The Swimmers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Background

Authorial Context: Autobiographical Features in Fiction

Julie Otsuka was born in 1962 in California. Her parents were first and second-generation Japanese Americans. Otsuka’s cultural background and the experiences of her family during and after World War II influenced her first two novels, When the Emperor was Divine and The Buddha in the Attic, which are considered historical fiction. The Swimmers, however, aligns much more closely with the details of her personal life, blurring the lines between novel and memoir, fiction and non-fiction.

Like Alice’s daughter in The Swimmers, Otsuka has two brothers. Her father was an aerospace engineer. Her mother, like Alice, worked as a lab technician. Otsuka’s grandfather, who worked for a Japanese-owned mercantile company, was arrested by the FBI the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. On suspicion of being a spy for Japan and considered an enemy, he was sent to a series of detention camps run by the US Department of Justice. Otsuka reports he returned home after the war a changed man. Otsuka’s mother, grandmother, and uncle spent three years in a detention camp during the war. Memories of these experiences stayed with Otsuka’s mother through the majority of the time she lived with dementia, even as most memories from later in her life faded.

Otsuka’s mother, like Alice in the novel, was diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a rare subtype of frontotemporal dementia. Caring for her became too difficult for her family, and she was moved into a nursing home. Otsuka was profoundly impacted by watching her mother go through a slow and painful decline until she died in 2015.

Otsuka became a recreational swimmer in her mid-thirties. She was struck by the fanatical devotion of the community of swimmers and fascinated by the locker room culture. As she explored this subculture while writing the first two sections of The Swimmers, Otsuka began to see a connection between this and an earlier standalone piece about her mother’s dementia, which became Part 3 of the novel.

Historical Context: World War II Detention Camps and Japanese American Families

In The Swimmers, Alice retains memories of being sent with her family to detention camps during World War II, long after many other memories have been lost to dementia. In Part 3, Otsuka writes of Alice:

She remembers the number assigned to her family by the government right after the start of the war. 13611. She remembers being sent away to the desert with her mother and brother during the fifth month of that war and taking her first ride on a train. She remembers the day they came home. September 9, 1945 (79).

While the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II is not a major theme in The Swimmers, given the novel’s autobiographical elements, the respective experiences of Otsuka’s family are relevant. An awareness of what they went through and the historical context supports a more thorough understanding of Alice’s character and experiences within the novel.

On December 7, 1941, the US’s formal entry into World War II was triggered by an attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese military. Subsequently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized an executive order that led to the forcible relocation and incarceration of over 125,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans. At this point, many leaders in Japanese American communities were already in custody, having been arrested immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack. This was the fate of Otsuka’s grandfather and of Alice’s father in The Swimmers.

After being sent first to temporary camps called Civilian Assembly Centers, most Japanese Americans were sent to more permanent facilities, then known as Relocation Centers. One such center was located in Topaz, New Mexico, where Otsuka’s mother, uncle, and grandmother were incarcerated for three years. The novel’s narrator refers to Alice being “sent away to the desert” and telling “stories about ‘camp’” (79, 159). The camp at Topaz was open from September 1942 through October 1945.

Incarceration of Japanese Americans was presented to the public as a necessary security measure and was popularly supported at the time according to opinion polls. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the program. Pressure from the Japanese American Citizens League in the 1970s led President Jimmy Carter to open a new investigation into the government’s actions toward Japanese Americans during the war. The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians determined there was little evidence of a security threat posed by people of Japanese descent and that the incarceration program was a result of war hysteria, racism, and poor government leadership. At the recommendation of the Commission that the government pay reparations, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 officially apologized and authorized payments to former detainees who were still alive.

Though the phrase “internment camps” has long been used to label the detention centers where Japanese Americans were held, many now consider this a euphemism and urge the use of more accountable terms like “concentration camps.” In a book about the camp at Topaz, the Topaz Museum Board says it is most accurate to use the terms “detention camp” or “concentration camp” and “prisoners” or “internees.”