The Buddha in the Attic

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.

I'm gonna start my opinion of this book with the positive the idea behind this book is awesome I'm not gonna lie all the problems and difficulties of the people on this book is great represent and some chapters are splendid a example of it is the last chapter “A disappearance” this one actually wasn't repetitive and it was well implemented and in my opinion the whole writing on this book should be like this part.

However the negative stuff really hit this book the writing most of the time is bothering and irritating and not just the writing some descriptions are repeated a lot of times the emotions of the characters are not deep I mean I was more surprised for the emotions of the citizens after the Japanese people leave how they reacted what they feel and I think the author should have show a little bit deeply the emotions of the Japanese people because she focus so much in the details in showing all the problems that she seems to forget the emotions

Well This books was enjoyable for me was lacking a lot of thing and I don't it was worth it reading it but it wasn't entirely bad

In just 144 pages, Julie Otsuka magically takes us the readers deep into the experience of the lives of Japanese mail-order brides of the 1930's, lives filled with pain and terror and joy and exhilaration, like the lives of all brides, all women, all people. It's a beautiful trip. We readers go where the brides go, we see the things the brides see, and, best of all, we feel what the brides feel. It is amazing and this read has left me transformed, with a new appreciation and compassion for the women of the past.

No review can do justice to this book.

The story of Japanese “picture brides” as they arrive in California during the early 20th century to meet their unknown husbands. The story of many are told as one, in parallel, which was a very interesting narration style. We follow the abstract mass of brides through the hardships of marriage and demanding work, cultural differences, neighbourly racism and finally deportation/internment during WW2.

The style was unique, and the book is slim, a few times I found it quite touching, but it didn't fully grip me. 2.5