The Buddha in the Attic

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Carolyn Jolly, February 14, 2013 (view all comments by Carolyn Jolly)
A clever use of 3rd person personal and first person accounts ground the story of picture brides from Japan sent to America to marry Japanese farmworkers. Otsuka covers an extensive breadth of time, territory, and emotion as she tells the story of the collective brides and their individual hardships in a book not much bigger than a novella. The accounts are historically correct and the book can be read as an account of Japanese women in pre-world war II America. Osuka's book can also be read as a unique, creative, attempt to tell the stories from a history we have all but forgotten.

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Scot Nakagawa, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Scot Nakagawa)

Otsuka uses historical accounts to tell a story about a group of Japanese women who immigrated to the U.S. as picture brides. Fooled by marriage brokers into believing they were leaving behind hardship in early 20th century Japan for the good life in America, they arrived to find husbands, years older than the men whose pictures they were carrying, who were expecting wives who would join them in the fields as laborers.

Otsuka follows these women through years of farm labor and then to the internment camps during WWII. This is a story I've heard a hundred times or more. In the stories that have been shared with me, the Japanese Americans of this period are very near to be saints in their self-sacrificing devotion to family, America, and the Buddha. In The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka presents us with real, whole people, remarkably resilient, accessible, diverse and full of flaws. That she is able to do so without dwelling on the stories of any of the women individually is a bit of a miracle that manages to makes her story a remarkably compelling read. I couldn't put it down and carried with me throughout my day, reading it in snippets whenever I could until finally I was able to sit with it, finish it, and immediately order her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine.

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Scot Nakagawa, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by Scot Nakagawa)

Otsuka uses historical accounts to tell a story about a group of Japanese women who immigrated to the U.S. as picture brides. Fooled by marriage brokers into believing they were leaving behind hardship in early 20th century Japan for the good life in America, they arrived to find husbands, years older than the men whose pictures they were carrying, who were expecting wives who would join them in the fields as laborers.

Otsuka follows these women through years of farm labor and then to the internment camps during WWII. This is a story I've heard a hundred times or more. In the stories that have been shared with me, the Japanese Americans of this period are very near to be saints in their self-sacrificing devotion to family, America, and the Buddha. In The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka presents us with real, whole people, remarkably resilient, accessible, diverse and full of flaws. That she is able to do so without dwelling on the stories of any of the women individually is a bit of a miracle that manages to makes her story a remarkably compelling read. I couldn't put it down and carried with me throughout my day, reading it in snippets whenever I could until finally I was able to sit with it, finish it, and immediately order her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9780307744425

Author:

Otsuka, Julie

Publisher:

Anchor Books

Subject:

Literary

Subject:

Literature-A to Z

Copyright:

2012

Edition Description:

Trade paper

Publication Date:

20120331

Binding:

TRADE PAPER

Language:

English

Pages:

144

Dimensions:

8 x 5.1 x 0.43 in 0.32 lb