When the Emperor was Divine

Now that we have finished reading the book I wanted to reflect on the ending of the book and how it reflects on the characters and all that they have gone through. Towards the end of the book, the family finally leaves the internment camps and returns to their home. This outcome seems like it would be a happy ending, but like the rest of book, it is just a bleak ending to their already sad story. Their house has clearly been lived in for the past few years, but not by respectful renters but most like by homeless people or drug dealers. The mother was on the ground scrubbing the filth off the ground left by those people. Although they all were excited to go home and finally have the freedom and protection from their own home, but once they get home they don't seem as happy as they had anticipated. They all still sleep in the same room, and the mother doesn't even go looking for her homemade wine bottles; it is as though they are desensitized to feeling any happiness for being back. It doesn't help that their neighbors and the rest of the community are still looking at them as criminals and shunning them to continue the feeling of isolation that they felt back at the camps. And then at last, things seem to turn around when the father comes home, but once again Otsuka turns that little moment of hope into more despair when the father is completely different and traumatized from his experiences in the camps. He is not the same loving, fun, and active father that his children remember him as, but rather he is paranoid and nervous most of the time. Throughout the whole book I felt so sorry and horrible for this family and all those generalized families who went through that same experience of the internment camps. I felt that this family never got a break, and that their future is not hopeful from how Otsuka writes the book. This family will always remember their experience, as will all the families who went through the same thing, Otsuka wants us to have that same haunting memory as those families did, as dreadful and unhopeful the ending is.