The Heritage Month Project: "The Buddha in the Attic"

So many heritages used to be recognized by the U.S. federal government. You can check them out at this archived website from earlier administrations. May covers a number of them. This post deals with Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Month. 

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is a lovely and unique piece of writing. It's often described as a novel, though after reading this I feel I don't know enough about novels to be able to comment on that. 

Two Standout Features

The two memorable aspects of The Buddha in the Attic are its subject matter and its point-of-view.

Subject Matter: The book deals with Japanese picture brides, a group I'd known nothing about. (My Heritage Month Project is exposing me to a great deal I didn't know about.) Essentially picture brides were Japanese women who came to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century to marry Japanese men they didn't know, had never even met. The men were already in the U.S. and the couples exchanged pictures. As Otsuka recounts in The Buddha in the Attic, many of the men were less than truthful, using old photographs of themselves so they'd appear younger or borrowing clothes to wear for formal photographs, so they'd appear better off than they were. Many of these women learned after they got here that they were going to work with their new husbands, picking fruit or doing other kinds of field work, and live in tents or barns. "...if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters...we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do." 

Some women turned around and went back to Japan, but a large number of them stuck it out. They worked with these husband strangers, created families, and for their efforts ended up in internment camps during World War II.

(For what it's worth, in the seventeenth century around 700 women went to Canada at the king's expense to provide wives for settlers and soldiers. No photos, of course. Assuming they survived the trip there, les filles du roi, as they were known, would have been part of the mainstream European culture in Canada at the time. The Japanese picture brides were outsiders in the United States. It also sounds as if the French women were in more dire straits in their homeland than the Japanese women were in theirs. The Japanese women had legitimate expectations about what they would find here that often were not met.)

Point-of-view: The Buddha in the Attic uses a first-person plural point-of-view, also sometimes known as a collective narrator. It can be a bit demanding to get used to. However, I recently took a workshop on short stories in which Steve Trumpeter, the workshop leader, said that with every short story you have to teach yourself how to read that particular story. I think that's the case with many books. Once you've taught yourself to read The Buddha in the Attic, it's riveting. The collective narrator works fantastically here, because what we're reading is the shared experience of many people. Occasionally an italicized line appears that is one person's thought that illustrates what the collective had been speaking about. 

Does this book have a plot? Is a group's historical experience a plot? Do life stories have plots? I don't know. At any rate, this is a terrific book about a specific group's experience.