Author Julie Otsuka uses the collective "we" in the narration of her poem like, second novel, The Buddha in the Attic. The title of the novel refers to one of the Japanese "Picture Wives" who had left a replica of a Buddha in her attic as she was rushed out of her home to the internment camps during WWI. The "Picture Brides" came to Hawaii and West coast of the U.S.A, around 1920 when there was a call for Japanese women to come to America to marry Japanese working men.
Otsuka grew up in California, studied art at Yale, graduated from Columbia with a Masters of Fine Arts, and lives in New York. She is a recipient of the Asain American Literary Award, the American Library Association Alex Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her first novel was When the Emperor Was Divine about the Japanese Internment in the U.S.A. Preparation for the The Buddha in the Attic took a great deal of research to gather a collection of voices to represent the Japanese "Picture Brides" who came alone to America with hope for a good marriage and a good life.
Japanese "Picture Brides" Endured Grueling Obstacles
The young women arrived by boat in San Francisco with a photos of the strangers, who were their husbands to-be, in their lockets, silk purses, or in the sleeves of their kimonos, which they "touched often, just to make sure they were there." Photos were also carried in the pages of books, old Buddhist sutras or the King James Bible. No one knew that some of the photos "were twenty years old." Nor that the letters they had received had been written by "professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it was to tell lies and win hearts." The women in Otsuka's collective narrative had rationalized, "This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong."
When they had to work in the fields as migrant workers, some knew what to do, but others did not, working nimbly or slowly "hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, or backs would never recover."
Some chanted Buddhist sutras, sang Christian songs or harvest songs. Their husbands lied about big houses, so they "lived in tents and barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and stars."
The Bluntness and Sparseness of Julie Otsuka's Poetic Prose
To give a greater sense of Otsuka's prose, I have quoted part of the following paragraph in a list form:
"We forgot about Buddha.
We forgot about God.
We developed a coldness inside
of us that still has not thawed.
We stopped writing to our mothers.
We lost weight and grew thin.
We stopped bleeding.
We stopped dreaming.
We stopped wanting."
In spite of everything, the couples lived with pride in their work ethic. When children were born, no matter how disappointing their husbands and their life in America was, the women lived for their American children. As immigrants, they did not fit in except with each other. And, what did they think of the Caucasians? "We loved them. Hated them. Wanted to be them."
Striving for the American Dream, the Setbacks of Relocation and Internment
Twenty some years later, when they had built a better life for their families and their American children were helping the family business or going to college, the Japanese navy bombed Pearl Harbor, and once again the lives of the first-generation Japanese turned to chaos. They were given an ultimatum by Executive Order 9066 in 1942 to leave their homes, relocate, take only what they could carry, so they obediently were evacuated and resettled in interment camps with soldiers watching them from a tower. Even so, they made the best of it.
Otsuka's novel is haunting in a different way than other novels about Japanese immigrants tell the stories of individual families. The Buddha in the Attic is like a wailng chorus which failed to come out of the mouths of the docile parents and grandparents whose ingrained passiveness and acceptence as a minority helped them to persevere no matter what they thought inside, no matter what trauma or pent up anger they felt. Many of the elders never talked about their experiences, but in the years ahead, their children, the 3rd generation, found the words that the older generations could not speak. Now in this novel published in 2011, Otsuka has given those voices another chance to wail and sing about the condition of their souls.
Becker, Alda. "New York Times Book review of The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka," New York TImes, August 26, 2011.
Otsuka, Julie. The Buddha in the Attic, New York: Alfred A Knoft, 2011.
Carmen Sterba - Carmen Sterba has a B.A. in Far East Asian Studies and an M.A. in Literature. She is keen about Japanese history & Asian American ...
