By Julie Otsuka. New York: Knopf, 2011. 129 pp.
Otsuka’s intense and gorgeous The Buddha in the Attic was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. Described as a novel, it reads like a book-length prose poem told in the voices of a multitude of Japanese “picture brides” who arrived in San Francisco in the early 20th century.
The first section of the book introduces the unusual narrative voice as the women compare photographs of their new husbands and speculate about the lives they will find in America:
Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore we could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers’ daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. Some of us were from a small mountain hamlet in Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. (8)
Unlike Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” or Mirvis’s The Ladies Auxiliary, Otsuka’s narrators refuse to meld into a unified community, even as Executive Order 9066 sends them all into internment camps. The result is a remarkable sense of the individual women who embarked on new lives with men they’d never met, and after years in America, growing families and building businesses, pursuing the American dream, lost their homes because of America’s fearful response to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
