nwasianweekly.com
November 1, 2003

Join the Northwest Asian Weekly for its second-annual Rainbow Bookfest: Celebrating Authors of Color at Union Station, Fifth Avenue and Jackson Street in Seattle, on April 24, 2004. This year’s event will feature a poetry slam.

A quick look at books

When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka. Published by Anchor Books, 2002.

Julie Otsuka’s lean, stylish and unsentimental novel describes the surreal tragedies that surrounded the lives consumed by the U.S. government’s 1942 decision to order Japanese Americans into internment camps.

The book opens as a family is prepares for a trip on a train. The man of the house has been taken away. No matter where she goes, the wife and mother of two young children sees the notice posted, ordering her family to leave their home.

In Emperor, Otsuka peels away the rhetoric of politics to reveal the internal turmoil that the individual is left with when facing political realities. A young boy wonders how his father could have been taken away in his slippers. A mother must make decisions quickly: what to do with the family dog, the silver and the china; how to save their home while they are gone. Intimate details spill out in psychological slow motion, like steady footsteps heard on a quiet street. As with the actual people on whose lives the novel is based, the family is stripped of all personal identity — the characters remain nameless throughout.

The events in the novelist’s first work are loosely based on her own family’s life. Her grandfather was sent to a series of camps run by the Department of Justice. Her mother was interned in Topaz, Utah. When helping her grandmother move, Otsuka found letters and postcards that had been sent to her grandmother during the war. They struck a chord inside her. Emperor has garnered critical literary success, and is a rarity as few works of fiction have emerged from the internment thus far. What has been published until now has mostly been children’s books or works of non-fiction.

The writer describes herself as an artist-turned-writer. Emperor began as a short story and was originally titled “Evacuation Order No. 19.”

She explains in one interview that Ernest Hemingway inspires her writing. If Hemingway stands as master to some of literature’s longest sentences, Otsuka could be said to be a youthful commander of the spare phrase. She writes, “In the beginning, the boy thought he saw his father everywhere. Outside the latrines. Underneath the showers. Leaning against the barracks doorways. Playing go with the other men in their floppy hats ...”

Although it is her first novel, Otsuka does not wrestle with language. Her well-crafted prose illumines emotional truths and political reality.

Paris in Mind: Three Centuries of Americans Writing about Paris, by Jennifer Lee. Published by Vantage Departures, 2003.

If there were some way to definitively discover the number, I am sure I would discover that Paris has inspired more writing than any other city on Earth. Lee, who has also edited Martial Arts are Not Just for Kicking Butt and 2sexE: Urban Tales of Love, Liberty and the Pursuit of Gettin’ It On, has turned her attention to the City of Light as the truest lover does — fascinated by every aspect of the beloved. In this case, it is a place instead of a person.

Essays, letters, excerpts from books, articles and journal entries are divided into four chapters: “Love,” “Food,” “The Art of Living” and “Tourism.” Lee reproduces some of the most famous writings on the subject, like excerpts from Ernest Hemingway, Anais Nin, Edith Wharton and M.F.K. Fisher, alongside newcomers David Sedaris and Patric Kuh.

Paris in Mind reads equally well as a literary journey, a historical review, a cultural exploration and a travelogue. I found this collection to be not only inspired but also an extraordinary experience of fine writing and thought. On the bus one morning, I read Gertrude Stein while rolling across a bridge of Lake Union, and, later, positively inhaled Thomas Jefferson’s essay on the early days of the French Revolution.

Reading Paris has led me to a new level with my own reading, as if the grand nature of the writers’ works had suddenly begun to inhabit my own mind. Lee’s thoughtful notes at the beginning of each author’s work also help to thread the needle of literary history with insight and freshness.

The editor’s enthusiasm for the place, the writing and the writers themselves compounds the pleasure between 260 or so pages like a fruit-filled layer cake. I found out that a bookstore I used to pass by every day when I lived in Berkeley had a namesake in Paris. In another author introduction, Lee discusses the fact that Benjamin Franklin went to Paris to help fund the American Revolution.

A kind of honors course between slim pink and sepia covers, the youthful Asian American editor’s Paris calls out to all the senses — and leads you straight to more adventures, literary and otherwise, if you want to go there.

Ann-Marie Stillion can be reached at annmarie@nwasianweekly.com.