The Buddha in the AtticBy Julie Otsuka Penguin Fig Tree, 129pp. £12.99
A DECADE AGO, Julie Otsuka’s debut novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, traced the lives of a Japanese-American family interned in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. It’s a short and powerful novel, describing a mother’s preparations the day she and her two children receive their evacuation orders: deciding which of their belongings to bring, killing the elderly family dog, setting the pet macaw loose. The train-journey and internment-camp sections are narrated by her two children, and the return home is told through the eyes of the father for whom life, after four years of imprisonment, will never be the same.
The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka’s long-awaited second novel, takes as its starting point the journey made from Japan to San Francisco in 1920 or thereabouts by a ship of women from the same generation as the mother in When the Emperor Was Divine. Indeed, the mother of the first novel is quite possibly one of the women on the ship in this second novel, which is narrated in a choral “we” voice: “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. Some of us were only 14 years old and were still young girls ourselves.”
Each girl and woman carries with her a photograph of the man to whom she is betrothed, a man she has yet to meet, for these are mail-order brides, escaping backbreaking work in the paddy fields of Japan to make a better life in the US. Or so they think. “I own a farm,” their husbands have written. “I operate a hotel.” “I am the president of a large bank.” A devastating shock lies in wait for the brides when they disembark. The men they have married are old and poor. Many of the girls – some as young as 12 and 13 – are raped that night.
Their lot hardly improves. They sleep in fields and under trees, working from dawn to dusk as cheap labour for “the boss”. They have come to the US to “do the work that no self-respecting American would do”. They give birth to seven, eight, nine children, many of whom die. Several of them die themselves, being physically unable for the hard labour.
The Japanese women marvel at the Americans, at their height and their strength, their “funny, turned-out walk, their tendency to gather in each other’s parlours in large, noisy groups and stand around talking, all at once, for hours. Why, we wondered, did it never occur to them to sit down?” And then, just as they begin to establish a life for themselves and settle in to this new country, with children who are American citizens and in whose names they can finally lease land, the Pearl Harbor attack occurs and they are rounded up into internment camps as enemy aliens.
The wartime paranoia is particularly well evoked. There is apparently a “list”. The Japanese women do not know whose name is on the list, how long the list is, what will happen to the names on the list, how those names got on the list in the first place – “more and more we began to suspect that there were informers among us.” Several of their husbands are taken away in the night. Then they themselves are packed off en masse to the internment camps in which much of Otsuka’s first novel was set. Their narrative abruptly ends there. The Americans are left to wonder at their absence
The anonymous choral voice has been used to great effect in contemporary American fiction: Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End are outstanding examples. In both novels, the prose swells in the closing pages and the waves part to reveal the fragile selves hidden behind the collective. Otsuka, however, depicts her characters as a flock. A flock possessed of formidable grace and forbearance, but a flock all the same. And perhaps this is the point. Perhaps The Buddha in the Attic is intended less as an illumination of the individual experiences of a shipful of immigrant women, as it may at first seem, and more as an evocation of the impression these women made on the American psyche, in whose voice the last chapter is narrated, the neighbours and colleagues and employers who noted their sweeping departure from their horizons like an exodus of migratory birds.
Claire Kilroy’s fourth novel, The Devil I Know, will be published by Faber and Faber in August
