Julie Otsuka on writing When the Emperor Was Divine

Julie Otsuka: I feel like the topic chose me. I feel like the book snuck up on me. I actually began the novel as a short story. I wrote the first chapter of the book when I was a student at Columbia in workshop and up until then I had written only comedy, and this was the first piece of serious fiction that I’d ever written, and it seemed to come from nowhere, and so I wrote it just to get it out of my system and then I thought I would return to my real work, which was the writing of comedy. So I didn’t know it was the first chapter of something that would grow to be much larger, but then I was just very compelled by this family, by their situation, by the emotions that I felt while writing about this topic. I think it was something that, in my own family at least, was very suppressed and not really talked about, which I think is typical of many Japanese American families who went through that—through the war—just to remain silent about their experience. So I think it was something that I needed to explore for myself in order to understand my mother better and why she was the way she was.