The Buddha in the Attic

Monday evening when so many were snuggling in with a bowl of popcorn ready to watch a new season of favorites on television.  I curled up in my favorite chair with a book I had picked up earlier in the day while browsing in the bookstore.

image via Salem Press

"On the boat we were mostly virgins.  We had long black hair and flat wide feet and were not very tall.  Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.  
Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, 
but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we'd been wearing for years--faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and redyed many times.  Some of us came from the mountains, and had never before
 seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives.  Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiance, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water on unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on."

So begins Julie Otsuka's newest release The Buddha in the Attic.

Jule Otsuka hands us the incredible heart wrenching story of a group of young Japanese women brought to California as mail-order brides.  They leave mothers and homes with a picture a beautiful young husband tucked in a sleeve and a promise of a better life concealed in the heart, only to find something different.

The Buddha in the Attic is a collection of narratives written in the first person of "we".   It begins with their journey across the ocean to a new land to begin a new life.  Ms. Otsuka chooses to end the book, not  with the voices of the Japanese women, but of the people they worked for and lived among, who one morning awoke to find this group of people gone; homes deserted, shops closed, pets left behind.  

This slim (a mere 129 pages), but incredibly profound book is more poetry than novel.   I did not budge from my chair until I reached the last period.  

Happy Reading!