narrative then shifts to follow the daughter, who
has just turned 11 when the family is forced to
relocate from the temporary holding site at the
Tanforan racetrack to an internment camp in the
Utah desert. The third section, which centers on
the son, is set in an internment camp outside Salt
Lake City, where the mother and her children wait
out the war. The fourth, narrated in the first per-
son plural, documents the family’s return to their
home in Berkeley and eventual reunion with the
father. Finally, in the brief fifth section, the father
speaks in the first person, lashing out against the
racism underlying this historic lapse in justice.
These shifts in narrative perspective, and Ot-
suka’s refusal to provide names for her protago-
nists, paradoxically make her characters at once
universal and specific. In interviews, Otsuka has
acknowledged that the “bare bones” of the story
derive from her family history. Like the father in
the novel, her grandfather was arrested follow-
ing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. And, like
the mother and her two children, Otsuka’s grand-
mother, mother, and uncle were removed from
California to an internment camp in Topaz, Utah,
where they lived for three and a half years. Yet, in
the absence of sufficient details of her relatives’ ex-
periences, Otsuka moved beyond family history,
relying on research and her own imagination to
flesh out the emotional lives and lived experiences
of her fictional characters. In one sense, in refer-
ring to these characters simply as “the woman” or
“the boy,” Otsuka invites her readers to see them as
prototypical victims of wartime racism and gov-
ernment injustice. At the same time, Otsuka’s keen
eye to the details that constitute each character’s
experience reminds her readers of the variety of
ways in which specific individuals encountered
and reacted to Japanese-American internment.
With the exception of the final section, Otsuka’s
novel is a model of restraint. Relying on spare, mat-
ter-of-fact prose, Otsuka refuses to sentimentalize
her characters and resists the inherent melodrama
of their situation. Even when the family returns
to find their home vandalized and lives forever
changed, their response is one of quiet, measured
forbearance. It is only in the last section—the only
one to adopt the perspective of the father and the
only section related in the first person singular—
that the narrative poise and restraint of the first
chapters fall away, revealing a simmering outrage
reminiscent of JOHN OKADA’s NO-NO BOY (1957).
This final section came under fire in Michiko Ka-
kutani’s otherwise positive review in the New York
Times Book Review. Yet while Kakutani referred
to the novel’s conclusion as “a shrill diatribe” that
lacks the “subtle and emotional power of the previ-
ous portions,” Otsuka has expressed in interviews
her certainty that this last chapter offers an appro-
priate conclusion to her novel.
Despite some critical misgivings about the tone
of this last section, Otsuka’s first novel has gone on
to enjoy unexpected popularity. Recognizing par-
allels to the experiences of Arab Americans follow-
ing the events of September 11, many high school
teachers and college professors have included the
book on their syllabi. The novel won the American
Library Association’s Alex Award, was listed as a
Booklist Editor’s Choice for Young Adults, and was
a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great
New Writers program. Otsuka currently lives in
New York City, where she is working on a novel set
in Japan and America during the first decades of
the 20th century.Bibliography
Freedman, Samuel G. “One Family’s Story of Perse-
cution Resonates in the Post-9/11 World,” New
York Times, 17 August 2005, p. B9.
Kakutani, Michiko. “War’s Outcasts Dream of Small
Pleasures,” New York Times, 10 September 2002,
p. E6.
Stephenson, Anne. “ ‘Divine’ Gently Drives Home
History,” USA Today, 3 October 2002, p. 8D.
Rachel IharaOyabe, Jenichiro (1867–1940)
By his own account, Jenichiro Oyabe was born
in Tokyo, and his mother died early in his life.
Abandoned by his father, who joined the new
imperial civil service, the boy was raised by vari-
ous relatives. After attending different schools, he
rejoined his father, who became a judge on theOyabe, Jenichiro 233