Despite her dementia, a woman named Alice retains some memories of the camp for Japanese-Americans she was incarcerated in during World War II. 

“The number assigned to her family by the government.” “The taste of dust.” “The sound of the wind hissing through the sagebrush.”

These are Alice’s memories of the infamous incarceration camp included in Julie Otsuka’s 2022 novel “The Swimmers.”

Otsuka’s latest novel began much like these fragments of memory: as scraps of paper stowed in the author’s drawer, waiting to surface.

“I’d sketched out a few paragraphs that were set in this underground pool … maybe 15 years ago, while I was finishing up my last novel,” Otsuka recalled in an interview.

After completing her second book, she took out the scenes and started to write.

“I just thought there was something here,” Otsuka said. “But I didn’t think that I would end up also writing about dementia.”

Reviewers praised “The Swimmers,” which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in January, for its seamless movement between individual and choral voices--namely, Alice and the devotees of an underground community pool.

The book begins with the discovery of a crack on the pool floor, which pulls all who see it into a hypnotic spiritual undertow.

At first “no longer than a child’s forearm,” it spreads and multiplies, infecting the swimmers with an indefinable malaise and mirroring the progression of Alice’s memory loss. The descriptions of Alice are partially based on Otsuka’s own mother, who suffered from Pick’s disease and was also an internment camp survivor.

Otsuka said she never expected to revisit the theme of the Japanese-American internment experience in her later work.

“I feel like whatever my starting point is, for some reason World War II and the camps work their way in,” she said. “The war is a ‘silent, pale dark shadow,’ just kind of beneath everything. It just seems like it’s something that just comes up whenever I’m writing. I can’t seem to avoid it, even when I think that I am trying to not write about it head-on.”

WRITING AS REMEMBRANCE

“The Swimmers” is a creative departure for Otsuka, who is perhaps best known for historical fiction. Her first novel, “When the Emperor was Divine” (2002), follows a Japanese-American family sent to an internment camp during World War II.

Her “Buddha in the Attic” (2011) tells the story of turn-of-the-century “picture brides,” who emigrated from Japan to marry men they had never met in the United States. 

Otsuka, 60, said she often writes to make sense of her own family history. Now based in New York City, Otsuka was born in Palo Alto, California, to a Japanese father and Japanese-American mother.

Her father emigrated to the United States from Japan to attend graduate school at Stanford University, and her mother was born in Berkeley, California, to Japanese immigrant parents.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her maternal grandfather was arrested by the FBI as a suspected spy, and her mother, grandmother and uncle were sent to a concentration camp in Topaz, Utah. Her mother was just 11 at the time.

Otsuka recalled her mother regaling her with stories about the “camp” in a 2005 interview with Densho, a Seattle nonprofit that documents the histories of internment survivors and their descendants.

“There are a few anecdotes that I remember her telling to me when I was a kid … and this is why I never thought ‘camp’ was such a terrible place, because the anecdotes were sort of amusing. And she would mention camp … ‘when we were in camp,’ or, ‘we knew these people in camp,’ so I knew about camp, but … it was … just another word in our family vocabulary.”

Though Otsuka started out intending to be a comedic writer, she found she couldn’t get an image out of her head: that of a Japanese woman, much like her grandmother, seeing an evacuation notice in Berkeley for the first time. A professor in her creative writing program at Columbia University encouraged her to write about it.

At first, she said, the story didn’t seem very marketable.

“Twenty years ago, people were not writing historical, quote-unquote ‘ethnic’ fiction.”

But Otsuka felt compelled to write the story--which became “When the Emperor was Divine”--as a “personal labor of love.”

“Because there was a lot of silence in my family--and just in the Japanese-American community in general about what had happened during the war--I think that’s perhaps why I ended up becoming a writer,” Otsuka said. “I felt driven to figure out what had happened. And just beginning with my own family, there was just so much that I didn’t know.”

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the U.S. Army the authority to remove 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes on the U.S. West Coast. Two-thirds of them, like Otsuka’s mother, were American citizens by birth.

Internees were initially held at horse racing tracks and fairgrounds converted into temporary detention sites (euphemistically termed “assembly” and “reception” centers). Later, they were incarcerated at “relocation camps,” which were watched over by guard towers and encircled with barbed wire. The exclusion order was not lifted until 1945.

In 1983, a federal commission determined that the order had been motivated by “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” Internment survivors did not receive an apology from the U.S. government until 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act and issued reparations of $20,000 (2.7 million yen) to each internee.

Feb. 19 marks the annual observance of the Day of Remembrance. Launched as part of the redress movement of the 1970s, it commemorates the signing of Executive Order 9066 and often serves as a modern call to action on behalf of incarcerated individuals.

In New York City, the Day of Remembrance Committee seeks to connect the legacy of internment with the present-day detention of migrants in the United States.

This year’s ceremony drew “parallels between the surveillance, mass incarceration, and deportations of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the experience and treatment of migrants of color arriving in the United States today.”

In February last year, on the 80th anniversary of the order, the Biden administration officially recognized the Day of Remembrance as a national event for the first time.

“That order and the subsequent actions carried out by the Federal Government represent one of the most shameful chapters in our Nation’s history,” the White House said in a statement.

On Jan. 5, 2023, President Joe Biden signed a law to reauthorize funding for the preservation of World War II detention sites and allocated $10 million to promote education about the history of the internment of Japanese-Americans.

For Otsuka, remembrance is not just a recurring theme in her work. It’s a matter of personal urgency as people forget--or refuse to remember--the shame and misery of incarceration.

Years ago, on her book tour for “When the Emperor was Divine,” Otsuka recalled speaking with internment survivors in person. Now, she said, most of those internees are gone--and with them--the history they lived.

“I speak to a lot of young students, and many of them still have not learned anything, or heard even, about the World War II incarceration in their history classes in junior high or high school,” said Otsuka. “I don’t want this story to be forgotten”

Last June, a school district in Muskego, Wisconsin, pulled “When the Emperor was Divine” from its English curriculum. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel obtained emails from the school board committee finding that “there was concern that the novel focused too much on the Japanese-American experience.”

To Otsuka, the intent was clear. “There’s a deliberate attempt to erase some of the more unpleasant aspects of our history,” she said.

More than 100 people showed up to a rally outside Muskego High School, including leaders of local Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) organizations. Community members also launched a petition drive to the Muskego-Norway school board advocating for the restoration of the book. The petition has 362 signatures to date.

“It ended up actually giving me a lot of hope,” Otsuka said. “Because 80 years ago, nobody came to our defense. When those first evacuation notices were put up, people were just silent. Neighbors looked the other way. And I feel like, this time around, there were some really good folks in this town of Muskego who said no, and that meant a lot to me.”

Citing the recent uptick in anti-Asian violence, Otsuka said that the present is a “particularly fraught time for Asian-Americans.”

According to the Stop AAPI Hate National Report published in 2022, almost 11,500 incidents of anti-Asian hate have been reported since 2020. In this context, she added, her work is more relevant than ever.

“That’s another reason that I don’t want this story … to be forgotten, I really don’t. Especially now, I feel like it’s even just more important. Just to fight for the right to be heard, and for our stories to be told.”

Otsuka noted that her books often take on a life of their own, reflecting history in real time. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, “When the Emperor was Divine” could be read as a “cautionary tale” about anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States, she said.

In 2023, it strikes a chord of eerie familiarity.

“With the pandemic and just the sudden surge of anti-Asian hate, it was like I was describing the past all over,” Otsuka said. 

In a similar way, she said, the undercurrent of Japanese-American history in “The Swimmers” may subtly take root in the readers’ subconscious, causing new layers of meaning to surface over time.

“I think the beautiful thing about a work of literature is that it can kind of resonate in subterranean ways that the reader might not even be aware of,” Otsuka said. “Somebody could be reading this book purely just to read about a person with dementia.”

And, yet, like a crack at the bottom of a swimming pool, “war memories are just kind of slipped in very, very quietly … so it somehow gets to the reader, even if that’s not what the reader is expecting to read about in a very direct way,” she said.

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Kat Black is a staff reporter at The Asahi Shimbun’s New York Bureau.