Julie Otsuka

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Julie Otsuka (* 15. May 1962 in Palo Alto , California as Julie Otsuka Hideko ) is a multi-award winning American writer .

Life

Julie Otsuka was born in Palo Alto and grew up in Palos Verdes from the age of nine . Her father worked as electronics - engineer in the aerospace industry, her mother was a housewife and had worked as a lab technician to the birth of children. Both parents were of Japanese descent; the father immigrated from Japan as a student in 1950; the mother was born in California to Japanese immigrants. Otsuka has two younger brothers, including Michael Otsuka , who has been a philosophy professor at the London School of Economics since 2013 . After graduating from Rolling Hills High School in 1980, she studied art at Yale University , where she received her bachelor's degree in 1984 . She then lived with a friend for a year in West Berlin , where she painted, attended language courses in German at the Goethe Institute and graduated with a Goethe certificate . After returning to the USA, she worked as a waitress in New Haven for a year and put together an application portfolio for admission to an art college. In September 1986 she began a graduate course in art at Indiana University in Bloomington (Indiana) , which she dropped out after three months because she felt unable to cope with the pressure to perform and the criticism of her work. In January 1987 she went to New York , took a course in word processing and initially worked for a temporary employment agency as an IT typist in the marketing department of the construction company Lehrer McGovern Bovis (now part of the Lend Lease Group ). After a few months she was taken on as an employee there. Since she wanted to start painting again, she agreed with her employer that she could work part-time in the evenings to take care of the day's arrears after normal working hours. During the day she attended the private art school New York Studio School . After a few years she learned desktop publishing and designed the layout for offer folders, but kept the evening working hours. She worked for this company, most recently as a freelancer, until 2001 when the sale of her first book enabled her to live as a freelance writer.

Over time, Otsuka began to have paralyzing self-doubts about her painting skills, which ultimately made it impossible for her to work artistically. In 1989 she decided to give up painting for good. Depressed by the experience of her failure, she spent the mornings on long walks and the afternoons in a café reading for hours, as she found immersing herself in strange stories relieving and comforting. She got into writing herself through small, funny sketches that she wrote for her boyfriend at the time. In 1992, at the age of thirty, she began attending creative writing workshops in the Writer's Studio and writing humorous short stories. With these texts, she successfully applied for graduate studies at Columbia University in 1994 , which she completed in 1999 with a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing . During her studies, she was encouraged by her lecturer Maureen Howard to continue working on texts about the time of the Second World War , which she initially felt as "aberration". Her graduation thesis was the first parts of her debut novel, "the first piece of 'serious' literature I have ever written." Otsuka, who, according to her own assessment, works very slowly, needed another two years to finish the manuscript in June 2001. Her literary agent offered it to a publisher on Fridays, which accepted it the following Monday.

Julie Otsuka lives in the Morningside Heights district of Manhattan . When she is not on her way to readings or lectures, she follows a fixed work rhythm: in the mornings she researches, reads sources and takes notes. Every afternoon she visits her regular café, the Hungarian Pastry Shop , where she has her permanent place, initially getting in the mood for reading and then handwritten her texts on paper, which she transfers to the computer at home in the evening.

plant

In 2002, Otsuka's first novel When the Emperor Was Divine was published , which has been translated into eleven languages. In it, she tells how an economically successful, well-integrated middle-class Japanese family of American descent was traumatized and destroyed by the internment of Japanese-born Americans during World War II. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor , the father is arrested and locked in a camp for "enemy foreigners"; the mother, ten-year-old daughter, and seven-year-old son had to leave their Berkeley home in late April 1942 and were held under primitive conditions in a barrack camp in the Utah desert for the next three and a half years . After the end of the war, the family is reunited, but the neighbors avoid them, their property has been ransacked, their house ransacked, the severely traumatized father is unable to work and the mother has to support the family with cleaning work.

The general validity of their experience of displacement is emphasized by the fact that the main characters are not given names, but only appear as “the woman”, “the girl”, “the boy”, “the father” and are initially not recognizable as belonging to a certain ethnic group . The narrative perspective changes from chapter to chapter between the family members: the first chapter of the novel describes the preparations for departure, mainly from the perspective of the mother, the second the journey to the camp from the perspective of the daughter and the third the stay in the camp from the perspective of the son . The fourth chapter describes the return home from the common point of view of the boy and the girl, while the fifth and final chapter, an angry inner monologue of the father in the form of an ironic “confession”, shows his emotional injuries. This formal structure goes back to the fact that the first two chapters were originally conceived as independent narratives.

The outline of the plot and individual details are taken from Otsuka's own family history: Her maternal grandfather was imprisoned during the war under suspicion of espionage, her grandmother, her mother and her uncle were interned in the camp in Topaz, Utah. According to her own statement, she did not rely on family memories when writing the novel, but on an intensive study of numerous sources and documents. Visual details were especially important to her.

Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic , published in 2011, forms the prehistory to a certain extent. Written throughout in the we-form, it is a kind of collective biography of a group of young Japanese women who travel to the USA as picture brides after the First World War to enter into arranged marriages with unknown men. Beginning with the crossing, he describes how they are confronted with the material and emotional hardships of being an immigrant and ends with their internment in World War II. The novel has been translated into 22 languages. The German translation by Katja Scholtz was published by Mare Verlag under the title Wof wir träumten .

Honors and awards (selection)

Works

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Tom Ikeda: Julie Otsuka Interview for Densho Visual History Collection, May 2, 2005; Transcript, accessed July 4, 2018
  2. ↑ Michael Otsuka's website
  3. ↑ a b c d Renee H. Shea: The Urgency of Knowing: A Profile of Julie Otsuka. In: Poets & Writers, September / October 2011, accessed July 4, 2018
  4. ↑ a b c Astri von Arbin Ahlander: Julie Otsuka. Interview for The Days of Yore . June 11, 2012, accessed July 4, 2018
  5. ^ Sacramento State One Book Program - About the Author ( September 13, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Terry Hong: Looking Back at a Family's Internment. at Asianweek.com, October 24, 2003 (PDF, 919 kB, English), accessed on July 4, 2018
  7. ↑ a b Cindy Yoon: 'When the Emperor was Divine' ... and When Japanese Americans Were Rounded Up . Interview with Julie Otsuka on asiasociety.org, accessed July 4, 2018
  8. ↑ a b An interview with Julie Otsuka on www.bookbrowse.com, accessed July 4, 2018
  9. ↑ About Julie Otsuka at www.julieotsuka.com, accessed July 3, 2018
  10. ↑ a b Tricia Vanderhoof: Mondays with Authors: Julie Otsuka explores impact of WWII Japanese internment camps on eu.mycentraljersey.com, April 17, 2017, accessed July 4, 2018
  11. ↑ a b Julie Otsuka . Conversation with Josephine Reed for the Art Works podcast of the National Endowment for the Arts , July 10, 2014, accessed July 4, 2018
  12. ↑ Julie Otsuka: Julie Otsuka on Her Family's Wartime Internment In Topaz, Utah. In: Newsweek , October 15, 2012, accessed July 3, 2018
  13. ↑ Jane Ciabattari: Julie Otsuka Talks About New Novel, The Buddha in the Attic . In: Daily Beast , September 16, 2011, accessed July 3, 2018
  14. ^ Alan Yuhas: Six Questions for Julie Otsuka . In: Browsings. The Harper's Blog , June 13, 2012, accessed July 3, 2018
  15. ↑ Alex Awards 2003
  16. ↑ http://www.gf.org/fellows/11058-julie-otsuka ( Memento from June 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  17. ^ National Book Awards - 2011
  18. ^ Past Winners of the David J. Langum Sr. Prizes ( Memento June 30, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  19. ^ Past Winners & Finalists
  20. ↑ American Academy of Arts and Letters - Awards
  21. ^ Tous les Prix Fémina étranger
  22. ↑ Albatros 2014
personal data
SURNAME Otsuka, Julie
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1962
PLACE OF BIRTH Palo Alto , California, United States