TKO'd by The Buddha in the Attic

   There is no one main character in The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka's novel about Japanese picture brides who arrive in America during the early 1900s to marry men sight unseen. There are many characters. Scads of them. Each with a story that Otsuka melded into the first-person voice "we"  to retrace their journey, their first night as married women, their work, their children, their homes, their employers and neighbors, and eventually, their new status as traitors in the days after Pearl Harbor.
   It's a remarkable and memorable novel, and earlier in the year Otsuka won a big prize for it--- the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Buddha was also a National Book Award Finalist in 2011.  And in typical Otsuka style, Buddha is spare yet richly descriptive, small--only 129 pages--yet potent.
   It's been about 10 years since she wrote her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, a book that I liken to a quick punch in the gut. Not that I've ever experienced that, but her book took me down for the count and left me breathless. Her subject--Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps in 1942--interested me and her writing, which is lean, clean and powerful, packed a wallop of emotion.
   Her writing still lifts me up, and I find beauty in its simplicity. Here are the opening lines from The Buddha in the Attic:

     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.

And from the chapter "Whites":

   They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl. They marveled at our tiny figures and our long, shiny black hair. They praised us for our hardworking ways. That girl never stops until she gets the job done. They bragged about us to their neighbors. They bragged about us to their friends.

  Can you hear the music of her words? But what efficiency as a writer! I feel their isolation and anxiety on the ship. I am seasick with them on page five and homesick with them on page 17. These stories of young women who left Japan  from 1908 to 1920 to marry Japanese immigrants in America ultimately concludes with the theme of Otsuka's first novel--internment camps for Japanese Americans.

   

   Neighbors peered out at us through their windows. Cars honked. Strangers stared. A boy on a bicycle waved. A startled cat dove under a bed in one of our houses as looters began to break down the front door. Curtains ripped. Glass shattered. Wedding dishes smashed to the floor. And we knew it would only be a matter of time until all traces of us were gone.

   I regularly seek out books about Asian women. Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club pushed me in that direction years ago and since that time I've read many books about women from patriarchal cultures who face desperate situations and survive and sometimes flourish. Memoirs of a Geisha, Chinese Cinderella, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan are among my favorites. Even before I read it, I knew The Buddha in the Attic was a natural fit for me. 

  This small book is tiny enough to stash away in a purse or tote bag if you're travelling light for a weekend away. You can easily tuck it inside a beachbag or carry-on luggage.  I can't insist that you read it but I'd like to challenge any woman to open it up and resist its first few lines. Keep reading, and you'll be like me. Knocked down and breathless. Otsuka's got quite an upper cut.

The Push From the Book: each book we read leaves its mark and gives you a push: a new way of thinking, a new take on life, new ideas, new goals. Here's what this book did to me: 

    Simple response. I uttered many prayers of thanks for my life, my courtship, my husband. I did some digging before writing today's blog entry and listened to a bit of  a WHYY radio interview (http://www.julieotsuka.com/media/) with the author. Otsuka explained that these first meetings between the picture brides and their husbands were often a "first date for life" because divorce was not an option in Japanese culture at that time. Some of the matches were doomed from the start and the new brides endured harsh husbands, family life and working conditions. They had no options and for that I felt pangs of sorrow while reading. The women were strong and stoic and inspirational. Maybe some of that will rub off.  An inner-strength tune-up is always appreciated.