Caveat Reader: I loved this beautiful little novella, which just won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Though, several in my book group did not. Julie Otsuka tells the story of the Japanese “picture brides” who emigrated to California en masse during the early part of the twentieth century. Otsuka employs a sing-song narrative of many voices, which I found captivating:
“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 purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in thick brown envelopes from America … We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.”
Some people found this distracting and wanted one narrator and one story. But for me, the first-person chorus worked to convey both the scope and the intimacy of these women’s experiences. So many were packed onto the boat: girls from small mountain hamlets who had never before seen trains, aloof sophisticates from Tokyo, daughters of farmers who’d wished they’d had sons, a widow from a silk-weaving village, and the youngest, a twelve-year-old girl from the shores of Lake Biwa.
I became engrossed in the wonderful cacophony of viewpoints. Women who landed in San Francisco and then found themselves in a brothel in “J-town,” digging onions in Stockton, picking peas in Los Osos, or as a maid in the servants’ quarters of a large house in Atherton.
We get the collective outcry: “We settled on the edges of their towns, when they would let us … We lived in unsightly shacks.” Then Otsuka pulls us in: “One of us blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead.”
For me, Otsuka’s unique approach really conveys how these women must have felt—as their personal sorrows were swallowed up by the hardships of so many. Otsuka has crafted a tour de force, with her very original working of the first-person plural.
She evinces that mix of wonder and apprehension of the immigrants. The young women were surprised to find that Americans saw a man instead of a rabbit in the moon. They were struck by the awful smell of milk and cheese, “butter stink,” and they were careful to avoid those from Okinawa. “They’re not real Japanese.”
The voices overlay to form a narrative arc, as the women establish homes, give birth, and find their places in the community. There are also happy moments, and some find that they blossom in their new land, at least until the tragedy of Pearl Harbor and World War II upends them all again. If you pay close attention, a few characters do resurface as the novella progresses, such as Sumika in Montecito.
My advice is to give yourself over to this book, as an original reading experience. I found it so engrossing that it almost flew by too quickly. I really did not want the story to end. But end it did. As the Japanese were rounded up and forced to abandon their homes and their businesses.
“Some of us left weeping. And some of us left singing. One of us left with her hand held over her mouth and hysterically laughing. A few of us left drunk. Others of us left quietly, with our heads bowed, embarrassed and ashamed.”
In the dark of night they were ‘evacuated’ from the coast put on trains headed inland to the internment camps—their stories, their voices, scattered to the wind.
The Buddha in The Attic Wins PEN/Faulkner Award
I really can’t wait to read this now – thank you so much for this review.
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Cassie,
Let me know what you think of it.
Sarah @ Word Hits
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[…] #TwitterPulitzer, readers and bookstores have nominated The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka (I thought this was a tour de force), The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides and several other must-read contenders. Check it out for […]
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