Historical Injury and Asian American Literary Minimalism

When it was published in 2002, Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine offered a literary representation of Japanese American internment that was quite different from previous narratives.1 Employing the perspectives of four unnamed members of a Japanese American family across five chapters, the slim novel painted a stark portrait of loss and injury in spare prose. One of the most distinguishing features of Otsuka's debut novel was its lack of desire for the documentary. That is, unlike previous narratives of internment that were mostly based on personal experiences, When the Emperor Was Divine was written in a style that abandoned any pretense of mirroring reality, instead drawing attention to the text's qualities as fiction. This style may well be characterized as minimalism given the role carefully rendered images play in the narrative and the efficient, allusive, and implicative prose.2

The stylistic departure of Otsuka's debut novel from previous literary narratives of internment has significance beyond the particular novel or even the individual writer when one views it as part of a larger cultural shift in Asian American literature. In response to the visibility of Asian American literature in mainstream publishing in recent decades, critic Min Hyoung Song points to the maturation of a generation of Asian American writers whose families immigrated after the immigration reform of 1965, a turning point for Asian immigration to the U.S. While pre-1965 Asian American literature has been viewed as developing outside the literary mainstream, the "children of 1965" have a relationship with the literary mainstream that cannot be explained solely through the lens of inclusion and exclusion.3 Using the term literary minimalism to read Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine is an attempt to think about the representation of historical injury as a medium of collective consciousness at a time when a number of racial injuries considered significant to Asian America cross over from the realm of memory to that of history. Otsuka's stylistic innovation in looking back on Japanese American internment is not only relevant for her own works of fiction but for reading later writers such as Paul Yoon who take on historical subjects in minimalist prose much in the vein of Otsuka in novels like Snow Hunters (2013).

The literary qualities of When the Emperor Was Divine come into high relief when we read the text alongside the list of works Otsuka consulted, appended to the end of the book as "A Note on Sources." On this list are historical studies and documentary compilations as well as a memoir. Together they comprise an excellent initiation into the history and experience of Japanese American internment. Along with chronology, facts and details on evacuation, relocation, and internment, as well as an accounting of property loss and damage, these texts include numerous first-hand accounts. In these individual accounts, the terror of abrupt uprooting appears in flashes and fragments. They vividly convey how Executive Order 9066 destroyed the rhythms and expectations of daily life. There is, for example, a young couple who thought they were going to lose their toddler when they thought she had swallowed pills of rat poison lying around. They were so busy trying to pack what they could carry they had forgotten to feed her that day.4 Most memorable to me is the account of a camp survivor who confesses to outbursts of anger when she has to wait in line. The endless long lines she experienced in the camp followed her even after her release from the camp.5 Deeply embedded in the realm of the everyday, these fragments of ex-internee accounts cumulatively deliver the internment as lived experience. There is no single narrative, no plot or progression of events, but that is exactly the point. If there is a style at all to Otsuka's list of references, it would be documentary maximalism. Its principle? Spare no words in approximating lived experience.

In contrast to the historical works and first-person accounts it draws on, When the Emperor Was Divine focuses on the story of one unnamed family — father, mother, a girl, and a boy — from a few days before evacuation to a few years after release. By placing a middle-class heteronormative family at the center of injury, Otsuka's novel pierces the lie of the American dream. If material objects appear in plenitude in the documentary accounts as byproducts of verisimilitude, they play a quite different role in the novel. Period-specific proper nouns index time and place to socially and culturally locate the family squarely within the imagined community of the nation during the Pacific War. The following piece of memory, which occurs to the girl when she rides the train from Tanforan relocation center to the camp in Topaz, is one example:

The account of loss here seems all-around American. The girl had been growing up to be part of multiple communities, starting with her neighborhood and the community of cartoon readers. Now her development into a young adult is stunted by being shut out of this prospect. The proper nouns mark the experience of loss as that of a young girl from San Francisco in the 1940s without subtracting from the account's universal appeal.

The stylistic imperative to craft a story of loss in spare prose, though, has limitations in delivering more than glimpses into the life of the family. Through the family members' memories of better times, Otsuka's narrative constructs the image of a family that had been comfortable before internment. For example, on the train ride to Topaz the girl remembers a family vacation to Yosemite, which involved a chauffeured drive, a weeklong stay at the Ahwahnee hotel, and "dinner[s] in the fancy dining room beneath the enormous chandeliers."7  Leisure, of course, is completely out of reach for the girl in the narrative present. Other than providing a sense of concreteness to the setting of their lives, the proper nouns also index a class status, from which the family precipitously falls. But the narrative does not — cannot — offer a fuller story of how the family came to attain the status it did. Not through the psychology of the characters and not through the milieu.

This is not, of course, to say that Otsuka portrays all Japanese Americans as being well off. The family's fellow internees are a truly varied group. The diversity found in the camp in fact highlights the racist rationale of the camp: the only thing shared by all the internees is a common ancestry. Otsuka is clearly mindful of the class divisions within Japanese Americans. At Topaz, the mother runs into Mrs. Ueno who used to work as a housekeeper for the family. Relating the encounter to the boy, she says:

"Equals" is at once a fitting and strange choice for this moment. It is fitting because it draws attention to the forced leveling of social differences effected by the camps. At a time of burgeoning anti-communist sentiments, the suggestion that Japanese Americans experience socialism for the first time in an American internment camp is rich in its irony. Aside from this instant irony, however, the term also unsettles readers because the idea is so embedded in liberal democracy as a system. Whereas America as a liberal democracy theoretically should be a society of socially equal members, the woman's statement to Mrs. Ueno shows a world where members recognize the social differences that divide them. The narrative does not offer additional explanation on how a system of private property warped into one of social inequality. That seems beyond the purview of the minimalist style which aims to imply and allude rather than to explain or elaborate.

The literary minimalism of When the Emperor Was Divine renders an achingly beautiful portrait of injury on a family readers can readily identify with. From the different perspectives of the family, the novel distills into a compact narrative the suffering of an American family who happened to be of Japanese ancestry. While it thematizes a historical injury important to Asian American history, it does not aim to be a historical novel in the sense meant by Georg Lukács. For the Marxist critic, the development of the historical novel coincides with the emergence of a collectivity of people who saw themselves together, as a "mass," capable of changing the course of history. The genre shares a lot in common with social realism — with its thick descriptions of milieux and deep probes into character psychology — but remains generically distinct because it draws readers' attention to the conditions of revolutionary change.9 Otsuka's minimalist works of fiction are a far cry from the works of fiction Lukács saw as historical novels. This would not be a point even worth bringing up were it not for the fact that the idea of collective consciousness and action is also crucial to the vision of community behind Asian America. The increasing diversity of Asian America, as well as the shifting terrain of racial politics, necessitate conversations on what community means and what forms the foundations of this community for the pan-ethnic group. If Asian American literary criticism is not just about critics of Asian descent writing about literary publications by writers of Asian descent, then the question of what comprises community and why in reading practices becomes both unavoidable and salient.

This may be a fitting time to return to a point I raised earlier about the crossroads of memory and history, because to ask When the Emperor Was Divine to bear the burden of showing the path of revolutionary change is not exactly fair. It is particularly unfair because Otsuka's literary interest in Japanese American internment seems personal. In several interviews, Otsuka has mentioned her personal connection to Japanese American internment.10 Her mother was a young girl when she was put in the camp. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, draws on the story of her grandmother who first came over to the United States as a picture bride and was later interned during World War II. In her most recent novel, The Swimmers, internment appears in fragments in Alice's memory as the main character loses herself to dementia. Through the arc of her three works of fiction, a more complete picture of internment can be assembled, and at the heart of this picture is the painful and enduring loss experienced by everyday people caught in the web of systemic racism. In other words, internment in Otsuka's works of fiction is very much postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch to refer to the inherited trauma of the descendants of Holocaust survivors.11 While Otsuka herself may not have experienced internment, the event is part of her psyche. Memory, of course, is related to, but also distinct from, history. Both in terms of temporal stretch and the number of affected persons, memory scales smaller than history. It is intimate.

How to read the representation of injury in When the Emperor Was Divine is a vexing question because it takes place at the crossroads of memory and history. Just like the feminist embrace of the motto that the personal is the political, Asian American studies has also embraced challenges to ways of knowing that affirm established knowledge at the expense of other forms of knowledge. In cases where a group's history has been dismissed or distorted, collective memory understandably takes the place of official history. Otsuka's novel, though, does not squarely fit this frame of memory as history. In fact, When the Emperor Was Divine only becomes possible after the work of historical scholarship like those the author references at the end of her novel. One dimension of the work this historical scholarship performed, with its documentary imperative and attention to factual and verifiable evidence, was buttressing the Redress movement. The text may not reference it explicitly, but When the Emperor Was Divine is a post-Redress novel on the internment in the sense that it enters the world of representations of Japanese American internment after the political success of the Redress movement, an official apology from the President, and monetary reparations (nominal as they were) made to the surviving ex-internees. It emerges at a time when official history has already changed to view the Japanese American internment as a historic wrong and memory does not have to take the place of history.

How, then, to read the representation of historical injury in When the Emperor Was Divine as not just any novel but as an Asian American novel? My tentative answer to this question is that the emphasis falls less on "historical" and more on "injury." The literary craft of minimalism in Otsuka's novel delivers aesthetic images of human suffering that hold a universal appeal and are complex and ambiguous. These images, however, do not necessarily dwell on the historical circumstances or the social significance of the injury. History, in other words, is not really imagined through collective, revolutionary action at its center. This, however, should not be taken as meaning that When the Emperor Was Divine disavows a sense of community. In fact, Otsuka's insistence on the last chapter as an integral part of the novel suggests a vision of a community of readers who would embrace the chapter's racial affect.

The book's last chapter, written from the first-person perspective of the father who was wrongly taken by the FBI, is at the center of the its engagement with racial affect, and it is in the interpretation of the last chapter that one sees a stark difference between the publishing industry and Asian American literary criticism. According to Otsuka, her editors "were worried that the last chapter was too angry in tone, compared to the rest of the novel."12 One widely acclaimed reviewer singled out the last chapter as a misfit because it "trades the elliptical method employed in the earlier chapters for a shrill diatribe."13 In contrast, Asian American literary criticism has viewed the anger of the novel's last chapter as what makes the novel Asian American.14

Racial affect is a point that distinguishes Otsuka's minimalism from conventional views of minimalism that understand the style primarily through writers like Raymond Carver (as shaped by his editor Gordon Lish) and Ann Beattie, the representative writers of American minimalism as it became prominent in the 1980s. In conventional minimalist narratives, affect is barely present, so the discomfort at the strong affect of Otsuka's last chapter on the part of some readers—be it at the narrative's overall tone or at sentence-level style—should not come as a surprise. Yet, noticeably, it is the unconventional chapter that communicates racial authenticity for readers who seek not only stylistic innovation but also a sense of community from the novel's cultural work to make the past present. If we view the writings of Otsuka — or later writers like Paul Yoon — as in any way related to minimalism, then their works call for an understanding of the style that looks beyond language use and accommodates divergent as well as convergent experiences of racialization that undergird Asian American literature. In this sense, writers like Otsuka and Yoon may be outlining a distinctive Asian American literary minimalism in their adaptation of the style to address historical injury.

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Jeehyun Lim is Associate Professor of English and core affiliate faculty in Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

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