Julie Otsuka

A novel written by Julie Otsuka in 2002 describing a Japanese American family that was put into an internment camp in the second World War. The novel follows a family made up of a mother, her two children and their father who was incarcerated and whose location is unknown until his return after the war. The novel depicts the struggle of Japanese Americans at the time and the unimaginable life conditions that these people suffered during and after the internment period. The first three chapters are told in the perspective of the mother, the eleven-year-old daughter and the eight-year-old son. The fourth chapter is told through a "we" perspective that is an attempt to articulate the struggle to Japanese Americans as a whole and the fifth giving the perspective of the family's father.

After graduating from high school, Otsuka attended Yale University, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. She later graduated from Columbia University with a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1999. Her debut novel When the Emperor was Divine dealt with Japanese American internment during World War II. It was published in 2002 by Alfred A. Knopf. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011), is about Japanese picture brides.

Otsuka was born in 1962, in Palo Alto, California. Her father worked as an aerospace engineer, while her mother worked as a lab technician before she gave birth to Otsuka. Both of her parents were of Japanese descent, with her father being an issei and her mother being a nisei. At the age of nine, her family moved to Palos Verdes, California. She has two brothers, one of whom, Michael Otsuka, is currently teaching at the London School of Economics.