and dark. Some of it was tiny. She wrote down a few words on the back of a bank receipt, then turned around and went home and began to pack." Of course, to say I'm on par with Otsuka is ridiculous. She's a baroque wordsmith, and I am not. This is writing intended to be read aloud. Between the many lists - "There were things they could take with them: bedding and linen, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, cups, clothes" - enunciated syllables, and journalistically short sentences, the story stays in the audience's head freshly and readily. You know Japanese wood carvings? Otsuka's writing is the cerebral equivalent, lotus blossoms, pallid faces, willowy, depressive figures, all etched simply.

Speaking of pallor, the color white makes frequent appearances in When The Emperor Was Divine. "She crossed California Street and bought several bars of Lux soap and a large jar of face cream at the Rumford Pharmacy." Lux soap is of great significance to Asian culture; specifically in regards to skin lightening. Asian women apparently go to ridiculous lengths to achieve the whitest skin possible because it is seen as immensely attractive by their society as a whole, that ivory pallor, and when you consider the 1940s setting as well as the American backdrop, the woman's desire to have whiter skin is much more understandable. She may just want to be seen as an American, to blend in or be accepted without issue, rather than viewed as a Japanese-American or, at worst, a foreigner despite living in America for over fifteen years. We ultimately don't know what the woman's motivations are, however. What I do know, though, is of Lux's strong connection to the goth subculture. It may seem ridiculous, but on the advice of some friends, I ordered Lux whitening soap from the Philippines last summer under the pretense it would make my skin bone-white. Well, it didn't exactly do this, but that doesn't stop the Lux brand from advertising itself as a skin lightener nor being commonly accepted as the best way to achieve lighter skin by mainstream Asian society (in my opinion, never mind the whitening aspect; it's capabilities as a moisturizer are overlooked and if Lux had a stronger presence in the US Dove would more forgotten than Ozymandias). The heavy presence of the color white goes way beyond just skin tone, as well: White Dog, dresses, frocks, soap itself, films, Dorothy Lamour (who, despite having olive skin, looked Irish-pale in pictures and movies during the time), moonlight, teeth.

"Teeth don't count."
"Teeth are essential."

Names are usually seen as essential, too. Names are fundamental to identity. "Thank you, Joe." Then the door slammed behind her and she was alone on the sidewalk and she realized that in all the years she had been going to Joe Lundy's store she had never before called him by his name. Joe. It sounded strange to her. Wrong, almost. But she had said it. She had said it loud. She had wished she had said it earlier," remarks the woman. Why is it that the Japanese-American family is never named - indeed, the woman doesn't even call her children anything other than "the boy" or "the girl" throughout the novel - yet the untitled woman calls others, people outside their family, by their first names with little hesitation? Even White Dog, an animal who is killed like an animal, is technically named. Otsuka may be trying to say something here, whether it's a comment on Japanese culture as a whole, or simply a remark about the family's tenacity and modesty, as their reluctance to attach names to themselves speaks loudly when juxtaposed against outside influences.

Perhaps the family's namelessness was intended to twist cultural statements, which are not usually seen as malleable, into something else entirely. "She took The Gleaners out of its frame and looked at the picture one last time. She wondered why she had let it hang in the kitchen for so long. It bothered her, the way those peasants were forever bent over above that endless field of wheat," says the woman. In either a darkly ironic statement, or a boldly defiant declaration, Otsuka plays around with Asian typicality: that women are wilting flowers, banded feet, well-poised objects of subservience. Considering Otsuka mentions "the woman, who did not always follow the rules, followed the rules" when describing her thoughts towards moving into the internment camps, in addition to emphasizing her individualistic streak with phrases like "sitting down on the landing with her dress pushed up above her knees and lighting a cigarette," (a woman smoking and wearing a dress above the knee during the 40s virtually spells out a lack of adherence to social mores) using The Gleaners painting and the woman's reaction to its realism is symbolically defiant - as well as foreshadowing the station, that of chattel, which the woman and her family will later occupy in the internment camp. Further imprisonment symbolism appears moments after the woman releases the family macaw from its cage. "Without the bird in the cage, the house felt empty," muses the woman, with deafening irony. In addition to being an obvious allusion to internment camps, the irony - that a house would feel empty without a captive soul within it - is biting. Cloak-and-dagger irony seems to be Otsuka's favorite vehicle to convey imagery and emotion, because the woman's emotional responses to outside events, nor her own inner thoughts, are rarely described in detail. Instead, they are shown to the audience, leaving meaningful interpretation of characters up to the readers.