I don’t know how coherently I can write about When the Emperor Was Divine, a novel by Julie Otsuka about one family’s experience of the US internment camps for Japanese during World War II. Or rather, if I can discuss it without letting my emotions boil over into the simmering rage that Otsuka so clearly contains within her sparse, yet poetic, language.

She focuses on a Californian family, a mother and her adolescent children, a boy and a girl. The father is already gone by the time the story begins, having been taken away in the night by government offiicals. We are never given the names of this family, and so we come to see them as symbols of the Japansese-American experience as a whole, as archetypes rather than characters, but this does nothing to lessen their impact. The most powerful and disturbing scenes are not in the camp itself, but beforehand when the mother is preparing her family for their departure, burying her heirlooms and killing the old family dog they could not take with them, and then upon their return home, when they must stare at the hateful slurs painted on the walls of their home, and deny their own identities, obsequiously pandering to avoid being noticed, being hated.

For me, this was a shocking reminder of how cruel people can be to one another, even to our neighbors, and that not all of war’s injustices are committed by our enemies.