The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is the poignant and incredibly heart wrenching account of
Japanese mail-order brides in America in the post-World War I era.
These girls from all corners of Japan, from villages and towns, came in droves to escape the poverty of their own lives, eyes bright and hearts uplifted, hoping for a wonderful life in America the land of opportunities. All of them had hung their hopes on the photographs they had been shown of serious young Japanese men in Western clothing. Very few actually end up marrying the person in the photographs. Most find themselves looking at men who are ten or twenty years older and in some cases with absolutely no relation to the person in the picture. The extent of how unprepared they were to life in America is best reflected in these lines. “On the boat we carried with us in our trunks all the things we would need for our new lives: white silk kimonos for our wedding night, colorful cotton kimonos for everyday wear, plain cotton kimonos for when we grew old, calligraphy brushes, thick black sticks of ink, thin sheets of rice paper on which to write long letters home, tiny brass Buddhas, ivory statues of the fox god, dolls we had slept with since we were five, bags of brown sugar with which to buy favors,……”
They become a generation of women doomed to be overlooked by their husbands, children and even history. Farm workers, laundry workers, house maids and shop clerks who lived their lives forever feeling unwelcome in their adopted land. Striving for normalcy in an alien land and among people who remained enigmas no matter how much they tried to fit in. Theirs is a constant battle for acceptance by first their husbands, then the land and people and finally their children. The tragedy being that most of them are left disappointed in all counts; forever feeling alien, grappling with issues of language and identity.
They get caught between two worlds, hanging on to the last vestiges of their culture at home and at the same time having to watch their children adopt Westernised names and manners. The ultimate blow Fate delivers is the final displacement they have to undergo during the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Forcibly moved from their homes to camps, their whole lives work disappearing, dispersed like dandelion seeds in the wind.
The narrative does not follow a particular set of protagonists, but takes forward multiple stories. It was like entering a hall full of snapshots. As soon we enter they start drifting down giving us glimpses of heartbreak, disappointment and uncertainty. There are very few chinks of happiness. They exude the heavy scent of betrayal and loss. What broke my heart is how deeply they long to get back to their homes and mothers. They continue to dream of familiar things in an alien landscape. “By day we worked in their orchards and fields but every night, while we slept, we returned home.”
The author writes in the first person plural and the narration is spare and without embellishments. The starkness of the words lends intensity to the lives of the women. “ Some of us wept while we worked. Some of us cursed while we worked. All of us ached while we worked – our hands blistered and bled, our knees burned, our backs would never recover…… “Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters- they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and stars – we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do.”
The lives of many women are strung together in a cohesive pattern to give a richness to the narrative. Each chapter is like a room of memories, with each room denoting different stages in the progression of their lives. It starts with the journey by ship from Japan to America. Then it proceeds to their life with their husbands, efforts at assimilation into a foreign way of life, birth of their children and so on.
Julie Otsuka has given a voice to the trials faced by a generation of Japanese –American women. It is a novel that has to be read, to understand the agony, bewilderment and sense of loss of a displaced population. I leave you with these lines from the book which best describes their experience – “This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry. And we would be wrong.”
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