Harking back to a book that may be speaking to us now in new ways
Julie Otsuka’s brilliant novel, The Buddha in the Attic, first published in 2011, begins on a ship in the 1920s.
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 … 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.
The world of the novel, with its plural first-person narrator, is one of allusive and elusive identities, of we and us and our and ours standing for a multitude of unnamed characters. It’s a voice at the same time intimate and anonymous as we meet these women, known to history as “picture brides”; along with the letters of proposal from men they’ve yet to meet, immigrants who left Japan some years earlier, the women carry photographs of their betrothed. “On the boat the first thing we did … was compare photographs of our husbands. They were handsome young men with dark eyes and full heads of hair and skin that was smooth and unblemished.” When at last they arrive in San Francisco, the women are shocked at the sight of the men on the dock now stepping forward to claim them—some shyly, some formally, some roughly as if taking ownership of livestock—who bear no resemblance to the much younger, much more handsome faces in the photographs. And when, soon after, they join these men, their new husbands, in harshly unforgiving lives as migrant workers, they discover that the prosperous ease they were promised in the letters was the largest lie of all. …
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