The Buddha in the Attic

By: Julie Otsuka

Narrated by: Samantha Quan, Carrington MacDuffie

Length: 3 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” - The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture brides’ nearly a century ago.

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.

From the Hardcover edition

©2011 Julie Otsuka (P)2011 Random House Audio

Brilliantly crafted

Otsuka tells this deeply moving story in a unique and compelling way that kept me engaged from beginning to end.

Expected More

I loved Julie Otsuka's When the Emperor Was Divine and have been waiting for years for her to publish a second novel. I had high expectaions, but, sadly, they weren't quite met. The Buddha in the Attic exhibits the same lovely, spare, almost-poetic style, reminiscent of a fine brush lightly stroked across rice paper--nothing to fault there. And in telling bits of the stories of Japanese picture-brides, Otsuka intrigues us with the beautiful, the sad, the mundane, and the horrific. The problem, for me, is her choice of what is mainly a first person plural narration--"we"--to represent them (although periodically she shifts to "they," speaking both of the women's offspring but also of the white Americans, who later become "we"; are you confused yet?). Otsuka claims that she chose this form because "the Japanese are a collective people," but it seemed more like a gimmick to me.

There are two main problems with this narration. First, stylistically, it starts to get monotonous, even though some of the details, events and images are striking. Second, aside from the basic fact that all the women are picture brides who emigrate from Japan, they are NOT all from similar backgrounds, nor are all their experiences in America all similar. Here's an example of what I mean--which is NOT Otsuka's exact language but my attempt to recreate a section of the audiobook:

Some of our husbands looked like their photographs. Some of our husbands were 20 years older than in their photographs. Some of our husbands had sent us photographs of a handsome friend. Some of our husbands were very tall. Some of our husbands were shorter than we were. All of our husbands had that strange smell. What was it? Some of our husbands beat us every night. One of our husbands treasured his wife like a pearl. Many of our husbands got drunk every night. Some of our husbands bought us special gifts to show their love. Some of our husbands took up our work in the fields when we were too exhausted so the boss wouldn't get mad. Some of our husbands made us sleep on straw in the barn like dogs.

Well, you get the idea. I understand why many readers were captivated, but, personally, I wanted to know more about the woman who, when asked if she would sleep with a man for $5, told him she would for 10. I would much have preferred to read the developed stories of a few women's lives than to read these artful lists of "collective" lives. In When the Emperor Was Divine, Otsuka's multiple narrators--simply called the woman, the man, the boy, and the girl--were much more successful, I think, in creating the sense of a community's shared experience.

Would I have liked it better in print than on audio? I don't think so; the main reader was actually quite good.

Hoping for a Better Life.

A fresh account of Japanese soon-to-be wives coming to America to find a better life, with the intention to send money back home to the families left behind. It didn't work out the way they planned. Some of the women married and worked on farms, while others worked as domestic help, and yet other women lived under slave-like conditions with no immediate means to alter their circumstances. The narration enhanced the story, and I found it to be compelling.

Unique Style

The poetic style of this book is well suited to audio. The author’s choice to tell a story of the group vs individuals is fitting for the circumstances. People who only like traditional narratives may not like this book. But those who are open to a wider variety of narrative choices should enjoy it.

Gorgeous Story Disappoints Some at End

Most of this is simply wonderful. Otsuka explores a powerful subject – the lives of several Japanese immigrants to America in the 1920s and 1930s up through the forced relocations of World War II. At the same time, she employs a striking technique: most of this is told in the first person plural, in a way as memorable as those rare staples of the approach, “A Rose for Emily” and “The Things They Carried.”

The heart of the story is more lyrical than narrative. It’s possible to track threads that imply the stories of particular individuals, but, for the most part, this recounts everything as it happens to “us.” We’ll get details that cannot have happened to the same individual – one having six children and one having eight – but the power of the work is in weaving all those separate experiences together into what feels like a whole.

Otsuka moves things forward in dramatic steps. Most of what we experience comes in chapters that linger over large historical moments. The first deals with the arrival of postcard brides, and it’s mesmerizing. Some are happy to leave difficult homes, and some are bereft. Some have affairs along the way, and others are so innocent that they have to interrogate the more experienced for details.

A later such chapter deals with the children, and it’s equally gorgeous in the way we get so many fragments of lives that come together. The effect is something like collage. She pushes different pieces together into a whole that suggests individual experiences and simultaneously gives us a sense of a larger, communal whole.

For me at least, the triumph of all that is to reimagine this experience with White Americans – the “we” of most such histories – as the others. The narrative here may be broken in a way that’s subtly reflective of the broken-English of many of the protagonists it offers us, but it achieves a structure that invites “us” into the experience. As whites, we are made to feel other to our own ancestors, to the Americans who allowed this traumatic experience to occur to other Americans who just happened to be of Japanese descent.

So, I love all of that and deeply admire it. I read this for a colleague’s class, and I’m glad to be introduced to Otsuka’s work. This is ambitious and successful in ways that resonate.

And then comes the final chapter.

I understand it’s a controversial one – but no worries about spoiling because there’s no conventional narrative here – but it troubles me to switch voices in the end. In place of the displaced Japanese-American women who have effectively narrated the earlier chapters, we get the voices of those white Americans who confront their absence. There are moving details, a Fuji restaurant becomes a conventionally named diner or a former Japanese home grows dusty and neglected, but I’m frustrated to be asked to empathize with a whole new set of concerns, and I am disappointed not to hear the Japanese Americans again.

There’s a trope in Holocaust studies that pushes against the notion of Jewish absence. The idea there is that we want to be able to hear the voices of those who endured and of those who survived. Jews are more than victims, and we need to hear such stories to remind us ever of that fact.

Here, I am sorry that the last glimpse we get of these Japanese is through the eyes of others. I’d have preferred to see Otsuka persist with her dramatic technical experiment. You can see how challenging it was for Faulkner and Tim O’Brien in their famous stories; the first-person plural doesn’t lend itself well to an ending.

Here, as gorgeous as most of this is, I think Otsuka makes the wrong choice of an ending.

This is a remarkable work, and I recommend it, but I can’t entirely appreciate how she’s chosen to wrap it up.

History I wasn’t aware of.

Interesting but so sad…. at the injustice humans are capable of. This was disturbing but something I need to know.

Repetitive phrasing

The phrase "one of us" is used so many times that I had to discontinue listening in Chapter 14. This book received so many good reviews I was excited to add it to my library. Perhaps reading it would not be a challenging as listening to it, but overall I am disappointed.

Some of us

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Some of us like the story, Some of us grew tired of it and another one of us gave up after 2 hrs of listening to it.

Has The Buddha in the Attic turned you off from other books in this genre?

Some of the story was interesting, Some of the story drug on and on. And other parts of the story just wore on one of us.

Any additional comments?

Many of us could't get through the book, many of us grew tired of the many of them. One of us wrote a bad review, while one of us just turned it off, never to listen to this writer again. Some of us may have liked it, and some of us though it was a waste of time.

Unsatisfying

There is no real story in this book it is just a collage of many stories. It is hard to get interested. I hate this writing style. The reader is good.

Wanted to love but ending up hating

Perhaps audio was not the format to make this book acceptable. The constant repetition of the “we” and the stilted format made me nuts. I truly disliked this book. The story was interesting but the very odd presentation is very off putting for a listener. I listened to it to the end because I had purchased it, and thank goodness, it was short. It was a very very weary listen on a long car ride when I could not stop the car to stop the book. Agonizing listen.