When the Emperor Was Divine Literary Elements

Historical fiction

The action takes place in America during the Second World War and a few years after it.

The action is told from three different perspectives, namely the girl, the mother, and the boy. In all three cases, the action is told from a limited first person perspective.

Depressing, tragic, hopeful

The protagonists are the Asian family and the antagonist is the American government.

The major conflict is between the Asian community and the American government that doesn’t trust the Asian community.

The story reaches its climax when the father returns home.

After the woman kills the dog, she throws away her once stained white gloves. After her adventures during the day, the gloves became impossible to use anymore. The stains foreshadow how the woman and other people just like her will never be able to forget the things they will go through. Just like a stain, the impression will remain forever and will affect the lives of those people.

When the woman tells her children that they will go on a fun trip, it is an understatement because the children and the woman will end up losing their home and being ‘’deported’’ to a new place.

In the first chapter, the girl listens to one song, her favorite song entitled Don’t fence me in. The title of the song and the message it transmits alludes to the feelings the Japanese experienced during their forced deportation.

One of the most important scenes in the novel is when the mother eats dinner with her two children and her daughter, who is ten years old, looks at her reflection in the spoon she is eating with. She then asks her mother if she is beautiful and even if her mother tries to reassure her that she is, the daughter refuses to believe her mother. The idea transmitted through this image, of a ten-year old girl dissatisfied with her physical appearance is that of a nation born in a country that did not accepted them. Because of this, the girl was inclined to believe that she was not beautiful and that she did not fit in in the country she was born in.

The faith the Japanese people had in the American seems paradoxical when considers all the things they had to go through. For example, the woman still continues to believe that the government will do the right thing even if the government was the one who decided that her husband was dangerous and considered it necessary to incarcerate him for no apparent reason.

A parallel is drawn between the bird the woman sets free in the first chapter and the feelings the Japanese will experience when they will be finally permitted to return home. The bird, even though it should have flown away as soon as it could, decided to return and peck on the window, hoping to be put once more in the safe environment it stayed until then. In a similar fashion, when the Japanese were permitted to return home, many were reluctant to leave behind the sense of stability they knew into the camps, in exchanged for the freedom they had before.

The woman and her two children are used in the novel in a metonymic sense to make reference to the other Japanese people that had to suffer during the Second World War. The author left the main characters unknown on purpose to further emphasize this idea and to create a sense of universality.

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