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.”