Julie Otsuka's When The Emperor Was Divine

Philip Holland Dr. Aigbedion Third Form English May 29, 2024 Tone as a Window Into Experience Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine chronicles the experience of a nameless Japanese-American family as they are abruptly uprooted from their comfortable life on the west coast and sent to an internment camp in the desert. This ordeal forces upon them a very different existence; they lose all form of control over their lives in the miserable camp where, treated like prisoners, the mood of the novel becomes hopeless, even heartbreaking. However, the tone the narrator uses is not one of emotionality but of factual detachment: sentences are short and to the point, and the third person limited-omniscient perspective maintains a separation between the reader and the …show more content…
simply because we can. We flung open the windows and doors. The smell of the sea blew through the empty windows of the house, and soon the other smell, the smell of people we did not know [...] began to fade away.” (Otsuka, 109) These lines perfectly convey the new tone and mood of the novel. They mark the first point of true freedom for the family, and they are eager to embrace it: their running around the house shows joy in their freedom after so long under confinement. Just like the sea breeze clearing out the old smell of their house, so too does their familiar, free life wash out the sense of seclusion internment brought upon them. The family is ready, for the first time in years, to embrace their experiences instead of hiding from them through distance and memory; they are ready to live. The tone of this paragraph reflects this change. Instead of using simple sentences, the text employs more complex constructions that create a sense of flow for the reader, allowing them to become immersed in the text in a way that was previously not

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