A review by knitter22
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

3.0

I enjoyed Julie Otsuka's first-person plural style of writing in The Swimmers but found it less effective in The Buddha in the Attic. In six sections, she recounts the stories of Japanese picture brides who journeyed to California in the early twentieth century - leaving everything they knew and traveling to America, meeting their husbands and their first nights with them, backbreaking labor in the agricultural fields and the homes of white women, learning a whole new language and culture, their children, and their experience with World War II. The women set out with cautious optimism, but much of what Otsuka eventually reveals is heartbreaking.

"Most of us on the boat were accomplished, and were sure we would make good wives. We knew how to cook and sew. We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours, saying absolutely nothing of substance at all . . . We knew how to pull weeds and chop kindling and haul water, and one of us — the rice miller’s daughter — knew how to walk two miles into town with an eighty-pound sack of rice on her back without once breaking into a sweat."

Much of the novel reads like a combination of poetry, lists, and narration. What I found effective in The Swimmers is that Otsuka focused on one named swimmer after the first third of the book. She doesn't name the Japanese women until almost the end of The Buddha in the Attic.

"Iyo left with an alarm clock ringing from somewhere deep inside her suitcase but did not stop to turn it off. Kimiko left her purse behind on the kitchen table but would not remember until it was too late. Haruko left a tiny laughing brass Buddha up high, in a corner of the attic, where he is still laughing to this day."

I think the book would have been more effective for me if Otsuka had focused on individuals a bit sooner rather than later, but it was still an interesting and original way to tell the story of Japanese picture brides.