Julie Otsuka is a Japanese American novelist and former painter known for her evocative, lyrical prose and her autoethnographic approach to historical fiction. Drawing deeply from her family's experiences and Japanese American history, Otsuka has crafted a powerful trilogy of novels that explore identity, memory, displacement, and the emotional legacies of war and immigration.
Born in Palo Alto, California in 1962, Otsuka was raised in a household deeply shaped by the trauma of Japanese internment during World War II. Her father, an aerospace engineer, and her mother, a lab technician, were both of Japanese descent. Her mother, a nisei (second-generation Japanese American), was incarcerated along with Otsuka’s uncle and grandmother in the Topaz Internment Camp in Utah following the issuance of Executive Order 9066. Her grandfather, arrested by the FBI immediately after Pearl Harbor, inspired the father figure in her first novel. These personal family histories profoundly influenced Otsuka's writing, particularly When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), a stark yet poetic portrayal of a Japanese American family’s internment experience during the war.
Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (2011), turns back the clock to the early 20th century to trace the journey of Japanese “picture brides”—women who emigrated to America to marry men they had only seen in photographs. Told in a distinctive first-person plural voice, the novel earned wide acclaim for its innovative narrative structure and poignant depiction of shared female experience and cultural dislocation. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Her third novel, The Swimmers (2022), is a deeply personal and introspective work that began with her 2011 short story “Diem Perdidi,” which centers on a mother suffering from frontotemporal dementia. The novel explores the lives of a group of regulars at a community swimming pool, with special focus on one woman whose gradual mental decline reflects Otsuka’s own experience caring for her mother, who died of the disease in 2015. With its meditative tone and deeply emotional core, The Swimmers was named one of the top ten works of fiction of 2022 by Publishers Weekly and won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Educated at Yale University (BA in Art) and Columbia University (MFA in Writing), Otsuka brings a painter’s eye for detail and composition to her prose. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Albatros Literaturpreis, and the Asian American Literary Award, among others. Critics and scholars alike praise her work for its emotional precision and historical insight, often citing her unique narrative voice and ability to transform individual memory into collective experience. She lives in New York City.