When the Emperor Was Divine

by Julie Otsuka

“I was afraid I might accidentally remember who I was and . . . offend myself.”

“What if it’s not real?” she asked us. Or had been delivered to our house by mistake? Or sent to us, as a joke, by the same man who called up in the middle of the night to tell us where we could go?

So sad how much mistrust can be distilled into an individual after societal abuse

We didn’t know. We didn’t want to know. We never asked. All we wanted to do, now that we were back in the world, was forget.

He was suspicious of everyone: the newspaper boy, the door-to-door salesman, the little old lady who waved to us every day as we passed by her house on our way home from school. Any one of these people, he warned us, could be an informer.

He stopped reading the newspaper. He no longer listened to Dr. I.Q. with us on the radio. “There’s already enough noise in my head,” he explained. The handwriting in his notebook grew smaller and fainter and then disappeared from the page altogether. Now whenever we passed by his door we saw him sitting on the edge of his bed with his hands in his lap, staring out through the window as though he were waiting for something to happen. Sometimes he’d get dressed and put on his coat but he could not make himself walk out the front door.