Why Nameless Characters?
One of the first things that stood out to me while reading the first section of When the Emperor was Divine was the decision of the author, Julie Otsuka, to omit the names of the characters, simply addressing them as "the woman," "the girl," or "the boy." There are plenty of reasons why Otsuka may have made this decision, and ultimately, we will never know without her outright explanation. Nevertheless, Otsuka's decision is a unique one, and one that most definitely was meant to serve a greater purpose in the understanding of the novel. Thus, my goal in this blog is to speculate as why Otsuka may have made such a radical literary move...
One possible reason for this decision is to take a step towards presenting the characters of the novel through the lens of American society. The Japanese population was not seen for their individual identities by the majority of the American people, seeing them instead as mere members of a threatening race. Despite the fact that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was only orchestrated and even supported by a subset of the Japanese population, leaving most Japanese-Americans uninvolved and often against the attacks, the American government and society as a whole saw every Japanese-American as an enemy. The nation was at war with Japan the political state, not Japan the ethnic origin of many American citizens, but many failed to differentiate the two. Thus, the Japanese were not seen as real people with real families and real, significant lives, but instead as political threats to American domestic security, justifying Otsuka's move.
Another possibility is that Otsuka was attempting to generalize the experience of the characters in the story to represent the greater experience shared by the hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in camps. Without names, the disheartening story of the mother, daughter, and son stands for the story of all Japanese-Americans who were shipped away, allowing readers to avoid immense emotional connection with specific characters and see the greater picture: It wasn't this one family, hundreds of thousands of lives were halted by Executive Order 9066.
I think this is a great blog post Ben. I really like how you discuss the namelessness being a device to allow the characters to be seen as a greater representation of Japanese Americans at the time. Otsuka is writing a fictional story after all, but in doing so she is trying to represent a historical event accurately. Thus by not using names, like you said, she is not telling the story of one family by of 100 thousand families instead. Making her book more appealing and more multifaceted as it no longer appears exclusively as a fictional story but as a historical book that can be used to help people understand the events of the 40s around Japanese interment.
ReplyDeleteThis is some excellent analysis Ben. A name serves so many purposes for a character (identification, development, etc.) that it is quite fascinating why Otsuka elected to omit them from her novel's principal characters. I agree completely that the namelessness serves as a demonstration of the American view of those with Japanese ancestry. Names are only given to people or things with a unique identity, for whom we feel some form of care, and Japanese-Americans were certainly not unique to or cared for by the American population. I also think your point about the flexibility of the namelessness is a good one, as it demonstrates the universality of these characters' experiences. Great post!
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