When the Emperor was Divine: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Using the first-person plural of “we,” this chapter is written through the dual perspective of the boy and the girl. When the family arrives home after the war, the children notice that the trees seem taller and the rosebush the woman planted in the front yard is no longer there. As they walk towards their house for the first time since returning, the man next door, not the same man who was living there before the war, rakes leaves in his yard and nods to the family. The woman ignores him, making no response back. The children wonder if he is one of the men their mother warned them about, the men who would not be happy to see Japanese people returning to their homes.

At the front door, the woman takes out the key that has been hanging around her neck for the entire time they’ve been away. Once, when the woman thought no one was looking, the boy and the girl had seen her put the key in her mouth and smile with delight. Their mother opens the door. After three years and five months, they are finally home.

The family finds their house in disrepair. The paint is peeling, the floor is littered with broken bottles and empty food cans, and the furniture is all gone. Despite the mess, the children run through the house, yelling “Fire! Help! Wolf!” The woman walks out the back door and stands under the shade of the tree. The boy and the girl think about how they came from a place without any shade, where the only trees were the ones in their dreams.

On the day before the evacuation, a lawyer had come to their house and said that he would take care of their property when the family was gone. But instead he had rented the place to squatters and never sent the family any money. In the upstairs rooms, there are soiled mattresses and old magazines with pictures of naked men and women. The sunroom has been broken into, and the vacuum, the wedding china, and all the family’s valuables are gone. On the wall of one bedroom there are slurs written in red ink. Several months later, the woman gets the money to paint the walls over, but the words stay in the heads of the boy and the girl for a long time after that.

On the first night back, the family all sleeps together in the room at the foot of the stairs. Long and narrow, this room resembled their room in the barracks. All night, the boy and the girl think of the stories they had heard about the people who had went home before them. One man’s house was doused with gasoline and set fire with him inside. The woman makes the children sleep in their clothes because, as she says, “We will not be caught dead in our pajamas.”

In the following weeks, the family eats at the table and listens to the same radio programs that they had listened to before the war. The names of the streets are the same, and the fashions people wear are the same. The boy and the girl tell themselves nothing has changed, that the war had been an interruption and they can move on now. They decide to listen to the music everyone listens to, dress like everyone else, and change their names to sound more like everyone else’s names so that they will never be mistaken for the enemy again.

The war relocation authority had sent each family home with train tickets and twenty-five dollars, which is the same amount given to criminals on the day they’re released from prison. With this money, the woman buys thick mattresses for the boy and the girl to sleep on in the front room—until the night someone throws a whiskey bottle through the window. After that, the children sleep in the back bedroom, the one with the slurs on the walls.

As American soldiers come back from war and tell gruesome stories of the torture they suffered at the hands of Japanese prison guards, the boy and the girl look at themselves in the mirror and see what they think is the face of the enemy. They feel guilty, but tell themselves that all they need to do is behave in order to convince everyone that they are loyal to America. From then on, they avoid their reflections in the mirrors.

The children’s classmates at school are polite, but are no longer friendly, and the boy and the girl keep mostly to themselves. If people whisper behind their backs or call them something unkind, the children pretend not to notice. They keep their heads down and don’t cause any trouble. They speak softly and follow all the rules. If they do something they feel is wrong, like accidently touch another person’s arm, they imagine themselves saying that they are sorry, that they never wanted to touch you, that they’ve always wanted to touch you, that they will never touch you again.

The woman begins looking for work, but every time she applies for a job, the business owners say that they don’t want to upset the other employees or customers by hiring her. She eventually finds a job cleaning the houses of wealthier, white families. The woman tells the boy and the girl that it’s easy work. If they ask you scrub the floors, you get on your hands and knees and scrub.

A telegram soon arrives from the father, saying that he will arrive in a few days. On the day of his arrival, the family waits for him at the station. When the train comes to a stop, a small stooped man steps off. His face is wrinkled, his suit faded, and his head bald. Though the boy and the girl have been waiting for him for years, they don’t know what to do when they see him. The woman pushes them forward to give the man a hug, but they are unable to move because they fear that this man is not their father. Their father gets on his knees and hugs the children, uttering their names, but even then, they still can’t be sure it’s him.

When the father comes home, he wears dentures because he lost all his teeth while detained, and he never sings or reads stories to the boy and the girl like he used to do. He never says a word about the years he has been away, and never talks about politics or how he lost his teeth. But the children are happy he never says anything, as they don’t want to know—they just want to forget.

When he first returns home, the father wanders from room to room, picking up objects in bewilderment, as if he has never seen them before. He is suspicious of everyone, and tells the boy and the girl never to trust others. Small things like a misplaced pen or a dog barking send him into a rage. No one will hire him because his health isn’t good, and because he came from a camp for dangerous enemy aliens. The man spends his days scribbling in notebooks. When he asks the children about their days, he seems to be thinking about something else when they give their answers. They wonder if he is thinking of the woman, about how she is at work cleaning another person’s house. Or maybe he is thinking of the headline in the newspaper he’s reading: “Jap Emperor Repudiates His own Divinity!”

The father begins spending more time in his room. He stops reading the newspaper and his handwriting in his notebook grows smaller and fainter until it disappears altogether. Some days he gets dressed, but never leaves the house. He goes to sleep right after dinner because he “might as well get the day over with.” He sleeps poorly, always dreaming of being locked outside the barracks five minutes past curfew, fearing that he will never get back inside.

In May, when the roses everywhere burst into bloom, the boy and the girl wander the streets looking for their mother’s rosebush. They go to other gardens and inspect other people’s roses, but they never find her rosebush. Even after they give up, they never stop imagining that in some stranger’s backyard, the rosebush is blossoming “madly, wildly.”