Displacement and Reaction: Analyzing When the Emperor Was Divine Karli R Ching College

The characters in the novel When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka find themselves in a rather comforting place they call “home.” The father has a job outside the home, the mother works inside the home, and the children go to school and make friends with whites. They seem to be the exact definition of the typical American family in the 1940s. The characters in Otsuka’s novel never felt that they fit into the “box” that is a stereotypical American due to their physical appearance and culture. However, once they are confined to the camp, they begin to feel a sense of displacement from what they once had and learn cope with these feelings in different ways.

To begin, the reader finds that the young girl in the novel tends to talk excessively about the past. Even on the train, before the family arrives at the camp, the unnamed character speaks to an older man about her scarves and pairs of shoes her dad had given her from Paris. She says, “My father gave it to me. He used to travel a lot. He bought it for me the last time he went to Paris. I asked him to bring me a bottle of perfume but he forgot. He brought me this scarf instead. It’s very plain, isn’t it?” (Otsuka 33) Although this may seem irrelevant to the reader and he or...