“We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. We stopped writing home to our mothers. We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting.”
The first thing that really got me in this novel is the "choral voice" with which it is written, instead of the more common first or third person. So it is a WE were from, WE did this and WE said that. It is such an uncommon way to write a novel and yet it is, in this case at least, so powerful, as never like with a big WE you get all the emotions, the fears and hopes that these ladies are going through as individuals and as group of Japanese brides immigrating to the USA/
The story starts on the ship they take as new brides to reach their "just seen in a picture" Japanese living in America husbands. Then it proceeds explaining how the reality is different from their expectations and all the hard work they have to endure. It goes through how difficult, complicated, estranged their relationship with the husbands are. Then how their lives settle a bit more in America, even if the majority of the WE never really learn how to speak English and never really mix with anybody outside the Japanese community. Then the children arrive. And then the war and with the war the antagonism between Americans and Japanese.
It is such an intriguing story, a lot of stories within the story, I'd say. It is an open window on the lives of the Japanese immigrants at the time, their culture and their trials to adapt to such a different place and such different customs.
In summary, a great book which you can read in one sit, because it is short and because it is very engrossing. Highly recommend it!
"We loved them. We hated them. We wanted to be them. How tall they were, how lovely, how fair. Their long, graceful limbs. Their bright white teeth. Their pale, luminous skin, which disguised all seven blemishes of the face. Their odd but endearing ways, which ceased to amuse - their love for A.I. sauce and high, pointy-toed shoes, their funny, turned-out walk, their tendency to gather in each other's parlors in large, noisy groups and stand around talking, all at once, for hours. Why, we wondered, did it never occur to them to sit down? They seemed so at home in the world. So at ease. They had a confidence that we lacked. And much better hair. So many colors. And we regretted that we could not be more like them.”
Overall rating: 8 Plot: 8 Writing style: 8 Cover: 8
Title: The Buddha in the attic
Author: Julie Otsuka
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 144
Publication year: 2011
Plot:
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.
The Author:
Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. After studying art as an undergraduate at Yale University she pursued a career as a painter for several years before turning to fiction writing at age 30. She received her MFA from Columbia. She is a recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Asian American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, France’s Prix Femina Étranger, an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.She lives in New York City, where she writes every afternoon in her neighborhood café.
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