One Family's Story of Persecution Resonates in the Post-9/11 World

SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN - New York Times: "DURING the six years Julie Otsuka was writing her novel, she knew one thing for certain: No one was going to read this book. It was her own mission or obsession or duty, a journey back into her family's past, and nothing could be more arrogant than to believe the outside world might care.

Ms. Otsuka grew up in California hearing the occasional reference to her grandfather's arrest on the day after Pearl Harbor, and of the internment the following year of her grandmother, uncle and mother. Sometime in the late 1980's, when that grandmother was moving out of her home in Berkeley, she revealed a hidden box of letters from her husband written during the war, mailed from one detention camp to another.

Those memories and letters fertilized Ms. Otsuka's imagination. Entering her early 30's in 1995, having failed in her initial aspiration of painting, Ms. Otsuka was seized by the image of a Japanese-American family reading an eviction notice. In June 2001, she wrote the final pages of the novel she had titled, "When The Emperor Was Divine." Its destiny, she fully believed, was obscurity.

Yet here she stood on a summer morning at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus, speaking to a room full of high school English teachers, teachers from Hawaii to Long Island, as well as Switzerland and El Salvador. At their seats, they balanced wobbly piles of binders, notebooks, worksheets and coffee cups and listened raptly, paging through copies of the book, which many already had tagged with Post-its.

Like the rest, Sousen Shamseddine Dobbs had read the novel before coming to the weeklong workshop. While she appreciated the precise language and somber tone, she had to wonder how her juniors in Dearborn, Mich., could possibly connect to a book about a Japanese-American family 60 years earlier.

Then, listening to the discussion around her, she had that eureka moment. This book was all about the world her students inhabited as part of the largest community of Muslim-Americans and Arab-Americans in the nation. Ms. Dobbs's mother had been detained by immigration authorities for hours as she returned from a social dinner on the Canadian side of the border because, in a spasm of anxiety, or maybe just one of those "senior moments," she kept misspelling her middle name.

MS. DOBBS decided then and there to add "Emperor" to the fall syllabus. "When it was right in my face, I suddenly realized how applicable it was," she said later. "It's a cautionary tale for what's happening today."

Much to Julie Otsuka's shock and satisfaction, her book has provoked a multitude of similar responses since it was published in September 2002. While "Emperor" received some luminous reviews - Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times praised its "mesmerizing power" - many books sink like rocks despite comparable plaudits. What has happened with "Emperor" is what no one in publishing or education can predict: the way an accomplished work of art, though set in the past, captures something essential about the present day.

In the America that was altered on Sept. 11, a nation struggling not to perceive its Arab and Muslim citizens as enemies within, "Emperor" has become a startlingly popular text. It has been taught from the Chapin School on the Upper East Side to Tarbut V'Torah, a Jewish high school in Irvine, Calif.

It has been assigned to all incoming freshmen at Simmons College and Utah State University. It has been selected for City Reads programs in Carmel, Ind.; Topeka, Kan.; and Santa Barbara, Calif.

TO watch "Emperor" catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers - 142,000 copies of the book are in print - is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like "Lord of the Flies" or "To Kill a Mockingbird" or "A Separate Peace." There was a time when they, too, were just being discovered, just finding their way into what might be called the canon of scholastic literature.

"In writing about one moment in history," Ms. Otsuka, 43, said the other day, still fairly dazzled at the book's reception, "I seem to have stumbled into another."

Stumbled is indeed the operative word. At the Fordham session, a teacher from Hong Kong, Joanne Pohn, asked Ms. Otsuka, "Is this a political book or a literary book?" To which the author responded: "I didn't write it to make a political statement. I didn't sit down and say, 'This is an untold story the world needs to know.' I wrote it to understand what my mother had gone through."

Alice Haruko Nozaka, Ms. Otsuka's mother, was 10 years old when she was ordered to a detention camp in Topaz, Utah. Two years passed before her father, Shigeharu Nozaka, was reunited with the family. Only after the Japanese surrender in August 1945 were the Nozakas permitted to return home.

With scrupulous historical research and a novelist's magic for channeling characters, Ms. Otsuka rendered her forebears' experiences in exact, quotidian detail: a son realizing he can no longer smell his absent father's aroma in the parent's shoes, and a mother patching the barracks walls with pages torn from the Sears catalog.

Published by coincidence around the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, "Emperor" offered an unplanned analogy to a period of investigation, interrogation, suspicion and deportation of Arabs and Muslims in the United States. But its relevance did not end there.

The instructor at the Fordham workshop, Renee Shea, found that her mostly African-American students at Bowie State University in Maryland fastened onto the issue of reparations for slavery.

For Repheal Sackville, who teaches English at a Jewish day school in Queens, the book brought back the childhood memory of a gangster turning up in synagogue every year on Yom Kippur to stand reverently behind Mr. Sackville's grandfather. It was the criminal's homage for the grandfather's having saved his life in a concentration camp.

No teacher, perhaps, gave Ms. Otsuka a more meaningful response than Jane Beckwith in Delta, Utah, a small town near the Topaz camp. After having the author meet with her students, Ms. Beckwith drove Ms. Otsuka to see the remains of a place she had only imagined. It was a field of stray nails and broken glass, cracked foundations and rusty barbed wire.

"I'm still sort of amazed," Ms. Otsuka said. "I'm just glad my book is out there in the world, and that it means something to people other than myself.""