"The Buddha in the Attic" by Julie Otsuka

This remarkable book dispenses with the norms of writing in order to express the experiences of a community.

It starts with a boat-full of Japanese women heading to the USA to marry the husbands as selected by the matchmakers. It describes their disillusioned dreams as they follow the full immigrant experience, working as agricultural labourers and domestic servants, working their way up to self-employment. And babies, lots of babies. And tragedy, a lot of that too. And then, as most of them reach prosperity, the aftermath of Pearl Harbour sees the whole community interned as enemy aliens and transported to labour camps.

I knew something about the Japanese-American experience having read, years ago, Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. But 'The Buddha ...' is told in a completely different way. There are no individual character arcs. History happens but there is little in the way of a conventional plot. Instead the experiences of the women are listed in sentence after sentence, creating a powerful chanting effect. Here are two examples: 

• “Some of us on the boat were from Kyoto, and were delicate and fair, and had lived our entire lives in darkened rooms at the back of the house. Some of us were from Nara, and prayed to our ancestors three times a day, and swore could still hear the temple bells ringing. Some of us were farmers' daughters from Yamaguchi with thick wrists and broad shoulders who had never gone to bed after nine. Some of us were from a small mountain hamlet in the Yamanashi and had only recently seen our first train. Some of us were from Tokyo, and had seen everything, and spoke beautiful Japanese, and did not mix much with any of the others. Many more of us were from Kagoshima ...” (Come, Japanese!)
• “Home was a bit of straw in John Lyman's barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse in Stockton's Cannery Ranch. Home was a bunk in a rusty boxcar in Lompoc. Home was an old chicken coop in Willows that the Chinese had lived in before us. Home was a flea-ridden mattress in a corner of a packing shed in Dixon. Home was a bit of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree in Fred Stadelman’s apple orchard ...” (Whites)

The whole book is like this. It is mesmerisingly effective.

Nouveau roman? Certainly it reminded me of Natalie Sarraute's Tropismes. But whereas that book feels like an impressionist painting, whose message lies in the creation of an ambience, this is a collage of fragments with the punch of pop art.

Selected quotes:

• “In our dreams she would always be three and as she was when we last saw her: a tiny figure in a dark red kimono squatting at the edge of a puddle, utterly entranced by the sight of a dead floating bee.” (Come, Japanese!)
• “They gave us new names. They called us Helen and Lily. They called us Margaret. They called us Pearl.” (Whites) As ‘Whites’ might suggest, three of these four names refer directly to skin colour: lilies and pearls are white and Margaret is a name derived from the Latin word for pearl.
• “We threw out their cheese by mistake. ‘I thought it was rotten,’ we tried to explain. ‘That's how it's supposed to smell,’ we were told.” (Whites)

It was a New York Times bestseller but don't let that put you off (some truly dreadful books have achieved the same accolade)

It was a 2011 National Book Award finalist and won the 2012 Pen Faulkner Award. 

January 2025; 129 pages

First published in the US by Knopf in 2011

My paperback edition issued in the UK by Penguin in 2013

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God