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 we…