Word: otsuka
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...desire to live like a manga character gave rise to "maid cafés," staffed by waitresses dressed in extreme French-maid outfits. The possibility that women might want a tearoom of their own prompted a group led by Yoko Otsuka, 29, a pleasantly bookish young woman, to create Swallowtail, Tokyo's first butler café. Since Swallowtail opened last March, customers have lined up for reservations. The café tripled its space in October, but tables are still booked solid. The most ardent customers come daily and might never leave if Otsuka hadn't put an 80-minute limit on reservations...
...easy to see why. Otsuka has planned every detail of the café, from the two months of training would-be butlers undergo to the grandfather clock by the fireplace to the leather volumes of obscure poetry (by that famous Victorian bard, William Allingham) that adorn the shelves. "There's no place like this, so we had to make it from our imagination," says Otsuka. It doesn't hurt that the food is surprisingly good, prepared with the help of Paul Okada, a hospitality consultant who spent 12 years as the food-and-beverage director at the Four Seasons Tokyo...
Novels about the discrimination suffered by Asians in America tend to be melodramatic affairs calculated to get readers reaching for tissues rather than insight. Julie Otsuka's first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, is a crisp departure from the Asian-American sobfest. Otsuka's tale of the disintegration of a Japanese-American family during World War II offers a powerful indictment of government-sponsored paranoia that has implications for today's U.S. war on terror...
...book's backdrop?the injustices suffered by Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during the war?is familiar material. But Otsuka, through various devices such as the use of characters without names, manages to make universal the psychological torment of wartime prejudice without wallowing in sentimentality. Starting with the arrest of the father of the clan in a midnight FBI raid, Otsuka spins out the story from the perspective of each family member. First, the characters lose their freedom as they are trucked off to a camp in desolate Utah. Ultimately, they lose their identity, returning to their vandalized home...
...Threading together deceptively simple details of prison life, Otsuka describes the tightrope that the characters must tread between loyalty to their adopted country, loyalty to family and loyalty to race. It is a balancing act rigged to end in alienation: they are doomed to demonization simply by being Japanese. As the civil liberties of Middle Eastern immigrants in today's America are eroded by the war on terror, When the Emperor Was Divine serves as a cautionary reminder of the damage governments inflict when they indiscriminately punish the innocent in the name of national security...