(This conversation was originally broadcast on March 15, 2023)
Tom's guest on this archive edition of Midday is the award-winning author, Julie Otsuka. She has published three critically acclaimed novels. Her first, When the Emperor Was Divinewas published in 2002, and over the past 20 years, it has been chosen by more than 60 colleges and universities as a “campus reads” book, in which everyone at those institutions reads and discusses it.
In 2022, that same book was banned by the Muskego-Norway school district in Wisconsin, which deemed it inappropriate for high-school sophomores.
When Tom spoke with Julie Otsuka in March, she was preparing to come to Baltimore to deliver the keynote address at the 2023 Loyola University MD Humanities Symposium. Her March 16 talk was entitled, An American Story: War, Memory and Erasure, in which she talked about her family’s experience in internment camps during the second world war, and the importance of keeping those memories and those important stories alive. The launching point for her talk was her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine.
Julie Otsuka’s second novel is about Japanese “picture brides,” who came to America in the early 20th century to wed men they had never met in person. It’s called The Buddha in the Attic, and it won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her latest novel, published last year, is called The Swimmers. The story concerns a group of people who swim at a community pool regularly, and what happens when that pool develops a crack that no one can seem to explain. It’s also about dementia, and the complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter. And it’s about multitudes more.
The American Library Association awarded it the 2023 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Julie Otsuka is an artist who writes with power, elegance, and compassion, and The Swimmers is a book that many readers have found to be gripping and wondrous in every way.
Julie Otsuka joined Tom on Zoom from New York…
