The Buddha in the Attic
Ratings36
Average rating3.6
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • National Book Award Finalist • Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award The acclaimed author of When the Emperor Was Divine tells the story of a group of young women brought from Japan to San Francisco as “picture brides” a century ago in this "understated masterpiece ... that unfolds with great emotional power" (San Francisco Chronicle). In eight unforgettable sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces the extraordinary lives of these women, from their arduous journeys by boat, to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; from their experiences raising children who would later reject their culture and language, to the deracinating arrival of war. Julie Otsuka has written a spellbinding novel about identity and loyalty, and what it means to be an American in uncertain times. Don’t miss Julie Otsuka’s new novel, The Swimmers, coming in February 2022!
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I LOVED this book. It shows us the lives of these anonymous women starting off from one similar point - mail order brides on a boat from Japan to America in the early 1900s - and how each experience could go lots of ways and they all are just one tiny thread in the tapestry of life. Here is an example:
“Some of us worked quickly to impress them. Some of us worked quickly just to show them that we could pick plums and top beets and sack onions and crate berries just as quickly if not more quickly than the men. Some of us worked quickly because we had spent our entire childhoods bent over barefoot in the rice paddies and already knew what to do. Some of us worked quickly because our husbands had warned us that if we did not they would send us home on the very next boat. I asked for a wife who was able and strong. Some of us came from the city, and worked slowly, because we had never before held a hoe. “Easiest job in America,” we were told. Some of us had been sickly and weak all our lives but after one week in the lemon groves of Riverside we felt stronger than oxen. One of us collapsed before she had even finished weeding her first row.”
A subtle book, with flashes of sadness and flashes of goodness, all building to a quiet intensity of emotion. By the end of the book I felt my heart racing because it felt like I had truly seen how life goes, the good and bad and the sheer blind chance of it all.
I'm not sure what the point of this book was. It's an array of lists and not much else, I guess I could give it credit for creative style, but I didn't find it that creative. Up until the last maybe ¼ of the book it wasn't bad but then it got really drawn out and there was a change of point of view from the Japanese women to the white American that seemed too largely sympathetic to the Japanese considering what was done to them and crass at the same time and it was just tedious.
Read this as a follow-up to Otsuka's The Swimmers, which I loved. A buddy gave it to me (thanks Davinder!) and I'm really grateful. It's a poetic meditation in prose form on female Japanese immigrants to various places in California, tracking their lives loosely up to the WWII internment camps (which I didn't learn about until I got to college). It's emotional and beautiful and horrifying all in turn, and I'm not giving it away, not paying it forward, because I want to read it again someday.
