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A Book A Week: The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 8:22AM The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Osaka. Alfred A. Knopf 2011 (library copy).
Otsuka’s second novel tells the story of a group of women, Japanese picture brides, traveling on a boat to meet the husbands that have bought them and brought them to America. We follow the women through their struggles, pain, fear, joy, disappointment, outrage, success, and failure, through their various jobs, marriages, and experiences leading up to their next great journey: to Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. We feel their experiences in the immediacy of the narration. Rather than feeling those experiences individually though, we feel them collectively through Osaka’s use of first person plural narration.
The story has a chant-like quality, almost prayer-like in the layered repetition of the women’s collective lives. We are the women when we read the story. We feel the reverence and sanctity of their lives. We are hurt by their tragedies. We feel the betrayal and devastation most keenly when the narrative voice shifts from the women themselves to their neighbors who watch them go to the camps. The neighbors who understand nothing, and do nothing, as the Japanese-Americans (and anyone who might resemble a Japanese-American) marches away to who knows where, leaving behind a void that is first lamented, then filled, then forgotten.
This small, spare, beautiful, important novel might be overlooked, but, perhaps without intending to, can teach us a lesson about the world we live in now. I see the same kind of marginalization and dehumanization of Muslim-Americans happening today. I hope we as Americans do not forget the ugly truth of the wrong we inflicted upon Japanese-Americans in the name of patriotism and a false sense of security. I hope that we can learn from those experiences of the past. But I am not certain.
Osaka’s deft and subtle use of language is thrilling to me, and I look forward to reading her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine.
A Book A Week, Read Something in Words 
Reader Comments (1)
I love the sound of this book as well as your descriptions and final thoughts, Dani.