EUREKA – Julie Otsuka, the author of the award-winning novel When the Emperor was Divine, will read and discuss her work at 7:30 p.m. March 24 in the Cerf Center at Eureka College. A book-signing and reception will follow. Tickets are $5 and may be reserved by calling (309) 467-6420.
Otsuka will be the featured speaker for the college’s 16th annual writing competition for high school students, which takes place earlier that day.
Otsuka received an Asian American Literary Award for her first novel, the 2002 When the Emperor was Divine, which revolves around a Japanese American family in California after Pearl Harbor, their internment during World War II and their return to California after the war, where they face suspicious neighbors, returning American wounded servicemen and stories of the atrocities of the war. Otsukas’s mother, grandparents and uncle were interned during the war.
“I wanted to write a novel about real people… their experience is universal not only for Japanese Americans, but for people of any ethnic group,” Otsuka said. “All throughout history people have been rounded up and sent away into exile. The predicament of the family in my novel… is that of ordinary people caught up in the extraordinary.”    
One critic wrote, “The themes of identity, pride and conflict of loyalties are brilliantly and subtly handled” by Otsuka, whose current project is a novel that continues the exploration of themes found in When the Emperor Was Divine.
Otsuka received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a master’s degree from Columbia University. She received a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, which is awarded to those “who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.”