"The Buddha in the Attic" (by Julie Otsuka)

The Buddha in the Attic is a 2011 novel written by American author Julie Otsuka about Japanese picture brides immigrating to America in the early 1900s. It is Otsuka's second novel. The novel was published in the United States in August 2011 by the publishing house Knopf Publishing Group.
The Buddha in the Attic was nominated for a National Book Award for Fiction (2011) and won the Langum Prize for American Historical Fiction (2011), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2012), and the Prix Femina Étranger (2012).

There is no plot in the usual sense of specific individuals going through particular events. The novel is told in the first person plural, from the point of view of many girls and women, none of whom is individualized as a continuing character, but all of whom are vividly described in a sentence or two. The first chapter, "Come, Japanese!" describes a boatload of Japanese picture brides coming to California to marry men they have never met. The next chapter, "First Night", is about the consummation of their marriages with their new husbands, most of whom are nothing like the descriptions they had given. The third chapter, "Whites", describes the women's lives in their new country and their relationship with their American bosses and neighbors. Some of the women become migrant laborers living in rural shacks, some are domestic workers living in the servants' quarters of suburban homes, and some set up businesses and living quarters in the "Japantown", or "J-Town", area of big cities. "Babies" tells about giving birth and "Children" about raising American-born children, who want to speak only English and are ashamed of their immigrant parents, but are discriminated against by most of their classmates, neighbors and merchants. "Traitors" describes the effect of the Pearl Harbor attack and World War II on the families: the rumors and increasingly the reality of Japanese men being arrested without warning, the fear and eventually the reality of entire families being sent away to parts unknown. "Last Day" tells of the departure of the Japanese from their homes, jobs and schools. The final chapter, "A Disappearance," is told from the point of view of the white American families left behind, who at first miss their Japanese neighbors but gradually forget about them.

This is a small jewel of a book, its planes cut precisely to catch the light so that the sentences shimmer in your mind long after turning the final page. With The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka has developed a literary style that is half poetry, half narration – short phrases, sparse description, so that the current of emotion running through each chapter is made more resonant by her restraint.
She takes as her subject the Japanese women brought over in their hundreds to San Francisco as mail-order brides in the interwar period. Instead of a single, named protagonist, Otsuka writes in the first personal plural through a series of thematic chapters. Such a device shouldn't work but does. Although there are no dominant characters, Otsuka's brilliance is that she is able to make us care about the crowd precisely because we can glimpse individual stories through the delicate layering of collective experience.
The opening chapter sets the scene on the boat as the women make their crossing to America, clutching photos of the handsome young men they believe to be their new husbands. When they arrive, they are disillusioned by "the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock… the photographs we had been sent were 20 years old."
The reality that confronts the women deals a blow from which they never fully recover. In a devastating chapter entitled "First Night", Otsuka recounts the physical consummation of these new relationships. Some of the women's experiences are harrowing, some stilted, some humorous. Otsuka makes no distinction between them, relying on the rhythm of her words to pull the reader along. Occasionally a single voice will break through and the effect is startlingly good. "They took us by the elbows and said quietly, 'It's time.' They took us before we were ready and the bleeding did not stop for three days. They took us with our white silk kimonos twisted up high over our heads and we were sure we were about to die. I thought I was being smothered."

Each subsequent chapter charts some aspect of immigrant life – getting jobs, giving birth and dealing with the casual racism of pre-war America ("They learned that they should always call the restaurant first. Do you serve Japanese?"). Their children grow up to be more comfortable with their adopted land than their parents: changing their names to sound American and making fun of their mothers' accents. Some of the marriages survive and some don't.
And then, after Pearl Harbor, the order comes for the Japanese to be interned. Entire communities are uprooted, forced to give up their houses and livelihoods. It is here that Otsuka finally gives her women their names: "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."
This sudden individualisation is extremely poignant, especially when, in the final chapter, Otsuka's collective voice shifts from the Japanese to the Americans: "The Japanese have disappeared from our town. Their houses are boarded up and empty now."
Lyrical and empathetic, The Buddha in the Attic is a slender book of real, haunting power.

What is the meaning of the title The Buddha in the Attic you ask?
An attic is a place in which one stores possessions which are of some sentimental value but no longer of immediate need. When an immigrant wave enters the USA, they come with a history, an essence, a culture, and a distinct ethnicity. For these Japanese women, the Buddha represents not only their Buddhist beliefs and religious traditions but also their Japanese secular customs. As they compel themselves to conform to the conventions of American society, the women must learn to in essence store that Buddha in the far recesses of their heart, their own attic, to be brought out at a time of need. These times of need may include when the husbands are not as originally expected, when the first born children need to be reared, and when that "wonderful American suburban society" cheats them of their equally American rights as Japanese Americans.

The Buddha in the Attic is brief yet powerful in its laconic words. It is universal, yet relates the specific stories of the Japanese Americans. It is comprehensive in its ability to expose the reader to a variety of conditions.