The Buddha lured by a photo

Buddha in the Attic sadly recounts the way Japanese women were tricked into leading better lives in America during the early 1900s through being ‘picture brides’ and the troubles they faced acclimatising to this foreign country.

Young woman were encouraged by their families and social peer pressure to marry ‘rich good-looking’ American men. Little did they know, they were the victims of a sad scam. They wrote to their betrothed and recieved photos of the men, albeit taken probably 15 years prior. Men wanted young women, but American women wouldn’t have them. Japanese women wanted a better life than the one they knew in the Promised Land in Post World War I society.

American author, Julie Otsuka narrates through the voice of all Japanese women. ‘We’ is the group term used at the beginning of every sentence to incorporate the hardship that every tricked and deceived woman went through. Long unfurling linked paragraphs detail the woman’s woes and disappointment. While the ‘we’ appears to hold the characters at a formal distance, that reticence infuses their stories with powerful emotion. Yet each situation is still voiced through the plural as even though not every woman may have had the exact same experience from beatings to rape to the silent treatment, every single Japanese hopeful felt the pain of each woman’s mistake.

As the string of vignettes proceeded, the questions they asked, the observations they made, the illusions they cherished created a bond with the reader. With their sometimes uncomfortably familiar hopes and fears, Otsuka’s characters emerged as particular individuals even as their concerns took us far beyond the particulars of the Japanese-American experience. In these nameless people, we confronted our own uncertainties about where we truly belong, where our loyalties lie, where we should place our trust.

Highlighting a perhaps under representing story Ostuka brings to light the shear sadness of the situation, full of hope women diminished to worse lives that they previously led and would have grown up into at home.

Otsuka’s second novel, after her widely acclaimed When the Emperor was Devine, The Buddha in the Attic is, in a sense, a prelude to Otsuka’s previous book, revealing the often rough acclimatization of a generation of farm labourers and maids, laundry workers and shop clerks whose husbands would take them for granted and whose children would be ashamed of their stilted English and foreign habits.

Shea shame of their culture were the only factors keeping them from returning home to their loving families and ‘better’ life. Religion keeps the women sane and is their hope and saviour along with one another in their imprisoned lives. Women were required to keep their Buddhist religion at bay, and when forced to leave, one woman leaves a tiny laughing Buddha high up in the corner of the attic, hence the title.

The questioning of the ‘strange’ American culture provides entertainment that will always prevail between cultures, especially east and west from wearing shoes in the house to what they see in the moon. Otsuka uses evocative descriptions of the land, the women and the families that draws in the heart of the reader

Soon, once women had given birth to their hybrid children, who were second generation American citizens. On becoming teenagers their heritage was lost on them. Thinking of their mothers as old fashioned and embarrassing, they broke the women perhaps more so then the men raping and beating them had initially done.

Meeting half way and becoming more American themselves, the Japanese women’s efforts are shattered after World War II breaks out. The women are second class citizens and families are forced to leave their homes, jobs and friends. The plural ‘we’ at the end of the novel sadly shifts to the Americans, ‘the Japanese have left us’.