Review: The Buddha in the Attic

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Most of this is simply wonderful. Otsuka explores a powerful subject – the lives of several Japanese immigrants to America in the 1920s and 1930s up through the forced relocations of World War II. At the same time, she employs a striking technique: most of this is told in the first person plural, in a way as memorable as those rare staples of the approach, “A Rose for Emily” and “The Things They Carried.”

The heart of the story is more lyrical than narrative. It’s possible to track threads that imply the stories of particular individuals, but, for the most part, this recounts everything as it happens to “us.” We’ll get details that cannot have happened to the same individual – one having six children and one having eight – but the power of the work is in weaving all those separate experiences together into what feels like a whole.

Otsuka moves things forward in dramatic steps. Most of what we experience comes in chapters that linger over large historical moments. The first deals with the arrival of postcard brides, and it’s mesmerizing. Some are happy to leave difficult homes, and some are bereft. Some have affairs along the way, and others are so innocent that they have to interrogate the more experienced for details.

A later such chapter deals with the children, and it’s equally gorgeous in the way we get so many fragments of lives that come together. The effect is something like collage. She pushes different pieces together into a whole that suggests individual experiences and simultaneously gives us a sense of a larger, communal whole.

For me at least, the triumph of all that is to reimagine this experience with White Americans – the “we” of most such histories – as the others. The narrative here may be broken in a way that’s subtly reflective of the broken-English of many of the protagonists it offers us, but it achieves a structure that invites “us” into the experience. As whites, we are made to feel other to our own ancestors, to the Americans who allowed this traumatic experience to occur to other Americans who just happened to be of Japanese descent.

So, I love all of that and deeply admire it. I read this for a colleague’s class, and I’m glad to be introduced to Otsuka’s work. This is ambitious and successful in ways that resonate.

And then comes the final chapter.

I understand it’s a controversial one – but no worries about spoiling because there’s no conventional narrative here – but it troubles me to switch voices in the end. In place of the displaced Japanese-American women who have effectively narrated the earlier chapters, we get the voices of those white Americans who confront their absence. There are moving details, a Fuji restaurant becomes a conventionally named diner or a former Japanese home grows dusty and neglected, but I’m frustrated to be asked to empathize with a whole new set of concerns, and I am disappointed not to hear the Japanese Americans again.

There’s a trope in Holocaust studies that pushes against the notion of Jewish absence. The idea there is that we want to be able to hear the voices of those who endured and of those who survived. Jews are more than victims, and we need to hear such stories to remind us ever of that fact.

Here, I am sorry that the last glimpse we get of these Japanese is through the eyes of others. I’d have preferred to see Otsuka persist with her dramatic technical experiment. You can see how challenging it was for Faulkner and Tim O’Brien in their famous stories; the first-person plural doesn’t lend itself well to an ending.

Here, as gorgeous as most of this is, I think Otsuka makes the wrong choice of an ending.

This is a remarkable work, and I recommend it, but I can’t entirely appreciate how she’s chosen to wrap it up.


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