When the Emperor was Divine

Like the Bonsai tree on its cover, this is a small, perfectly formed, carefully tended novel. It follows one Japanese-American family – a mother, her daughter and her son: the father has already been taken away by the FBI, hatless and still wearing his slippers – through their experience of internment during the Second World War. We never get to know their names.

We first meet them when they're almost a normal American family, although already fatherless. The kids drink Coke, pop round to their friends' houses after school. The Evacuation Order has just gone up, and the mother is busy, methodically packing, storing stuff in the basement, burying the silver in the garden, and – because they're not permitted to take family pets with them – disposing of the family menagerie, with what appears to be remarkable dispassion. Her daughter is ten, her son seven when, in spring 1942, they are given a family identification number, and transported from Berkeley, California, and fetch up, eventually, in the Utah desert.

The enduring impression is of endless boredom, and of unthinking petty cruelties, rather than big deliberate ones. The barracks they live in, for instance, are far too hot in summer, far too cold and drafty in winter: and they are only allowed two blankets in the sub-zero temperatures. The mother retreats into herself, the daughter becomes too knowing too young, the son is just bewildered and dreams of his absent father. They follow the rules. Their mother instructs them to keep a low profile, keep to themselves, especially after the war when they return home.

And Julie Otsuka's prose is as careful and controlled as her characters' behaviour. Until the last few pages, that is, when we are finally permitted to understand how it all really feels…