When the Emperor Was Divine

by Julie Otsuka

The girl had always lived in California—first in Berkeley, in a white stucco house on a wide street not far from the sea, and then, for the last four and a half months, in the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack south of San Francisco—but now she was going to Utah to live in the desert.

She wrote down her name across the six of clubs and slipped the card out the window.

THE RULES about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it.

There were rules about language, too: Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental Climate, not Morale. There were rules about food: No second helpings except for milk and bread. And books: No books in Japanese. There were rules about religion: No Emperorworshiping Shintos allowed.

We heard a click and then the door swung open and she took off her hat and stepped into the foyer and after three years and five months we were suddenly, finally, home.

We would listen to their music. We would dress just like they did. We would change our names to sound more like theirs. And if our mother called out to us on the street by our real names we would turn away and pretend not to know her. We would never be mistaken for the enemy again!

Twenty-five dollars, we later learned, was the same amount given to criminals on the day they were released from prison.

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

But we never stopped believing that somewhere out there, in some stranger’s backyard, our mother’s rosebush was blossoming madly, wildly, pressing one perfect red flower after another out into the late afternoon light.