Winner of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Julie Otsuka’s second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, is a deceptively simple tale. Tale is probably the wrong word to use to describe this kaleidoscope of memories and experiences that make up this story of the Japanese everywoman who crosses the ocean, leaving behind her family and life in Japan, to an unknown fate tied by marriage to a man she has yet to meet. Many are virgins, some are not. Otsuka’s voice is rocking and gentle and yet what it says is harsh and blunt and doesn’t shy away from the trauma and tribulations faced by these women, all in search of better and happier lives.

The collective voice, the collective experience all serve to draw a complex, harsh picture of life as an immigrant in a land where they are viewed with suspicion. They work hard, they have children, they learn to put up with their husbands who may not have been wholly truthful to them about their prospects. But within their difficult lives are little nuggets of happiness and contentment, a picture of lives lived to the full, whether in happiness or pain.

I wasn’t sure whether I liked Otsuka’s style and stopped reading the book after the first chapter. It was too much; the voices, the endless yearning and hopes, the dissappointments. And yet, when I took up the book again, I found I couldn’t put it down. I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to know that they would be alright. There was something inherently familiar about the women Otsuka describes.

And it’s not just the inner lives of these women that Otsuka is so good at exposing. The Buddha in the Attic is also a portrait of small town America, the immigrant experience, segregation and ultimately the suspicion and internment of the Japanese immigrants as enemy aliens after Pearl Harbour. There’s so much life in this slender volume. It was as though I was watching reel after reel of film where you get glimpses of early 20th century Japan and the US.

As in most immigrant experiences, the trials of the parents are different to those of the second generation. And as the children shed their Japanese names with their language, the parents can only look on with sadness and bewilderment, uncomprehending and yet wanting them to integrate.

Otsuka has done in a slim volume what many have tried in big, chunky sagas. It’s beautifully written and one that will echo within me for a long time.

So have you read this? I’ve a mind to go and get hold of her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine.

A big thank you to Penguin for kindly sending me a copy of this book to review.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka has been selected as the winner of the 2012 PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction. It is a precise, poetic novel that tells the story of Japanese picture brides brought to California from Japan in the early twentieth century.

Ms. Otsuka and the four finalists will be celebrated during the 32^nd Annual PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction Ceremony, which celebrates the winning novel as “first among equals.” The four finalists are:

• Russell Banks for Lost Memory of Skin
• Don DeLillo for The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories
• Anita Desai for The Artist of Disappearance
• Steven Millhauser for We Others: New and Selected Stories

Three judges, chosen annually by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, select four finalists and one winner from among the more than 350 submitted works by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2011 calendar year, making this the largest peer-juried award in the country. This year’s judges were Marita Golden, Maureen Howard, and Steve Yarbrough.

Click here for more information about the winner and finalists.

Source: PEN/Faulkner, 2012

This is the context that I couldn’t help carrying with me into my reading of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic. I read an excerpt of this very slim novel back in the Spring 2011 issue of Granta; it was called “The Children” and it absolutely stunned me. I’ve studied a considerable bit of Japanese history, especially the Pacific War and the issue of The Comfort Women, but I’ve never done much looking at the Japanese immigrant experience, which is the central question of Otsuka’s book. It begins with a boat full of young Japanese brides, clutching photographs of the men they’ve married but never met. Each chapter then moves forward through what happens to this collective body of women: meeting their husbands, working in American fields or as servants or running laundries, having children, raising first-generation Japanese-American children, and relationships with “white” people. Eventually Otsuka makes her way to World War II and the internment of the Japanese-Americans.

Perhaps the most unique characteristic of the book is that Otsuka writes this novel in the first-person plural with the occasional bit of italicized dialogue to conjure up an individual voice. When I encountered this in the Granta excerpt, it is part of what gripped me, perhaps because it ends up reading like a long prose poem and creates a sustained emotional involvement in the narrative:

We laid them down gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets beneath the trees. We left them lying naked, atop blankets, on woven straw mats at the edges of the fields. We placed them in wooden apple boxes and nursed them every time we finished hoeing a row of beans. When they were older, and more rambunctious, we sometimes tied them to chairs. (…) But when they tired and began to cry out for us we kept on working because if we didn’t we knew we would never pay off the debt on our lease. Mama can’t come. And after a while their voices grew fainter and their crying came to a stop. And at the end of the day when there was no more light in the sky we woke them up from wherever it was they lay sleeping and brushed the dirt from their hair. It’s time to go home.

Before starting the entire book, however, I worried that this particular narrative perspective would start to wear after fifty pages or so, but that isn’t the case, at least it wasn’t for me. I admit that my interest in Japanese history might make me less objective than others. In any case, the book reads really quickly (it’s only 129 pages) and is quite beautiful. Otsuka presents the diversity of the immigrant experience through a first-person plural narrator that manages, quite cleverly, to be both many women and one woman all at the same time. At the very end she affects a subtle shift in perspective that closes the story in a meaningful way; I thought this was really well done.

Apparently her earlier novel, When the Emperor was Divine, is more specifically about the internment experience. It is fitting then that The Buddha in the Attic doesn’t go further than the packing and the leaving and the subsequent emptiness. The disappearance of the Japanese from their homes.

My final comment about the book is that it was curiously uninterested in anger. Otsuka is writing about the treatment of “foreigners” in American society but she does this without laying blame at anyone’s feet. It’s quite fascinating how she manages to do this. It’s all very gentle, really. And yet still provocative.

annotation by Tina Rubin

Stories dealing with the misguided actions of the U.S. government toward its perceived enemies usually affect me like a punch to the gut. But I need to know, so I don’t run away. Julie Otsuka’s novella about the Japanese picture brides who came to California between the two World Wars was a killer in that respect. Her short, Hemingwayesque sentences were icebergs of emotion.

Otsuka uses an interesting device: her point of view is first person plural. The “we” of the book is a group of young Japanese women who meet on the boat, sailing to an unknown future in America to meet Japanese husbands they have never seen. The husbands, of course, had sent twenty-year-old photos back to Japan to win over their brides and hired professional writers to craft their courtship letters. The narrative arc moves from the women’s arrival and initial disappointment to their inevitable adjustment—to their husbands as well as to the new country, culture, and language. Most accept their fate stoically and thrive despite disease, extramarital affairs, and having to work in the fields or as maids to white families.

I read the book with mild interest until the last forty or so pages, when the Japanese internment begins. After that, the anguish of the author’s understated words hit me, and I could only read a page or so a night before choking up. It was then that I recognized the degree of Otsuka’s skill. Despite keeping individual characters at arm’s length throughout the book, she managed to reveal who they all were. And I cared about every one.

Here’s how she did it. Otsuka relates much of the action by opening her paragraphs with words like “some of us” or “most of us.” She follows with  statements expressing many different situations, ending with a specific thought by someone in the group that illustrates the point. As I absorbed first the general examples and then the narrower one, I began to differentiate the characters—although I didn‘t realize it at first.

An example, from the opening chapter, “Come, Japanese,” on the boat:

At night we dreamed of our husbands. . . . We dreamed we were lovely and tall. We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her. (5)

Or, from the chapter simply called “Whites”:

One of us blamed them for everything and wished that they were dead. One of us blamed them for everything and wished that she were dead. Others of us learned to live without thinking of them at all. We threw ourselves into our work and became obsessed with the thought of pulling one more weed. . . . We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. . . . But it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. And often our husbands did not even notice we’d disappeared. (37)

As the novel goes on, Otsuka attaches names to the characters but keeps the structure intact. The effect is to reveal the tremendous power of each detail. Details tell the entire story, yet each one, so carefully chosen, becomes irreplaceable.

In a startling final chapter, “A Disappearance,” the first person plural now represents the whites who are left behind after the Japanese have been rounded up and taken away. The unexpected shift in point of view is a delicious surprise. Not only does it work perfectly, but it’s a logical choice, given that the original “we” is gone. And from a historical perspective, even if a fictional one, the reactions of the whites trying to make sense of their friends’, schoolmates’, and local business owners’ disappearance wraps the book up with food for thought.

This is a novel that remains in one’s thoughts long after the last page is read—for Otsuka’s technique as well as her story.

We’re almost at the end of the 4th month of the year, so 1/3 in and I’ve read 18 books. Yes, that’s half of my goal completed. I’m even thinking of upping my goal to 50 books. Nerd gone wild.

I use Good Reads, which I absolutely love, so if you want a new social media outlet get on board and let’s compare shelves. Favorite books so far this year: When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka, The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and Bossypants by Tina Fey.

Any book recommendations I should add to my to-read shelf and/or holds list for the library? Yes, that’s right, I use the library. Old school nerd style.

They said that our short stature made us ideally suited for work that required stopping low to the ground. Whereever they put us they were pleased. We had all the virtues of the Chinese — we were hardworking, we were patient, we were unfailingly polite–but none of their vices — we didn’t gamble or smoke opium, we didn’t brawl, we never spat.

They couldn’t go home again, back to Japan, those “picture brides.” They had sought husbands and lives outside the restrictions of Japanese culture, so they married men they had only seen in pictures. The pictures, it turned out, were often of someone else more attractive or had been taken 20 years before. When the women arrived, they went to work, they bore children, they endured.

In this magical book, Julie Otsuka gives us their voices, a chorus of voices, yet within their song we can hear the individual singers.

We gave birth during the Year of the Dog and the Dragon and the Rat. We gave birth, like Urako, on the day of the full moon. We gave birth on a Sunday, in a shed in Encinitas, and the next day we tied the baby onto our back and went out to pick berries in the fields. We gave birth to so many children we quickly lost track of the years.

We hear these women speak from the boat on which they traveled from Japan, during their first experience of their new husbands, of their work, of their babies, of their children and, finally, their fate as they were exiled again from the place they had learned to call home. In the last chapter, we no longer hear the picture brides, we hear those they left behind.

A year on and almost all traces of the Japanese have disappeared from our town. Gold stars glimmer in our front windows…. Harada Grocery has been taken over by a Chinese man named Wong but otherwise looks exactly the same, and whenever we walk past his window it is easy to imagine that everything is as it was before. But Mr. Harada is no longer with us, and the rest of the Japanese are gone… All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall probably not meet them again in this world.

True, the Japanese you will meet when they are released from the camps will be different people, changed by their experiences, just as the picture brides were changed by theirs.

In March, I had only slightly better success, book-wise. It’s funny: I have one book in my bag that I’ve been carrying since January, and while I like it and will finish it, I just never seem to be in the mood to sit down and read it. I’ve been picking off 10 pages or so at a time, usually on the bus. And not to be cryptic– the book is Honeymoon in Tehran by Azadeh Moavani, a memoir of the author’s return to Iran as a journalist and her subsequent marriage to a man she meets there, and it is good, I really do like it. I just don’t ever seem to want to read it. The same is true for Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson; I started reading February 8th and *will* finish this month, but it shouldn’t be taking me this long. I also started That Used to Be Us by Friedman and Mandelbaum a few weeks ago and had to return it to the library Saturday after just 90 pages, so who knows when I will pick that up again…

But let’s talk about the positives. Let’s talk about Dorie Greenspan! I hope that a few of you were lucky enough to grab the $5.87 bundle of Baking: From My Home to Yours and Around My French Table from Amazon.com last Thursday; after hearing about it from some fellow bloggers, I grabbed one and then did my part to share the link love. Man, am I glad I jumped on that deal! What amazing cookbooks these are: R & I spent a few hours Saturday poring over the volumes, shouting out recipes we wanted to make and then changing our minds almost instantly in favor of another. My meal plan this week is all based on those books– not necessarily exact recipes, but ideas and flavor combinations, etc. An incredible find, an incredible value, and books I know will be well-worn over the years to come.

In March, I read three novels that were good enough to recommend; the first is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I know, from the length of the queue at the library, that this little slip of a book is popular right now, and I guess that a lot of that has to do with his Booker Prize win. I have a strict policy of avoiding reviews before starting a book, particularly one with this much current attention, so I was shocked after finishing to read so many mixed reviews. I adored this book. I liked the main character, found his voice true and believable and properly flawed, and I enjoyed the build-up to and resolution of the main story line. I would be curious to hear from anyone else who has read The Sense of an Ending what they thought.

Secondly, I read What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander, a collection of short stories. A few were mind-blowing to me, and I read a lot of short story collections. Though I didn’t connect with or enjoy all of them, I remember so many details of each story, which is rare; there are too many collections I finish on a Friday and can’t answer questions about come Monday morning. Particularly memorable were “Camp Sundown”, which was eerie and disturbing in an unexpected way; “Sister Hills”, with two mothers arguing over an issue with no easy resolution; and a story of which I have, sadly, forgotten the title about an author reading in my beloved Elliott Bay reading room, though the story is so much more than that. This collection is one you should pick up.

And most recently, I picked up The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much; perhaps I was fooled by its tininess, or the unassuming cover. This was absolutely a case of “good things come in small packages”. The novel was told from the perspective of mostly anonymous Japanese women who had come to California to marry: some were happy, others not; some were mothers, others maids or shopkeepers; some had tragic stories and others made the most of a very foreign place. All were eventually affected by Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which called for the imprisonment of all people of Japanese heritage in in “relocation centers”, which we now know as internment camps. Though the narrator is a constant voice, the unnamed women, despite their wildly varied experiences, are given a haunting sense of group, or community, or togetherness, while remaining distinct– a hard concept to explain, let alone accomplish successfully in a novel. A quick read, but well worth your time and highly recommended by this reader.

So, with one quarter of the reading year past, I am on track to meet my reading goal of 60 books, and looking forward to some exciting books up soon on my to-read list. And… I vow to finish everything I have started so far. Promise.

 Julie Otsuka is the winner of the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel “The Buddha in the Attic” (Alfred A. Knopf), the directors of the award announced on Monday. The book, which traces the lives of six Japanese mail-order brides who sail to San Francisco in the early 20th century, was chosen from more than 350 novels and short-story collections, all by American authors and all published in 2011.

Click here to read the rest of this story

First up my favourite four books by women last year have to be my first choices. Those were without question ‘Gillespie and I’ by Jane Harris, ‘The Proof Of Love’ by Catherine Hall, ‘There But For The…’ by Ali Smith and ‘The Borrower’ by Rebecca Makkai. I would absolutely love to see this four make the cut, you can click on their titles to see my reviews and gushings over each one – seriously these are four blooming brilliant books!

Next up were books, if any, that have made the cut this year and how could I not include ‘The Snow Child’ by Eowyn Ivey which I loved and ‘Girl Reading’ by Katie Ward which I haven’t reviewed on here yet (though I have on the telly, ha). Next up were the books that I started last year, didn’t finish though no idea why as I was enjoying them, and so wouldn’t mind reading/starting again should the mood take me. In come ‘Go To Sleep’ by Helen Walsh and ‘Half Blood Blues’ by Esi Edugyan.

Then I chose four eligible books which I have in the TBR and have yet to crack open. ‘The Blue Book’ by A.L. Kennedy, ‘Solace’ by Belinda McKeon, ‘The Submission’ by Amy Waldman and ‘All is Song’ by Samantha Harvey are all books that have been on my radar, and pulled out and put back in the TBR over the last few months and I must have a read of them soon.

You may notice there haven’t been many of the ‘big names’ yet and whilst I am sure Ann Patchett and some other expected contenders will show up on the list I am not that fussed about them personally. I almost popped Anne Tyler on the list but hers comes out after the eligible dates. However there are for books receiving a lot of hype/buzz that I wouldn’t be surprised to see on the list and they are; ‘The Night Circus’ by Erin Morgensten, ‘The Buddha in the Attic’ by Julie Otsuka, ‘The Land of Decoration’ by Grace McCleen and ‘The Lifeboat’ by Charlotte Rogan.

The final four are all a little bit random and have come from popping into Waterstones and having a mooch around all the tables covered in books. They are simply books I thought sounded really interesting and loved the first chapter of (that’s not how I judge on The Green Carnation Prize by the way) they may not appear but I’d use it as an excuse to read them all the quicker if they did. These are; ‘My Policeman’ by Bethan Roberts, ‘Then’ by Julie Myerson, ‘The White Shadow’ by Andrea Eames and ‘The Cowards Table’ by Vanessa Gebbie.

Realistically I know this will be nowhere near the actual list. I just love the guessing, but I am realistic enough to admit despite my love of books I have only a small idea of all the eligible books and no idea what has been submitted and what hasn’t. I also actually want to be a million miles off, one of the reasons I love prize longlists is that they invariably throw up some titles that have passed you by and you want to go off and find out more about. I am hoping for lots of those.

I am not the only one who likes a guess; Jackie of Farmlanebooks, Nomadreader, Open Letters and Her Royal Orangeness have had a crack too, plus Jessica (who has become one of my new favourite bloggers, she makes me howl) has done her top five. I will report back with the list of books and my thoughts when it’s been announced. Until then, what books would you like to see (not necessarily the same as the books you think will) end up on the Orange Prize Longlist when it gets announced?

What do Michael Ondaatje, Manning Marable and Stephen King have in common? They’re all in the running for 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. The finalists — five each, in 10 categories — were announced Tuesday. The 32nd annual prizes will be awarded at a public ceremony April 20 at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.

Fiction
“Ghost Light” by Joseph O’Connor (Frances Coady Book/Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
“The Cat’s Table” by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf)
“The Buddha in the Attic” by Julie Otsuka (Knopf)
“Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories” by Edith Pearlman (Lookout Books/University of North Carolina Wilmington)
“Luminarium” by Alex Shakar (SoHo Press)

Mystery-Thriller
“Started Early, Took My Dog” by Kate Atkinson (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)
“Plugged” by Eoin Colfer (Overlook Press)
“11/22/63” by Stephen King (Scribner) “Snowdrops: A Novel” by A.D. Miller (Doubleday)
“The End of Wasp Season” by Denise Mina (Reagan Arthur Books/Hachette Book Group)

Read complete artice @ LA Times

What does home mean to you? That was a very difficult question posed to me at the end of “The Buddha in the Attic” by Julie Otsuka. Julie Otsuka’s book is about immigrant Japanese women, set about a century ago, who have come to America to their husbands and new lives. Their lives away from their homes to create new ones – the magic and dream of America that once existed, is revived in this beautifully written short book.

The eight almost inter-linked (because of the theme) and yet isolated (because of what each story centers on) stories are real, heartbreaking and sometimes hopeful. For me immigration has not been an alien concept. I have heard stories from my grandparents about how they had to move from Pakistan to India during Partition (though it is very different from these tales) and it does ring a bell when I read anything about leaving your country for a new one. To start anew and especially when you are expected to be the obedient Japanese wife to her husband who has not told her about the truth of his job, what she would have to undergo in a strange place and what her life would be like. These women worked from dawn to dusk, lived with men who they did not love or loved but their love was not returned. They worked in fields, as maids, as anything, as long as it was work and paid them.

I had read a part of this book; the first story that is, “Come, Japanese!” in a Granta series titled, “Aliens” and was immediately taken in by it. I knew then that I would read it when it would be made available. The stories are subtle, sharp and sometimes they wrench the heart and make you want more. The basic idea of having to master a new language after say thirteen years (as young) or thirty seven (as old) of thinking and dreaming in Japanese is a task for these women. Otsuka follows these women as they enter the early days of WWII, when entire Japanese-American communities disappeared (Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the reasons) to their relocation to desert camps.

The Buddha in the Attic is about the human touch. Always about it. Julie Otsuka does not for once waver from it. The writing is beautiful and easy to read, without losing the emotion it wants to convey. At the heart of the book, there is a lot of hope and love for the women in strange ways. I cannot for one wait to read her first book, “When the Emperor was Divine”.

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The narration style isn’t interesting just because it’s unusual. By speaking equally through many women, Otsuka is able to describe many different immigrant experiences without privileging any. She is able to speak about restaurant owners, farmers, and prostitutes as parts of American history without making one into a representative experience. By conflating these women’s voices, she is able to bring out a personal history that is totally different than both history books and historical novels.

Each section of the book moves forward to another chunk of time– coming to America as picture brides, working, getting along with their second generation children, the evacuation.

Oddly, the last chapter of the book switches perspectives, to the nonJapanese neighbours left behind after the evacuation, as they are left wondering where the Japanese went. I’m confused as to what Otsuka was trying to accomplish there. The neighbor’s responses seem flat in comparison to the women’s voices, and unnecessary.

It’s a very quick 144 pages. It hardly felt like 100 pages. Even busy grad students like me should be able to finish it in a reasonable amount of time. And a great example how spare, straightforward prose can be far more emotional than rich, embellished descriptions. I’m a fan.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami, is an epic work of science-fiction-y, cult-y fiction set in the 1980s (around 1984…) in Japan.  The chapters alternate between two main characters’ lives, one of whom climbs up a ladder and ends up in what seems to be an alternate timeline and reality.  The characters are very well developed and their stories become entwined.  But be forewarned that there is some weird stuff with “little people” that come out of the mouth of a dead goat, and some creepy sex cult stuff.  I found the book to be remarkably unique and I enjoyed the writing style, but this one is both dense and, well, quirky.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is quirky in a different way.  A historical fiction, written about “mail order brides” brought to America from Japan at the turn of the 20th century.  What was different about this book is that it is was written in mostly first person plural.  For example, the opening of the book: “On the boat we were mostly virgins.  We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall…”   I expected that the book would at some point begin to talk about one woman or another, but it did not.  It stayed talking about “we” for the entire novel.  I enjoyed it, and felt like I learned a bit about the history and culture of the Japanese immigrants at that time.  A short, fast read,  I recommend this one.

The narrator of Julie Otsuka’s second novel is a chorus: the disembodied ‘we’ of a cohort of Japanese women who travel to the United States at the start of the twentieth century as picture brides; the book follows them from their initial sea voyage through to their being sent away to internment during the Second World War. A quotation from the first chapter illustrates Otsuka’s general approach:

On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.

This is the language of The Buddha in the Attic: individual details and experiences, blended and distilled into a rhythmic composite. That quotation also hints at the hope which their husbands-to-be and journey to America represent to these women – a hope soon tarnished when they discover that the photographs they were given are twenty years old, and that their new husbands are not the well-off professionals which the women were led to believe, but farm-workers and servants. This is the first example in the novel of the American dream not living up to its promise for the women.

Once their new lives in America begin, the women’s experiences are varied, but most find themselves marginalised or ignored. This is where Otsuka’s main technique comes into its own, as the author creates a broad, sweeping portrait of many lives which can at once move out to reveal common themes and move in to focus on individuals.

When the women come to have children, The Buddha in the Attic gains a new layer in the ways that the new generation’s lives reflect and differ from those of their mothers. Where the women once imagined whatAmerica might be like, now their children have notions of the outside world based on hearsay, which may or may not be accurate (“Beyond the farm, they’d heard, wherever you went you were always a stranger and if you got on the wrong bus by mistake you might never find your way home”). As life goes on, some of the children get a taste of the American dream which was denied their mothers – but not necessarily as the women may have wished, because the children tend to reject or forget their Japanese names and traditions.

Life turns again with the advent of Pearl Harbor, as the women now find themselves and their families regarded with suspicion. Hearsay returns again in the form of a ‘list’ of people to be taken away, about which nothing is known for sure (including whether or not it actually exists), but much supposed. Otsuka builds tension effectively in this section, as the details which have so far formed the basis of the women’s experiences give way to questions and rumours.

Otsuka’s first-person-plural narrative voice may speak for all the women at once, but, to an extent, it also speaks for none of them, as we hear no direct individual testimony. There are occasional references to characters by name throughout the novel, but it’s not until towards the end that we get to perceive them as individuals en masse, as it were – but, by then, the Japanese are leaving their communities, and soon all that will remain of them are vague memories, and the odd physical trace like the brass Buddha which one woman leaves behind. The voice of the chorus falls silent, but the music of Otsuka’s writing rings on beyond the final page.

Today it was so cold outside that the air felt like a thousand tiny needles on my face.  On such a chilly day it’s good to think about something hot…After my last post on the scent of hyacinths, I was aware that the sense of taste is also difficult to write about and doesn’t appear in poetry often enough. Most writers, like most people, tend to focus on the visual, with an occasional excursion into the world of sound.

I’m not very fond of strong flavours so I got more than I bargained for when this week I tasted some wasabi peanuts for the first time.  I had an idea that wasabi was a sort of seaweed and so the instant hit of heat took me by surprise.  A characteristic of this heat is that, unlike chilli, it is experienced more in the nose than the mouth.  It brings a real sense of the nostrils burning and clearing, just momentarily; again unlike chilli, it quickly passes.  Words for how it feels – pungent, piquant, strong, tangy, caustic, powerful?  I was most interested to see that the green colouring used in the coating for these peanuts was chlorophyll.

Wasabi japonica is sometimes known as Japanese Horseradish and is in the Brassica family (as are mustard, horseradish and cabbages).  The leaves are very similar to the horseradish I’ve seen growing here in friends’ allotments. In Japan it grows naturally alongside stream beds in mountain valleys.  It is hard to cultivate and therefore very expensive – around £70 per pound.  Most of the wasabi we might come across is generally ersatz, made from a lurid cocktail of horseradish, mustard and green colouring.  Wasabi was listed on my peanuts’ ingredients so I presume it was the real thing making the back of my throat and nose sting, my tongue and eyes tingle.  Of course, since trying it, now I’m seeing it everywhere – in the papers and on TV, often in quite unexpected contexts.  Is it flavour of the month?

I’ve just finished reading Julie Otsuka’s wonderful and original The Buddha in the Attic (Fig Tree, 2012).  It’s a novella –  a form I admire for the few words and intensity it shares with poetry.  Reviewing it for the Guardian, Ursula Le Guin had this to say: The tone is often incantatory, and though the language is direct, unconvoluted, almost without metaphor, its true and very unusual merit lies, I think, in that indefinable quality we call poetry.

It was an absolute revelation to me – both in terms of the writing, which is flawless, and the subject matter, which was new to me.  The book tells the story of the Japanese ‘picture brides’ who travelled by boat, enduring all manner of discomfort, to the West Coast of America in the early twentieth century, lured by exchanged photographs with Japanese men who had already emigrated to the United States and looking for suitable wives from the home country.

ON THE BOAT we could not have known that when we first saw our husbands we would have no idea who they were.  That the crowd of men in knit caps and shabby black coats waiting for us down below on the dock would bear no resemblance to the handsome young men in the photographs.  That the photographs we had been sent were twenty years old.  That the letters we had been written had been written to us by people other than our husbands, professional people with beautiful handwriting whose job it is was to tell lies and win hearts.  That when we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away – I want to go home – but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day.  This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry.  And we would be wrong.

This unusual first person plural voice is sustained right the way through as the women endure various rites of passage: the crossing itself; the first night with their new husbands; being put to work in fields, orchards, laundries, restaurants and kitchens, where they attract suspicion and prejudice, at best ambivalence; giving birth and caring for their children – and then, the perilous moment after Pearl Harbour, when they wait to know their fates, before being summarily dispossessed and evacuated to inhospitable corners of the country until the War was over.

I was deeply moved by this insight into a slice of history I knew so little about.  It has been nominated for several prizes and honours in America and deserves to be widely read.  Otsuka’s writing is utterly convincing – measured and elegant, brave and playful.  I’m sure it won’t be long before I read her previous (also award-winning) book When the Emperor was Divine, which picks up the history where The Buddha in the Attic ends, in a more traditional third person narrative.

Here, in the final section, the first person plural is switched to that of the Americans left behind, witnessing the unexplained disappearance of their Japanese neighbours.  The change of where the voice comes from is violent and disorientating, expunging the gentle singing rhythms of the Japanese women whose story the reader has become so absorbed in.  It’s a sad, shocking ending, full of loss and shame, filtered through a bland righteousness.

WITH EACH PASSING DAY the notices on the telephone poles grow increasingly faint.  And then, one morning, there is not a single notice to be found, and for a moment the town feels oddly naked and it is almost as if the Japanese were never here at all.

Having tackled the subject of Japanese internment camps in her first novel, When the Emperor was Divine, Julie Otsuka turns now to the American dream. The Buddha in the Attic tells the collective story of a community of women who emigrate from Japan to marry the handsome and successful young Japanese-American men that have been courting them in letters. These men, they believe, will save them from a host of problems facing them in their native land: poverty, social ostracization, spinsterhood, a lifetime of hard labor. When they arrive, they are greeted by older men, many of them farm laborers, and it becomes clear that they have been lured to California to pick strawberries, clean houses, wash other people’s fine clothes, and stay perpetually pregnant.

Their stories will end in the internment camps, to which they are whisked away one by one and then everyone all at once. “Some of us went out and began buying sleeping bags and suitcases for our children, just in case we were next. Others of us went about our work as usual and tried to remain calm. A little more starch on this collar and it’s be fine, now, don’t you think?” 

There is not one set of named main characters. Rather, using repetition and first person plural, Otsuka creates a community of voices that articulates the contrast of cultural experiences between the categorized Japanese new immigrants and their individualized American counterparts. Though each woman has her own story, it is told through the sieve of the group. The community is in and of itself a unique character. This style of writing has the similar effect to walking through a holocaust museum; the many thousands of discarded shoes, glasses and clothes; the profound and oppressive realization that each item has its own unique story and, yet, the individual has been erased, replaced with the collective identity of “victim.”

The immediate impression is that Otsuka’s writing is more like poetry than prose. From the beginning: “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 as young girls and had 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 may more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years…” The repetition continues and we flit from one woman’s thoughts to another, sometimes in the same sentence, to great emotional effect. Even as the characters’ experiences vary to the extreme, there is no divorcing them from the collective.

The style poses many questions regarding identity, the immigrant experience and our cultural perception of the individual/the community. But most appealing is Otsuka’s fresh approach to narrative style. It is the perfect example of form-bending to suit an author’s thematic needs (rather than mere self-indulgence), and it is done as only an artist-turned-writer could. By eliminating the role of traditional named characters, Otsuka charges the narrative with a foreignness (what, no individual? This is not something we American readers are used to.) that is exotic and uncomfortable and completely other, which exactly reflects the experiences of the Japanese immigrant women.

Thank you, Leslie, from Inkwood Books for the recommendation.

            I am glad I was not one of the judges who chose the winner of this year’s National Book Award!  There were three novels that I really loved in the field:  Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, and, the subject of today’s review, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic.  Other books nominated were Andrew Krivak’s The Sojourn and Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision.

Ultimately, Ward’s Salvage the Bones took home the literary prize.  The Buddha in the Attic, though, was just as worthy and just as affecting. Otsuka writes this intimate novella with elegance and subtlety.

Although you need not read them together, The Buddha in the Attic is a kind of prequel to Otsuka’s 2001 novel When the Emperor was Divine, published just prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Otsuka uses the increasingly popular first-person plural (“we”) to tell her story.  Of all the novels I have read whose authors used this method of storytelling, I have to say that Otsuka does it the best of all.  Does she create the sense of place that Carsten Jensen does in We, the Drowned?  No.  Does she create the incredible feel for her characters that Justin Torres gives us in We the Animals?  Again, no.  So what is so wonderful about The Buddha in the Attic?  Many, many things.

The Buddha in the Attic begins with a hopeful group of Japanese picture brides who are on their way to America in the early 1900s.  Otsuka chose real history about which to write.  Many Japanese brides came to America at this time looking for better opportunities and for husbands.

Otsuka writes as if one of them were your sister or your best girlfriend.  You, the reader, sits down with her for tea and she recounts to you what it was like.  Sometimes she whispers and you must lean closer.  Sometimes she laughs, as do you.  Sometimes she gets a wistful look in her eye  when she remembers her family she left behind back in Japan.  Sometimes, when she recalls something especially painful, she cries.  And you do, too.

“On the boat we were mostly virgins,” Otuska begins.  “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.”

The first thing the girls did on the boat was compare photos of their husbands.  They were giddy to see them.  The husbands “were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished.”  They wore Western-style suits and posed by their American cars and American houses.

But when they reached port in San Francisco, the girls did not recognize the men waiting for them on shore.  Who were these men?  If you guessed that the men were older, darker, and poorer, you are correct.  The photos they sent were pictures of their cousins or of pictures decades old.  The girls were shattered.

When The Buddha in the Attic begins, the girls share a collective experience.  They are all on the same ship, all going to the same place, all picture brides.  When they reach San Francisco, though, their experience ceases being a collective one; it becomes individual.  No one girl will lead the same life.

Otsuka never concentrates on just one of these women; she wants to tell us about them all.  This may frustrate some readers who seek to feel deeper attachments to the characters they read about.

Again, picture the tea you are having with your sister or girlfriend.  She tells you a little about her own life, but there are so many other lives to tell you about.  She cannot focus only on herself.  The story is bigger than just one person, and that is what Otsuka wants her readers to realize.  I feel that is why she chose to use the first-person plural.

What happens to these women after their dreams were shattered?  The brides cannot return to Japan.  They have no money for the passage home.  They have nowhere else to go.  Some leave their husbands to become prostitutes.  Some leave their husbands for other men.  Others stick with their husbands and work with them in the fields.  They to make their lives work.  They have children and the years pass, as they are wont to do.  The women grow older, and their needs and lifestyles change.

Otsuka takes this story all the way to World War II and the Japanese internment.  You will cry here.  My one criticism is that Otsuka deviates too much at the end in the section entitled “A Disappearance.”  Otsuka writes this in third-person from the point of view of the women’s Caucasian neighbors who wonder what has become of the Japanese.

Otsuka, it is important to point out, was born in Los Angeles long after the time period in which she sets her novella; she writes, though, as if she lived it.  The Buddha in the Attic is an emotional, detailed, heartbreaking story.  Its 144 pages packs a powerful punch.  Japanese culture comes to life under Otsuka’s guiding hand.  Her prose is stylish and elegant.  This is one of those novels that will stay with you for your entire life.