‘The Buddha in the Attic’ by Julie Otsuka
Reading Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic (2011) leaves many breathless. In this short novel, there is no respite for the dispossessed. Told in the first-person plural, The Buddha in the Attic follows a group of Japanese women, from impoverished towns and villages in Japan to their passage to the United States on the boat, their arrival to the strangers that will shortly become their husbands, their unsettling tale of unbelonging, their relationship with the second generations, the rippling effect of World War II in their communities, and their disappearance.
Some knowledge of the history of Japanese migrants to the United States may alert us to the destiny of these women and their families, but nothing prepares us for the blow that Otsuka delivers with her narrative. The use of the first-person plural narrator brings to the fore a collective experience and a collective trauma that is nevertheless intertwined with individual testimonies: most of us, some of us, several of us, one of us, I. All of these first persons are confronted with a they that is insidious, that is pervasive, that is, ultimately, the silent witness of their disappearance. The last chapter of the novel switches to the collective voice of those Americans that have seen the Japanese vanished, that believe the authorities when they reassure them that they are in a safe face, that soon will no longer know what to believe. They just know that those who left in ghost trains have become ghost themselves.
Otsuka thus refuses the total disappearance of the Japanese: they are a haunting presence that has haunted (and should haunt) the history of the United States. The novel itself plays with repetition: the story of these women is a tale that must be told and retold. And it is this repetition that gives the narrative an accelerated pace and makes it so devastating. Despite its crudity, The Buddha in the Attic is a story of survival: the survival of these women through the decades before they are sent to the camps and the survival of a history that should not be forgotten.
