Book Review: Buddha in the Attic

My Review:

“…where we lay awake every evening staring up at the American stars, which looked no different from ours…” (Otsuka 24).

              We begin the novel with a twinge of hopefulness for these women. The same feeling you have when you have read the end of the book before the beginning, but apart of you still thinks somehow you escape the inevitability of what you’re about to read. These women who are experiencing true girlhood for the first time- gossiping, discussing boys, giggling and having sleepovers- are thrown into a country that resents their existence. They were catfished by these men who pull them into their country for free labor, and still somehow manage to be the strongest and hardest working people the American’s have ever witnessed.

              These women are beyond any comprehension of strength. Their first night they are raped and mentally tortured until sex feels like a punishment; a punishment you have no control over. It’s a weapon one cannot predict and becomes so routine, similarly to the rest of their American torments, it becomes habitual. The usage of this collective “we” becomes complicated; this is not just a small community but a story of an entire population of women who were brought to America, and their stories are vastly different yet are connected through shared experience and outsider perspectives. Otsuka uses cataloging often to describe these different experiences still in the “we” voice. She tends to start very broad, then make her way to a singular person.

“Most of us left in a hurry. Many of us left in despair. A few of us left in disgust, and had no desire to ever come back. One of us left Robert’s Island in the Delta clutching a copy of the Bible and humming “Sakura, Sakura,” (106).

              My opinion of this collective voice is a mixture of things: there is such writer strength to tell a story of a vast and complex narrative from the perspective of hundreds of women, but at times we become so distances from the women because of the collective voice we can feel isolated from their emotions. The narration is blunt and stoic; Otsuka writes gut wrenching things in the tone of being underwhelmed or unphased at times. This voice that is being created I think is important for the idea she is getting across; these women and families did not have the luxury of an opinion or decision. The American’s forced them into assimilation, they had to change everything about themselves and hide their own personal beliefs and rituals in order to survive.

“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,” (37).

              While we are hearing from the women who have suffered, at the same time it’s from the communities that changed them. These short and oftentimes blunt sentences are the realities of these generalizations that came from the community around them. These women cannot be split up as individuals who have deep emotions and complex thoughts because they were never viewed as people by the American’s until they were gone, and even then, it came as a passing thought. This collective voice is impressive as Otsuka is able to not only demonstrate the silenced pain these women experienced but also show us readers how marginalized these women became and how stripped of any individuality they had.

              There are glimpses into personal experience, that plays on a theme of gossip and spreading rumors during this time. One person did this, and another said that they did that. It starts on the boat where it feels hopeful and sweet like childhood gossip, but later it becomes rumors about what it means for your husband to be on a list and how/when they take you. The author writes a bunch of different ideas of what people believed and never allows readers to know the truth (because we would never be privy to that information).  Later when the perspective switches to the American’s we get a plethora of what they think happened and the rumors going around their absence. My kids heard this or we think we understand that their absence is this.

              One function of Otsuka’s collective voice that I really enjoyed was the emphasis on italics. She uses these italics as personal thoughts; it makes you feel as though you are getting an excerpt from a journal entry. These are some of the hardest parts to read in the novel; they are deeply personal and depressing. It sheds light to some personal belief or experience and humanizes these assertions that are cataloged in the chapters. One thing I found interesting was the slow loss of italics. It seems as though loss of the personal experiences and thoughts that is representative of the loss of personality and beliefs. This correlates directly to the title of the book. These women had to give up their religion, personality, experiences, to bend at the will of the Americans.

“Haruko left a tiny laughing brass Buddha up high, in the corner of the attic, where he is still laughing to this day,” (109).

              It drives these families to hysteria. All they know is now once again being ripped from them because of the mass evacuations of the Japanese. The perspective switch to the American’s point of view made the at time lethargic “we” collective feel worth it. Describing an entire community of people in terms of rumors and speculation; the what could be's and what we could have done's. There is so much power held in that last chapter now that the families have been eradicated. It is the harsh truth of what happens in history. It is all left to what we think we know and the guilt that resides in the feelings of maybe we could have done something. It leaves you feeling powerless; how can you make a change as one individual when the whole country wants you to believe in conspiracies and be afraid of the people you have known maybe your whole life?

“Because the Japanese are gone, that’s all. ‘You worry about them, you pray for them, and then you just have to move on,’” (127).

              The only reason I don’t give this book a perfect rating is the disconnection at times we get with this “we” narration. There are pages that can feel like they drag because we are trying to compile so many different perspectives and experiences into a list, which makes sense for what Otsuka is trying to force us to feel, but for me personally I would get a little disconnected and lost in the words rather than the story.

              Overall, I think this story is a great telling of a perspective many of us cannot understand. It is deeply sobering and forces us face to face with a dark reality of our history. I would recommend this to someone who enjoys historical fiction, and wants to challenge themselves to not just hear a perspective of one person, but instead an entire collective of a community.