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about the author
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California and lives in New York. This her first novel was published by Viking to critical acclaim and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. We find out about her life as a writer and how things have changed, or not, since she has been published. She also tells us what she is working on next.
interview
Although complex in nature, the stories in When the Emperor Was Divine are told very simply. Why did you choose this approach?
I think that, because the subject matter of Emperor — the awfulness of the war, of the internment — is very ‘hot’ (and also inherently exploitable) it made more sense to me to tell the story in a ‘cool,’ simple, almost detached manner. The one thing I didn’t want to do was overwrite the novel. I wanted to tell the story quietly, and I wanted the facts to speak for themselves. I think — I hope — that keeping the awfulness in the background, just below the surface of the words, actually made it more present, more felt, to the reader, somehow.
The main character's names are avoided throughout the introduction of the book. What was your aim in withholding their names?
These characters have had everything taken away from them—their home, their belongings, their liberty, their faith in America, their dignity. The one thing that no one can take away from them, however, is their names, which only they and they alone know. I felt like I owed it to them to leave them with some small shred of self.
This is your family's story so how did you approach this as fiction knowing that ?
Although the bare-bones structure of the story — the arrest of the father, the internment of the mother and two children—is based on events that happened to my mother and her family during WWII, the characters in my novel don’t resemble anyone in my own family, they’re very much mine, so in that sense the book is “made up.” Also, my mother really didn’t talk about the internment much, so I felt I had to recreate her world for myself—day by day, scene by scene, detail by detail. I did a tremendous amount of research for the book, because so little of my family’s story was known to me. Nobody ever wanted to talk about what had happened during the war.
What is your favourite section or passage in "When the Emperor Was Divine"?
Oh, that’s a difficult question. I suppose it’s the long middle section that takes place in the camp and is told from the young boy’s point of view. I think he was the character I loved the most—probably because he was the one who needed most to be loved. The other characters seemed able to take care of themselves. I could just watch them and I knew they’d be all right in the end. But the boy was so vulnerable, and filled with such longing, such yearning and loss, I simply felt he needed looking after, and for some reason I felt very identified with him, and loved living in his head while I was writing his chapter.
I have read that that you love to swim and that your ideal time to write is after swimming. What else drives your creativity?
Oh, I’d have to say, boring as it may sound, routine. For years I’ve been going to the same café in my neighborhood every day. I wrote most of the novel in that café, in fact. I think that because writing is such an incredibly lonely, scary endeavor (for me, at least), there is something very comforting about working in a public place—you’re alone and yet not alone at the same time. I like sitting at the same table every day (all the way in the back, far corner), I like seeing the same regular customers every day, giving them a nod of the head, or a hello, then getting down to work. It feels very safe there, and I’ve always been allowed to sit for hours on end. Whenever I leave New York I find myself missing the café—it seems to be the place in which I write best, the place where I feel creatively at home.
One other thing—I think that reading is really the best inspiration for writing. When I’ve read something that truly moves me, I often feel the urge to write. Before I start with my own writing, I like to read first—there’s something about the act of reading that relaxes my brain and seems to prime me for the act of writing.
You initially moved to New York to be a painter. Do you still paint and if so you find any similarities between writing and painting?
No, I no longer paint. I put down my brushes for good years ago. I do think, however, that there are similarities between writing and painting. If you’re a painter you go to your studio every day, you set out your colors on your pallet, you put down a mark on the canvas, then another, then another, you stand back, you add, you take away. It’s the same thing with writing. You get up every day and you sit down at your desk and you put down a word, or a sentence, or, on a good day (I work very slowly) maybe a half page. You add a word here, you take one away, you sketch out a scene, it’s all wrong, it needs to be a little warmer, a little cooler, you change it, it’s still wrong... It’s just not that different from painting, really, the process of writing.
Which authors do you admire? Have you had the opportunity to meet any of them now that you are a published author?
Some of my favorites are Jamaica Kincaid, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Annie Ernaux, Marguerite Duras, Lydia Davis, Rick Bass, Julie Hecht, Haruki Murakami. I haven’t met any of them, though. Even though I’m now a ‘published author,’ my life’s pretty much the same as before — most of the time I’m just sitting by myself in the café, making stuff up, living in my head. Like many writers, I’m afraid I’m a bit reclusive by nature.
Could you recommend two novels for reading groups?
Autobiography of My Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid, Farrar Straus and Giroux
Badenheim 1939, by Aharon Appelfeld, Quartet Books
I understand that you are currently working on unexplored themes from When the Emperor Was Divine. Can you give us some more insight into this?
Oh, I do remember saying that—at the time I had an idea for a second novel that would address some of the questions I didn’t quite get to in Emperor. For example, what was it like for the townspeople who were left behind after the Japanese were taken away? Did they wonder what had become of the Japanese? Or did they simply forget about them as time went on? Why was there so little opposition to the internment? Where were those voices of dissent?
At a certain point, though, I thought, enough! I felt like I couldn’t think about the war anymore. I’d been living with it for so many years in my head, and felt the need to move on, to go someplace entirely new and unknown. So now I’ve started working on a different sort of story. A novel set in Japan and America during the first decades of the 20th century. It feels like a big story, and I wonder if I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, and, as always, I’m filled with doubt and dread (can I do it?), but I’m fascinated by the material, and by one character in particular, and also, I’m just deeply in love with words, with the process of writing, and I hope that all this is enough to get me through the writing of the book over the next few years. I feel like, ok, take a deep breath, here I go again…
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