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.