With regard to emotions, Otsuka’s style is most definitely minimalist. It is minimalist-styled because it needs to be. It needs to be because of the subject content of the real-life events that the story follows. If emotion is included in the family’s perspective, then suddenly, what the United States government is doing becomes unquestionably wrong and abhorrent. Since what the Government is doing is for ‘their own good’ and for ‘their safety,’ there is no need for emotion to be thrown into the story because there is nothing upsetting happening in this novel. This is the technique Otsuka uses to convey the insidious nature of the Government and how they took something inherently wrong, put a spin on it, dressed it up a little bit, and CONVINCED/REASSURED everyone (including themselves) that what they were doing was beneficial for everyone. When reality sets in for the family: the fact that they have been unjustly uprooted from their homes, had their father taken away from them, had just about all their possessions taken away from them and brought into captivity like common criminals; once the emotions took hold of them like it MUST have when it actually happened in the 1940s, when the tears begin to flow, accompanied with sorrow and pain and loss and distress and misery, that’s when it becomes transparently obvious that what the indignant and always good-intentioned Government is doing IS WRONG; BUT! what the Government is doing is just fine and for the Japanese people’s own good, so there’s no room and no need for emotion in this novel.

Push was a novel in which the author wrote with a certain desired effect: to shock and appall the reader, probably hoping to raise awareness and to shed some light on certain aspects of life. Emotion NEEDED to be in that novel and leak out of each character to make it work.

Along with precisely how awful it was to be sent into internment camps, the Government actually was able to make things worse and poured salt on wounds by trying to sell something to the Japanese that told them ‘all of this’ was ‘for your own good.’ Otsuka is trying to do two separate things: tell a story that is unjust in and of itself and show the angle the Government took in justifying its actions. By writing with the ‘muted’ and ‘concealed’ emotion Otsuka accomplishes her goal in conveying how the Government took the insult a few steps further.