I think I picked up The Buddha in the Attic (2011) at a day that Penguin ran for book bloggers back in 2013 and it has survived numerous culls of my shelves since then on account of its brevity. It’s only 129 pages, I thought. It doesn’t take up much room on the shelf, and surely I’ll manage to read it one day. Ten years later, that day has come!
The Buddha in the Attic is a historical novel about a time between the World Wars where Japanese women would be shipped from Japan to America to meet with their husbands. Not people they had married back in Japan, but new husbands – Japanese men who had already emigrated; people they had exchanged letters and photographs with, each side selling their end of the bargain. The man would make promises about economic opportunities; the woman would talk about her capabilities and beauty. The photos, they learned, were often old or even of other people. The letters were written by other people, filled with lies.
In the first chapter we are aboard the boat, and the opening paragraph shows the technique that Otsuka uses that makes this novella so unusual and, to my mind, so successful.
On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years-faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on.
Throughout the book, the pronoun is always ‘we’. Even if the incidents are clearly individual and unique, the narrator will say either ‘we’, ‘some of us’, or, occasionally, ‘one of us’. There are sections that go through so many different scenarios with a lilting, poetic repetition.
Home was a cot in one of their bunkhouses at the Fair Ranch in Yolo. Home was a long tent beneath a leafy plum tree at Kettleman’s. Home was a wooden shanty in Camp No. 7 on the Barnhart Tract out in Lodi. Nothing but rows of onions as far as the eyes can see. Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at Stockton’s Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us.
And so on and so on. Otsuka’s aim is to give the reader a whole sweep of experience – a whole generation of these young Japanese women. They mostly suffer hardship, whether that be thankless jobs, violent husbands, racism from white Americans, or simply a sense of hopelessness. At no point does an individual emerge as the heroine – rather, the heroine is the whole group. It is an intriguingly collectivist point of view, where almost every novel is an exercise in individualism. What an ambitious undertaking and, to my mind, it works really well.
I had to reconsider what I expected from a fictional narrative. Almost nobody is named, and there is no arc of individual narrative, and so I had to embrace a structure made of infinite variety. And somehow it is still compelling. I’m not sure it would have worked over a much longer book, but at novella-length it is a real success.
The quotes are so powerful. I’d not heard of this at all, it’s brave to use the plural for collective experience but it really seems to have worked.
For me, it really did, would definitely recommend.
Another really different style of writing and story – you seem adept at mixing things up for this May challenge! This one appeals to me too; I enjoyed reading the extracts you quoted. I have never read anything written from a collectivist perspective before and would be interested to learn about the social history covered.
Yes, it was definitely a perspective on the period that I knew very little about. And from the list of resources at the end, she thoroughly researched it.
I truly struggled with this odd way of writing. Creative–sure. Readable? Not so much. The Wives of Los Alamos was written the same was “all of our Marshas” etc…. However, I did, like her books When the Emperor Was Devine and The Swimmers (which hit too close to home–my elderly Mom–so I had to stop reading it)
Sorry this one didn’t work for you – I think if I’d just heard the concept, I wouldn’t have been drawn to it, but somehow it really worked for me.
I love the sound of this. Glad you finally read it!
Me too!
I thought this was a brilliant novella and I loved that she wrote it in the first person plural—she does the same thing in her new book The Swimmers, which I loved too. I interviewed her about her writing on my tv show: you can Google Seattle channel Julie Otsuka Nancy Pearl to watch it
Oo thanks Nancy, I’ll go and look that up. And good to know about the Swimmers too.
I love successful use of unusual perspectives like the first-person plural (or second person). This is a really good example of it. I’ve read all three of Otsuka’s novellas and think The Swimmers, her latest, is her best.
(You are a blogging SUPERSTAR to get Nancy Pearl commenting!)
Getting a book read that’s been on the tbr forever always seems to lead to another purchase :D And yes, I’m always a bit starstruck when I see Nancy P’s name in the comments!
Sounds like a really powerful way of telling a story Simon – very intrigued!
Yes, I’m not sure I’d have been drawn to it if I’d known, but it works really well.
I’ve only read her When the Emperor Was Divine but I’m drawn to this. I’ve read one book in this voice, Daphne Palasi Andreades’ “Brown Girls”, which worked very well, and this is also intriguing. Also echo Rebecca: NP! Really?!
Oo I’ll have to keep an eye out for Brown Girls, thanks for the mention.