Julie Otsuka

This was a quick, powerful read.

Written in the first-person plural, the story is at once personal and essentially anonymous. It is not the story of just one person, but of a people. The use of the "we" brings attention to the "us" vs "them" nature of racism and prejudice, and in the last chapter when the "we" changes, it raises the question, "Who are 'we' anyway?"

Otsuka takes us through the lives of picture brides from Japan, from their nervous but hopeful journey across the ocean to the show more harsh realities of their lives in America to their internment---along with their husbands and children and grandchildren---because they are deemed a threat to national security after Pearl Harbor.

In the group at which we discussed this book, the conversation turned to why it is that we, even today, avoid seeing violations of civil rights and prejudicial treatment going on around us. Why, we asked ourselves, do we as a culture turn away rather than acting when we see injustice?

We talked about the recession and how we've got our own stuff to worry about. We talked about how busy people are and how uninformed. We talked about the consolidation of media power and the resulting shallowness and one-sidedness of the news we consume. We talked about the compartmentalization that happens in social media and web searches and online bookstores that are designed to show us more of what already interests us. We talked about the lack of community.

This was a comfortable, philosophical approach to our inaction. What was less comfortable was when I turned the question on myself.

When I see an injustice, why don't I act? I used to act. I used to get up in arms and demonstrate and write legislators and help set up panel discussions. Why don't I any more?

It's not that I'm uninformed. If anything, I think I'm better informed about issues than I was in my twenties during my activism heyday.

It's not that I don't care. Discussions at church about how the Ecuadorean population of a nearby town are being mistreated in the wake of a recent tragedy leave me in tears. I feel compelled to do something and yet when it comes time, I balk.

Why is this?

The only reason I can figure is fear. Fear of taking a stand, fear of arguing, fear of being yelled at. I have an introvert's trepidation about meeting new people and talking in front of groups that's just compounded by the fact that the "new people" are part of a foreign culture and many of them don't speak my first (and pretty much only) language.

I realize, too, that I'm afraid of intensity of emotion.

I watch activists speaking and they can hardly talk, the words are all fighting to get out of their mouths at the same time. They cry frequently. Their passion is evident.

I used to share that passion. In my twenties and early thirties, if someone mentioned birth, I had that same flood of words that crowded in my mouth. I could---and would---argue hammer and tongs about the evils of episiotomies and the importance of teaching doctors how to deliver breech babies vaginally rather than relying on surgery.

But in the years since my son was born, my passion has cooled. And I do not miss it.

I've made peace with many of my feelings about birth, and I don't want to go back to that out-of-control, all-consuming obsession with something I had little ability to change or even affect.

I'm enjoying the calm, and I'm afraid of getting pulled back into the intensity.

While I don't think the out-of-control type of passion is necessary for activism, I don't know how to be an activist without it. I want to be an equanimous activist. I want to stand in the river and let the current rush by me. But I've yet to figure out how to get into the river without the struggle, so I continue to stand on shore.

With all of the things I fear, the biggest is that if I were put to a moral test like those that so many faced during World War II, I would fail. show less

Oh my, what a sad but important story, based on research and facts related to a dark part of American history, part of our history of racism that has not yet ended.

The Buddha in the Attic is about the wave of "picture brides" that in the early 1900s came to America from Japan to become wives of Japanese immigrant men living in California, marriages arranged via letter exchanges that were often filled with deceptions about their future husbands and about what their lives would be like in show more America. The reality would be sobering beyond what they could have imagined in their young girl hearts.

At first, the first person plural narration that Otsuka used was awkward for me, never following any particular immigrant, just sentences of experiences, one after another beginning with "We..." The poignant prose, though, kept me under her spell. Soon I got used to "we," lost my expectation of following a single person or family, and got into step with the march of sentences with many Japanese names, many American places, many experiences. Then, it hit me: Otsuka's choice was wise and apt. How else to tell the story of this incoming group as seen by Americans, lumped together as simply a different race, a different culture? Individuals were unseen. How else to convey that treatment of the Japanese as being as "Other," as unknowable? By telling so very many stories, not just one or even a few, Otsuka drives it into our hearts -- there were thousands of stories, of individuals never recognized, never respected. Following just one story would not have had the effect that all those "we's" did.

We (readers) follow their stories of the voyage, their hopes and their disappointments on seeing their new husbands. We follow them through wedding nights, marriages, their back-breaking labor in agriculture or as housecleaners or other lowly jobs. We read about suicides, affairs, and madness. We follow them through births and deaths of their children. We follow their strategies to not stand out more than they must. We follow them until they near acceptance, their dreams adjusted, and they acclimate to America and its racism.

Then, they disappeared. The Japanese especially on the coasts were shipped off, both the Japanese immigrants and the Japanese-American citizens. They were sent far inland, forced to leave all they had worked and built. They left sentimental items (including a buddha in the attic). They left pets and, worse, left sick children in hospitals.

Put on trains, they were forced to live in camps for the duration of WW II.

Trains. Camps. America.

No one protested on their behalf. Neighbors were mildly curious where their quiet neighbors were sent, greedy neighbors thieved their homes and businesses, some tried to stay in touch with letters and inquiries, and a small few missed them. But, before long, life simply moved on without their neighbors.

The Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism During World War II, from WTOP news article about the memorial and history, dateline August 15, 2019 show less

A group of women describe their collective experience coming on a ship to San Francisco, marrying men they’ve never met, working in demeaning and arduous industries, having children, keeping a household, and eventually being sent to concentration camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In the early 1900s thousands of women came from Japan to the US and married Japanese-American men, sight unseen. The men had immigrated in the years before to work on the railroads and in show more agriculture, but it was illegal for them to marry anyone outside of their race and illegal for women to come to the US without being married. Because Buddhism was persecuted in Japan at the time, many of the women who chose to come to the US were Buddhist. They did choose to come here, but based on false information - the photos their husbands sent them were decades old and staged so they would believe they were coming to a big house and a land of opportunity, instead of racism and agricultural work or house cleaning or a brothel.

This is a very unique book and I love the way the story is told. The narration is in first-person-plural, so that every possible experience can be acknowledged without having to create an unrealistic fictional character to experience it all. “Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years.” It’s truly amazing to fit such a huge diversity of experiences - mostly bad but also some good - into a tiny volume. And when all of the Japanese people are gone and the narration switches to their white neighbors? It’s devastatingly sad. show less

Julie Otsuka's writing impresses me. I wish she were more prolific.

The Buddha in the Attic is written in the first person plural, a bold choice that works exceedingly well in this novel. By using the collective "we", the author is not only able to include a wide array of personal experiences in one narrative, but also includes us, the reader, in the experience.

On the boat we carried our husbands' pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk show more purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there. We carried them pressed flat between the pages of Come, Japanese! and Guidance for Going to America and Ten Ways to Please a Man and old, well-worn volumes of the Buddhist sutras, and one of us, who was Christian, and ate meat, and prayed to a different and longer-haired god, carried hers between the pages of a King James Bible. And when we asked her which man she liked better—the man in the photograph or the Lord Jesus Himself—she smiled mysteriously and replied, "Him, of course."

The women are picture brides, and we accompany them on the boat across the Pacific and to their new lives with men they've never met. We share their disappointments and hard existence, and just when they start to be settled, they are uprooted again and sent to interment camps for the duration of WWII. Only then, in their absence, does the point of view shift to the white people in the towns they vacated. It's a moving piece of literature and an ode of sorts to the Japanese women who immigrated to the United States. show less