A year after the attacks of Sept. 11, Julie Otsuka published her spare first novel about a family of Japanese Americans consigned to an internment camp in Utah. “When the Emperor Was Divine” hit a lot of notes just right in our newly paranoid country: Its lyrical style, emotional poignancy and historical content appealed to book clubs; its brevity, chastity and diversity appealed to schools. While splashy books like “Lovely Bones,” “Middlesex” and “Life of Pi” soaked up attention, Otsuka’s quiet debut lay the foundations for paperback immortality.
Her follow-up novel, a kind of prequel that’s just as slim, starts off with a louder critical boost: It’s one of the five finalists for the National Book Award in fiction to be handed out Wednesday. Every year the shortlist makes an easy target for complaints: The finalists are too commercial, too obscure, too not the books I happened to like. Otsuka’s “The Buddha in the Attic” can’t be dismissed on any of those grounds, but the National Book Award judges have burdened this delicate novel with expectations it can’t comfortably carry.
(Knopf) - \"The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel\" by Julie Otuska
Writing in the first person plural (“we”), Otsuka begins with a group of Japanese “picture brides” — some as young as 12 — sailing to San Francisco, thrilled to be marrying successful, good-looking men. Each carries what she thinks is a photo of her fiance. “Most of us on the boat were accomplished, and were sure we would make good wives,” they say. “We knew how to serve tea and arrange flowers and sit quietly on our flat wide feet for hours.” Those will be less useful skills than they imagine in their new California lives.
The dramatic irony gets laid on thick in this anxious opening section, “Come, Japanese!” when these naive immigrants reassure themselves that “it was better to marry a stranger in America than grow old with a farmer from the village.” But the book’s plural voice is particularly effective at capturing their long, giddy conversations on the ship as they wonder if American men really grow hair on their chests, put pianos in their front parlors and dance “cheek to cheek all night long” with their lucky wives.
It turns out that guys have been larding their personal ads with exaggerations long before Match.com. Enticing letters to Japan had claimed, “I own a farm. I operate a hotel. I am president of a large bank” and my favorite new pick-up line: “I am 179 centimeters tall and do not suffer from leprosy.” In fact, as their young brides discover upon arrival, most of these men don’t own anything at all. They’re poor, old and coarse. Still, “there was no going back.” What follows is a chorus of muted laments and complaints, beginning with a bracing short chapter called “First Night” that details scores of — mostly — painful consummations.
But no story in the conventional sense ever develops, and no individuals emerge for more than a paragraph. Whereas each chapter of “When the Emperor Was Divine” presented the family’s experience from a different point of view, in this new novel, each chapter focuses on some general aspect of Japanese immigrant life — sex, employment, children — and the great variety of their experiences is blended, often sentence by sentence: “Home was a bed of straw in John Lyman’s barn alongside his prize horses and cows. Home was a corner of the washhouse at 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 bed of hay atop three apple crates beneath an apple tree.”
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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