https://www.julieotsuka.com
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University, she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her MFA from Columbia. She is a recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Otsuka’s novels include When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf, 2002) and The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf, 2011). Her fiction has been published in Granta, Harper’s, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Short Stories 2012, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012, and has been read aloud on PRI’s “Selected Shorts” and BBC Radio 4’s “Book at Bedtime.” She lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.
Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine is the Common Read for the University of South Alabama this year. I attended Otsuka’s reading in the ballroom where a slideshow on the wall behind her sifted through photographs of Japanese Americans on their way to internment camps during World War II—barbed wire, trains, and families together—waiting. Otsuka’s bold, poetic writing illuminates the impactful crimes against Japanese American citizens while offering us an inside view of the experience.
Amy Patterson: At Negative Capability Press, many of our interviews are conducted remotely. If you could choose any place for our discussion, where would we be and why?
Julie Otsuka: The Hungarian Pastry Shop, on Amsterdam Ave. and 111th Street in NYC. It’s my favorite place in the world. I’ve been going there almost every day to write for more than 25 years. It’s special—no wifi, no outlets, no music, and the coffee refills are endless and free.
AP: I like the list of all that the shop doesn’t offer. What an effective way to minimize distractions.
Initially, your writing focused on comedic work. How did you come then to write your first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, that tells the story of a fictionalized family enduring the Japanese internment camps?
JO: I began the first chapter of Emperor, ‘Evacuation Order No. 9,’ as a short story, which I wrote during my second year in the fiction MFA program at Columbia. It seemed to come out of nowhere—I’d never written a piece of ‘serious’ fiction before. Up until then I’d only written humorous short stories. My thesis advisor, Maureen Howard, encouraged me to keep writing about the family in ‘Evacuation.’ If it hadn’t been for her, I probably would have written the one short story, then returned to my ‘real’ work, which—or so it seemed at the time—was the writing of comedy. I do feel, however, that there is a bit of humor in everything I write.
AP: When it came time to publish the book, there was some question as to whether the final of five chapters should be included. Would you tell us about your decision to keep it and at what risk?
JO: The editors both in the U.K. and the U.S. were worried that the last chapter was too angry in tone, compared to the rest of the novel, and that this might put off the reader. I was getting a lot of pressure to rewrite the last chapter and lighten up the tone, but in the end I decided that it wouldn’t be my novel without that anger there, and the editors let me keep the ending the way I’d written it. And I’m so glad that I did. I get more comments about that last chapter than any other chapter in the book.
AP: You have family members who suffered through internment camps. How much did you draw from their experience, and what advice might you have for those of us writing about family histories?
JO: The novel very closely follows the arc of my own family’s experience in the camps. My grandfather, like the father in the book, was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed and spent several years in camps run by the Dept. of Justice for ‘dangerous enemy aliens.’ And my mother, her brother, and my grandmother, who all lived in Berkeley, were sent to Topaz, Utah, just like the family in the novel.
The personalities of the characters in the novel, however, are totally fictional and don’t resemble their real-life counterparts.
My advice would be: ask your questions now, don’t put them off until later. I wish I’d begun asking my mother about her past much earlier. Because when I was finally ready to write the novel and to ask away, she was already in the early stages of dementia.
AP: What are your thoughts on writing with sound and repetition in your second novel, The Buddha in the Attic?
JO: I was obsessed with the rhythm of the language while writing Buddha. I saw the rhythmic patterns as being a sort of secret underground grid that holds the whole novel together. You may not be aware of it as you’re reading, but the rhythms of the sentences are (hopefully) propelling you forward, just as much as the narrative.
AP: During a recent visit to the University of South Alabama, you related a story about a Japanese American living in Mobile, Alabama during World War II. Would you share this story with us?
JO: Years ago, in New Haven, Connecticut, I waitressed with a woman named Kathy Sawada. When I found out I was coming to Mobile I contacted her, and she put me in touch with her cousin, George Sawada, who told me about his and Kathy’s grandfather, Kosaku Sawada. Kosaku Sawada was an immigrant from Japan who came to Mobile in 1910. In 1915, he opened the Overlook Nurseries in Mobile. He was known locally as Mr. Camellia, for the beautiful flowers that he bred and grew and was quite successful (the Sawada Winter Garden at the Mobile Botanical Gardens is named in his honor)
He believed very strongly in two things—being a great neighbor, and loving your community—and was known for his generosity.
Right after the beginning of WWII, Mr. Sawada’s nursery was scheduled to be seized and sold at auction by the local government. And according to family legend, when the Feds showed up at the nursery to shut it down, they were met by several of the local growers—armed white men with shotguns—who were standing guard at the gate. They refused to let the Feds in and pleaded with them to let Mr. Sawada keep his nursery. The nursery was allowed to remain open, and remained in business for many more years. It recently closed, after an almost hundred-year run, in 2013.
AP: I would imagine that Mr. Sawada’s story is uniquely positive among the many histories that are shared with you.
I found it striking to learn that your experience as a painter influenced your writing. Would you describe how and comment on the potential inspiration that outside interests bring to writing?
JO: I find the processes of painting and writing very similar. When I was painting, I would loosely sketch out a scene on the canvas, working all over the rectangle, rather than fixating on a single detail in the corner. I’d try to bring up the image slowly. When I’m writing a paragraph, I do the same thing. I loosely sketch out a scene and bring it into focus slowly. The specificity of the details—that comes last.
Also, I think very visually. I often have to see a scene in my head before I can begin to describe it on the page. Sometimes I feel like my brain is a camera, just following a character around.
I think many writers come to writing from a visual background, I’m not sure why.
AP: What does your research process look like, particularly in regard to writing historical fiction?
JO: I do a lot of research first, a ton. I read history books, oral histories, look at old newspapers, photographs, artwork, diaries, letters, whatever I can find. I take voluminous notes in my notebooks, but probably end up using 2% of what I’ve learned. But I need to know that I fully understand the world that I want to write about before I actually begin to write.
AP: What does a typical writing day look like for you, and what helps you to stay committed?
JO: I spend most of the morning at home, in my apartment, taking notes and typing up the most recent edits I’ve made (usually by hand) the night before—at the Hungarian Pastry Shop—on the most recent printed-out version of the manuscript. In the afternoon I either go to the gym or for a walk and run errands, etc. In the early evening I go to the pastry shop and work for 2 or 3 hours. The Hungarian is where I get most of my actual writing done.
I love language, sentences, the sound of words, trying to tell a story, painting a picture, so it’s not hard to stay committed. I’m very obsessed with process, and I like making things. What’s hard is not writing. I start to feel antsy if I haven’t written for a few days. I love the state of ‘flow’ that you can enter into while writing, or doing any sort of work that you love. It may be a chemical thing in the brain, I don’t know.
Also, I’m a tortoise by nature—I take the long view, and tend to work very slowly. Things will hopefully add up, but it may take years.
AP: Thank you for sharing your process. I hope you visit Mobile again soon.