The Buddha in the Attic

By: Julie Otsuka

Narrated by: Samantha Quan, Carrington MacDuffie

Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award


Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” —The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.

Beautiful and intricate, poetic narrative

A beautiful rhizomatic litany of the complexity of the many experiences that often get lost when we are given "clean" narrative. I felt the forgotten and invisible summoned by this writing. Reading other reviews, I see others did not enjoy this. That is precisely the problem with lost histories we must work to relocate and commemorate. I will listen to this repeatedly and seek to think of my own ancestors in the same complex manner. Thank you for this work.

More A List Than A Novel

I was overall disappointed by this book believing that it would develop the story/character of young a Japanese immigrant bride coming to the US in the early 20th C. But the narrator uses the “royal we” in a sense lumping all the young brides into one continuum of existence within the context of the hardships of cultural estrangement, little to no personal freedoms, and enormous physical hardships.

I appreciate how difficult these young women’s lives were. But the book is more like a nonfiction essay than historical fiction in which the audience gets involved with the lives of characters as they endure.

The Men They Married

“Because the only way to resist, our husbands had taught us, was by not resisting.”
― Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic

I read entirely too much white male fiction. I know this. It is familiar and available. Abundant even. It is everywhere. So, I'm trying to reach beyond my normal boundaries. Read more minority voices, listen to another story. Otherwise, what good is fiction?

Julie Otsuka's little novella was quick. It checks in at 124 pages or so. But it sticks with you. It carries you*. It doesn't have one narrator, but a chorus of Japanese woman who immigrated to America in the early 20th century as mail-order brides for Japanese laborers in California. She follows this beautiful and tragic chorus of woman through a new country, a new culture, new husbands, work, loneliness, work, marriage, work, children, work, racism, and eventually the FDR's Japanese Concentration Camps of WWII (Executive Order 9066).

Newly married, living in Utah, I traveled to Delta, Utah with my wife and walked around the Topaz War Relocation Center. It was haunting. The images of dust and isolation came back to me 25-years-later as I read this book. It was written in 2011, but seems to warn us against the fear we seem to always have of the other (Mexicans, Muslims, Japanese, blacks, etc). We cage them because we don't recognize they are us. One of the lines that struck me the most from this short book was on page 124. It was the mayor of a California town speaking after the Japanese have been hauled away. Some of the words, however, came from a speech by Donald Rumsfeld in October of 2001 (before Guantanamo was a household word, before kids in cages, before black sites, and waterboarding became associated with America):

"There will be some things that people will see," he tells us. "And there will be some things that people won't see. These things happen. And life goes on."

Certainly, life will go on, but Otsuka' haunting prose; her beautiful narrative mantras; the pulsing rhythm of her Japanese chorus of women; her FPP anonymous narrators -- will all haunt me for a long time.

* Although a completely different book, I was reminded several times while reading this novella of O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried'

Loved this book

It make the Japanese experience personalized. I felt as though I could have been any of these women.

A story that needs to be heard

I struggle a little bit with the writer's style - and the use of sentence series in the structure of the entire book. But then again, it is a tool to help elevate the rich diversity of Japanese Americans. To humanize their immigrant experiences and to connect their hopes and dreams to all of ours.