Douglas Bauer on Julie Otsuka
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.
The youngest of the picture brides was twelve: My parents married me off for the betrothal money. The oldest was thirty-seven, and had spent her entire life taking care of her invalid father. One came from Kumamoto, where there were all of eligible men had left to find work in Manchuria. One had lost her first husband to the flu and her second to a younger and prettier woman who lived on the other side of the hill: He’s healthy. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t gamble. That’s all I need to know.
The Buddha in the Attic moves swiftly and laterally, achieving what I think of as a horizontal depth, a narrative richness in fewer than 130 pages. These sentence-long biographies gesture toward a fraught future, but they are all we get. Of the dozens and dozens of lives we encounter, each sweeps past us in a teeming instant, none gets more than a breath of biography. The drama of their histories might be unlike any we’ve heard, but no single one of them steps away from the chorus. “Be humble. Be polite. Be eager to please. Say, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all. You now belong to the invisible world.” In that blink of time when a character is present on the page Otsuka makes explicit the novel’s central indictment, that the native-born see these immigrants in their midst not as individuals living singular lives—if at all, noticed for no more than an incurious moment, leading quickly to disgust and from there to blind dismissal. At best, they’re invisible. “Whenever we left J-town and wandered through the broad, clean streets of their cities we tried not to draw attention to ourselves … we made ourselves small for them.”
When we first meet this cast of characters they’ve forged an inseparably harmonious bond, where we and us and our and ours represent vital mutual support. As the succeeding generations are burdened by the demeaning invisibility of we and us and our and ours, their plural identity remains a protection. Pronouns, that great contested zone. In Otsuka’s novel they’re patrons, sentries of a kind, providing shield and shelter.
And then: “The rumors began to reach us on the second day of the war … There was talk of a list. Some people being taken away in the middle of the night.” First there were rumors that masses of immigrants stood in the fields with flares, directing enemy pilots to their Pearl Harbor targets, rumors that thousands of farmers stored caches of weapons in their cellars. Husbands began to be beaten up, homes and businesses broken into, trashed, ruinously damaged. Then on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed the order directing Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to abandon their homes, their work, their deeply established American lives. Nearly a hundred and twenty thousand adults and children were removed to camps, in California, Arizona, and Utah; in Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas.
Some of us left weeping. And some of us left singing … A few of us left drunk. Others of us left quietly, with our head bowed, embarrassed and ashamed … There was a girl in long pigtails from a small town in Tulare who left carrying a thick stick of pink chalk. She stopped to say good-bye to the people lined up on the sidewalk and then, with a quick flick of her wrist, she waved them away and began skipping. She left laughing. She left without looking back.
This leave-taking is the last we hear of them.
A final chapter, “A Disappearance,” continues in the first-person plural, but it speaks for those who remain behind. The houses of former neighbors are boarded up and empty now. Mailboxes have begun to overflow. Unclaimed newspapers litter sagging front porches and gardens … Are the missing Japanese-Americans innocent? Are they guilty? Are they even really gone? Because isn’t it odd that no one we know actually saw them leave?
Schoolteachers call the Japanese-American students’ names while taking role, even though they see their seats are empty. Abandoned dogs roam the streets, refusing to be fed, as if suspicious of the gesture. Morning glories grow wild in derelict gardens. Autumn comes and there’s no Buddhist harvest festival.
The novel’s moral judgment is even more forceful for being the voice of ignorance, those who seem in their confoundment to have been innocents themselves, insisting they know nothing, noticed nothing, now shielding their identities behind that untraceable “we,” that faceless “us”; a cowardice performed in the hiding of their names. The mysterious Americans whom the “we” of the book’s opening chapters labor to discern and comprehend become the “we” who say, “We speak of them rarely now, if at all, although word from the other side of the mountains continues to reach us—entire cities of Japanese have sprung up in the deserts of Nevada and Utah … and in Wyoming a group of Japanese children were seen emerging shivering and hungry, from a forest at dusk … 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.” Exactly the same voice, and exactly not.
Douglas Bauer is the author of four novels, most recently The Beckoning World, and three works of nonfiction.
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Eloquent review of a narrative so painful.
Otsuka’s plural voice does something I rarely see: it turns grammar into evidence. In the opening chapters the collective “we” exposes how a society flattens thousands of women into one blurred silhouette—easy to ignore, easy to exploit. Then, in the final section, the exact same pronoun becomes a shield for the bystanders who claim they “never noticed a thing.” Same word, opposite moral weight. That pivot shows how erasure works: first you deny individuals, then you deny responsibility. It’s a structural indictment delivered in under 130 pages—and a reminder that the way we choose our pronouns can either honor a reality or erase it.