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.
