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Before Julie Otsuka visited the dusty desert site of what was the Topaz Relocation Center, she had spent six years building the place in her mind, block by block, barrack by barrack.
She conducted extensive research, reading as many oral histories and books about the camps as she could find. Eventually she had littered pages and pages of notebooks with sensory details, which she wove into her luminous, spare 2002 novel "When the Emperor Was Divine." The story is loosely based on her family's history and that of more than 120,000 West Coast Japanese-Americans who were relocated into hastily built flyover camps during World War II.
When Otsuka visited Utah's West Desert, she saw concrete foundations of the barracks, some broken crockery and a chest-high barbed-wire fence, evidence left behind nearly 55 years earlier. "You could tell at one time many, many people had lived there," says Otsuka, 52, in a phone interview from New York City. "It looked almost like being on the moon. If felt like you were at the end of the Earth, cut off and remote, like you were in the middle of nowhere."
That's how the desert must have felt for Otsuka's mother, who was 10, her brother 8, when the family was abruptly removed from the Bay Area in 1942. They were relocated just months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when her grandfather, a prominent exporter, had been arrested by the FBI and falsely accused of spying.
"They were waiting in that desert for years for the war to be over," she says, and it's that story of waiting that fuels "Emperor." Perhaps even more complicated is that some families no longer had homes to return to. Otsuka remembers her mother saying that nobody, not even her schoolmates, asked her where she had been.
Otsuka's novel is remarkable for how its simple kaleidoscope of shifting viewpoints — told by a mother, a daughter and a son, all unnamed, and then the collective "we" of a group returning home — builds to tell one family's story, as well as a bigger cultural story. The book ends with a devastating confession.
"These are characters from whom everything has been taken, their homes, their dignity, their sense of self," she says, in response to the readers who ask why they aren't named. "The one thing you couldn't take away was their names. And I also wanted their story to read as a universal one. It also suits the people because the Japanese are a very collective people."
When Otuska finished the novel in June 2001, she didn't yet know how a story of Japanese-American history would come to resonate with Muslim- and Arab-Americans after the terror attacks of 9/11. "There are very eerie parallels," she says. "In some ways, we haven't learned that much from history."
For a literary novel, the book was a breakout hit in 2002, going on to sell 300,000 copies while it was translated into eight languages, named to numerous year-end "Best Of" lists.
But now Otsuka's story has gone on to another life as the focus of community and university reading assignments. Because of Utah's history with Topaz, the powerful novel seems a fitting selection for the Salt Lake City Big Reads program, says Jane Beckwith, president of the Topaz Museum board. The museum is planning an opening art exhibit in fall 2015.
The novel also pairs well with a memoir by Salt Lake City artist Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey, "Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp," published this summer by the University of Utah press.
The Tribune is seeking comments about "When the Emperor Was Divine" (see box about how to email, text or tweet us) for the newspaper's October Utah Lit book club discussion, which will take place at 12:15 p.m. Thursday at sltrib.com.
Later that evening, Otsuka will make a presentation from "Emperor" as part of the Salt Lake Public Library's The Big Read program. Her talk at 7 p.m. at the Main Library auditorium is the centerpiece of a month of activities around the book, funded with a $15,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
While on book tours to promote "Emperor," Otsuka heard many more stories about Japanese women, including the generation who had immigrated to America as picture brides, marrying men they had only seen in a photograph.
When the women got off the boat, they learned their husbands were short, or dark, or ugly or old, "so many different iterations of the same story," Otsuka says. She was intrigued by women who were assigned a mate by fate, and that those same women, decades later, were scattered and dispersed and sent away to relocation camps.
She told a collective story of Japanese picture brides, eloquently weaving together a complicated fictional tapestry, in 2011's "The Buddha in the Attic," which won the Pen/Faulkner award for fiction.
Growing up in California, Otsuka says she didn't hear much about her family's story, and the war history of Japanese-Americans simply wasn't mentioned in her history books.
She recalls a set of rusty forks, inscribed with her family's government-issued numbers, tucked away in the back of the silverware drawer. Her mother rarely talked about the war, and only more rarely referred to camp, mostly making it sound like an adventure. "But I didn't understand for a long time what kind of camp my mother was referring to," the writer says now.
As a girl, Otsuka remembers seeing a Department of Justice sleeping bag, labeled with her grandfather's name. She was just 8 when he died, and the family never learned everything that happened to him during the war years.
Years after his death, during her grandmother's move, Otsuka discovered a box of his war letters. "That was my window into my grandfather," the writer says, describing the box of censored letters. "All of a sudden, there was this man on the page."
Her family's stoic silence was common among the Japanese people she knew. "I think it's very Japanese to not complain about your misfortunes," she says. "For a time, for the generation that came out of the camps, I think it was very important to downplay their Japaneseness. It was dangerous to be too Japanese."
Otsuka describes the household she grew up in as very American. Without understanding the history of internment, she also didn't inherit any legacy of government prejudice or injustice.
Instead, she went on to study art at Yale University. Through her 20s, Otsuka attempted and, she claims, failed at painting. "I knew in my mind the pictures I wanted to make, but was technically not able to execute" them, she says.
Eventually, she turned her creativity to writing vignettes. She was writing comedy sketches about contemporary life in New York City when she studied creative writing at Columbia University.
In her second year in graduate school, she wrote a short story of historical fiction, "and it seemed to come out of nowhere." The story, "Evacuation Order Number 19," about an unnamed woman in Berkeley who packs her house and her two children's belongings, eventually became the first chapter of "Emperor."
The story must have been sitting there in the back of her mind for years, the writer says now, but maybe like her mother she questioned who would want to read about it.
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Utah Lit Book Club
I Join the Tribune's Utah Lit online book club conversation about Julie Otsuka's novel "When the Emperor Was Divine" at 12:15 p.m. Thursday at sltrib.com. Text questions to 801-609-8059, use the Twitter hashtag #UtahLit or email ellenf@sltrib.com or jnpearce@sltrib.com.
Reading • After the Utah Lit discussion, join the novelist at 7 that evening at the Main Library auditorium, 210 E. 400 South, Salt Lake City. This Salt Lake City Public Library event is one of several taking place this month as part of The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Also • Stay tuned for the announcement of the Tribune's November's Utah Lit book selection.