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    The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel
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    The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel
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    The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel
    Audiobook3 hours

    The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel

    Written by Julie Otsuka

    Narrated by Samantha Quan and Carrington MacDuffie

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Finalist for the 2011 National Book Award

    Julie Otsuka's long awaited follow-up to When the Emperor Was Divine ("To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird" -The New York Times) is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as 'picture brides' nearly a century ago.

    In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

    In language that has the force and the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel about the American dream.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 23, 2011
    ISBN9780307940742
    Unavailable
    The Buddha in the Attic: A Novel

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    Reviews for The Buddha in the Attic

    4/5

    942 ratings135 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Otsuka's beautifully written, heart-wrenching novel is written as a first-person everywoman memoir of Japanese mail-order "picture brides" brought to San Francisco in the early twentieth century to work alongside their laboring husbands. For most, it was a joyless life of hard labor and disappointment. Otsuka follows them up until World War II, when their lives or the lives of their children and grandchildren were disrupted with sudden removal to internment camps for the duration of the war: "There were six brothers from a strawberry ranch in Dominguez who left wearing cowboy boots so they wouldn't get bitten by snakes. . . . There were children who left thinking they were going camping. There were children who left thinking they were going hiking, or to the circus, or swimming for the day at the beach. There was a boy on roller skates who did not care where it was he was going as long as there were paved streets." The final chapter is written in the first person of someone who watched her Japanese neighbors herded away: "We began to receive reports of lights left on in some of the Japanese houses, and animals in distress. A listless canary glimpsed through the Fujimotos' front window. Dying koi in a pond over at the Yamaguchis'. And everywhere the dogs. . . . Last loads of laundry still cling to the line. In one of their kitchens---Emi Saito's---a black telephone rings and rings. . . . Morning glories begin to grow wild in their gardens. . . . A lemon tree is dug up over at the Sawadas'. Locks are jimmied off of front and back doors. Cars are stripped." Otsuka has begun with stories of hardship and dashed hope and ends with quiet, emotion-charged intimate details of one of America's most shameful episodes. A difficult and painful read.
    • 3/5
      I didn't love nor hate this book. The reason I didn't love or hate this book is because it didn't have a story. This had many stories of the picture brides and what happened to them when they came to the west coast. To see how they were treated not only by their husbands but also their employers, and people they met here. To think that we as a society treated and some still do treat people of different cultures so cruelly and with such disrespect for their well being. I like to think that we as a society have improved and aren't living in the 'dark ages'.I am now interested in reading Julie's first book to see if I enjoy that one more since it has a story of just one family.
    • 5/5
      Spare, concise and heartbreaking. The life of Japanese "picture" brides brought to California in the early 20th century. Similar in style and a great companion and prelude to When the Emperor Was Divine, this is not a novel in the traditional sense - it almost reads more like a long poetry piece. The women, although sometimes named individually, are more often referred to as a collective "we". Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      A short book, a quick read and totally absorbing. I loved the style of writing, it caught me up, gathered me in and carried me along with the wonderful dialogue. I felt as if all the characters were seated in my lounge room. Everyone talking, chatting, crying, sitting quietly, arguing, hugging, laughing communing …..altogether, all at once! For what is a sad tale, I was captivated.
    • 5/5
      Written in the first person plural about the migration of Japanese women from Japan to the US before Pearl Harbor. It followed them from the boat ride, meeting their husbands, their migrant labor experiences, their families, the immigrant experience. Last chapter is told from the collective viewpoint of the Americans. We were/are so thoughtless sometimes.
    • 5/5
      This book delivers a truly unique and unforgettable reading experience. Written in plural form ("we"),which is not a common form, what a great way to emphasize the commonality of these women's lives, even as their stories took different paths. The form also contributes to a realness, and a sense of immediacy, urgency and anxiety that made me feel part of the action, as if I,too, was a part of their community.

      Otsuka's prose is in a way poetry --an image, an allusion, a word, and you "get" it. Short phrases of what a person wore, said, or did are like the brushstrokes of a larger portrait or like the stitches woven in an intricate tapestry.

      While it doesn't take long to get through 129 pages, I wouldn't classify this as a "quick read" or a "light" read. It took only a couple of days, true, but I lingered over much of it, savored the words with the story.

    • 5/5
      Short but so powerful

      I thought this book was deeply moving and the pluralized first person narrative made this book something unique. Japanese, mail-order brides have come to America married to men they have written to and have received pictures. They develop lives and while the book is in almost a chorus the reader still gets to know the individual and perhaps has an even better connection.

      For those who say they won't read a short story or novella because a story can't be told well enough which means the reader won't have the same depth of feeling I challenge them to read this story. And I have to say (and I hate politics in reviews so I have to apologize) this was such a timely read in today's political climate.
    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this a good deal. Pretty profoundly sad throughout, however. Often books like this have something to hold onto, some human spirit to cling to. Oust was keeping it real, though: shipped off to America, scared, arrive and get treated like crap, scared and lonely, have kids, many of them die, those who don't reject you and are embarrassed by you, get put in internment camps, everybody forgets about you. Not happy. Read in hotel while on a business trip in Dallas.
    • 5/5
      This was breathtakingly beautiful; almost poetic in the way it was written. It was heartwrenching and made me very sad. I don't think there is a way for me to describe this book other than to say you must read it. You feel completely immersed in their world. You struggle with them, ache with (and for them). You worry for them.

      This is a must read.
    • 4/5
      Great book
    • 4/5
      I listened to the audio book version. I believe the "snapshot" format of delivery would have driven me mad if I had read the novel. But the format worked exceeding well for me in listening to the "we were from...", "we had children..." quick glimpses into the Japanese brides' varied life experiences in the US. Almost like an incessant chant, the stories of these women are told from leaving Japan through the U.S. internment of American's of Japanese descent during WWII.
    • 4/5
      Possibly the most interesting thing about this book is the style the author used to write it. Most of it is in narrated in the second person featuring the thoughts of multiple people about the same issues. The book begins with a group of Japanese brides sailing for America aboard the same ship, probably in the 1920's. It narrates events up to the internment of the Japanese following the attack on Pearl Harbor. While no real new ground is broken with this book, it is very thought-provoking in terms of how we react to this type of event.
    • 5/5
      This short ‘novel’ is written in an unusual format. Otsuka writes from the point of view of a group of Japanese ‘picture brides’ who came to America in the early years of the 20th century. There is no real narrator; every statement is ‘some of us’ or ‘one of us’ or ‘we’. I did not at first think she could sustain that method for an entire book, but she did. It makes an incredibly strong emotional impact. There is no one person behind the narrative; she speaks for a group and the things they had in common and the things that they didn’t. Each chapter is a section of their lives. In the first, we find them in the depths of the ship that carries them, already married to men they have never met, to California. Some are virgins, some fallen women, one as young as twelve. All have pictures of their husbands, which they pour over, not knowing that the pictures are sometimes 15 years old and that the men are not the handsome, well to do, young men they claim to be. They don’t find this out until the ship docks, and they go down the gangplank, their fates sealed before they ever left Japan, and find that the ‘banker’ they married is really an agricultural field worker. We follow them through their wedding nights, their interactions with the whites in California, their unceasing toil for almost no return, their children, and, finally, WW 2 and the internment camps that steal away everything they worked for. It’s a heartbreaking book. These women faced such huge hurdles in life that, even without knowing them as characters are usually known in a book, they brought me near to weeping. It’s classed as a novel; its format makes it truly novel – new, unusual. Novel, documentary, history, biography. I see this book showing up in a lot of history classes in the future.
    • 4/5
      interesting mode of telling the stories of Japanese women who came to America to wed and what they went through and ultimtely going to the internment camps. I want to read her earlier book When the Emperor Was Divine.
    • 2/5
      A well done and powerful historical novel that didnt quiet click with me. I found the format (a kind of collective consciousness of the Japanese women brought to America) a bit difficult sometimes but it was effective in showing the varied experiences people went through. I was also uncomfortable with the graphic nature of some passages regarding prejudice and sexual violence.
    • 4/5
      it lagged a little at the end but the beginning is killer
    • 4/5
      3.5 stars. It took me a little bit to get into this book, but it was a quick and fascinating read once I did. Love the plural narration.
    • 5/5
      This was breathtakingly beautiful; almost poetic in the way it was written. It was heartwrenching and made me very sad. I don't think there is a way for me to describe this book other than to say you must read it. You feel completely immersed in their world. You struggle with them, ache with (and for them). You worry for them.

      This is a must read.
    • 4/5
      If Walt Whitman had been female writing about Japanese Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, this would have been that book.

      It was an interesting read. This is no protagonist. It is truly plural. All the way through. Try the "peek inside" and choose whether you want to read the whole book.

      I nearly quit twice, but found myself drawn back to the story in spite of the peculiar form. It is a sad story, but a good book. Well worth reading.
    • 2/5
      The point of view (first person plural) made me crazy. Maybe I could have finished it in a paper format' listening to it was irritating.
    • 5/5
      I’m not sure why it took me so long to read this one, perhaps because it’s such a slim volume that seems to get swallowed up in the overabundance of my bookshelves. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka is the beautiful, poetically rendered story of Japanese picture brides, lured to the American west coast in the early 20th century by promises of a new life and young husbands made wealthy in a nation where the “streets are made of gold.” The reality of the life they find is much different, filled with grueling work, devious men, ignorance, and racism.Otsuka tells their stories as a collective, using the first-person plural “we” throughout the book, and what could easily become an irritating conceit is instead wielded with power to tell the story of many in few words. While there may not be a specific character to latch on to, Otsuka manages to beautifully capture the essence of a whole experience, nimbly passing from woman to woman, from the farm worker, to the laundress, to the maid until she has drawn out the full breadth of their experience. A powerful story, beautifully told. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This book is written is a style I have never come across, and that includes other books written by the author. The paragraphs read almost as running lists, each one throwing out the different ways many women experience moments of their journey as brides immigrating to America.
      Selected as brides for men already in the US, the women come from varying backgrounds and make their choices for different reasons. Every element of their lives differs, and each experience is valid and needed to be documented. Instead of focussing on a few characters and writing a typical narrative, the author has done an exhaustive amount of research and is presenting us with as many heartbreaking, frightening, exhilarating, triumphant, humiliating, mundane, shameful, loving and terrifying moments as she can. No word is wasted, no experience unimportant and all contribute to my understanding of the experience of the Japanese women who came here for a better life, who came here to find love, who came looking for the American dream and what happened to all they had worked for when after many years, Pearl Harbor happened.

      To me this book read as a long, flowing poem and it honors and memorializes the lives, struggles, triumphs, failures, and sometimes destruction of these women.
    • 3/5
      33. The Buddha in the Attic (Audio) by Julie Otsuka, read by Samantha Quan and Carrington MacDuffie (2011, 3:52, ~110 pages in paperback, listened May 26-29)Rating: 3 starsA National Book Award and IMPAC Dublin award finalist, this short book, told in a collective we, covers the experience of Japanese mail-order brides. They immigrated to California by boat to meet their various generally disappointing husbands and live generally unexpectedly difficult lives as agricultural laborers until they were all sent to concentration camps during WWII.I had just given up on several audiobooks when I tried this one, really as a backup, and found myself instantly caught up it. I kept on enjoying it for awhile. I was caught up by their expectations and really a bit stunned by what they found. It's almost unimaginable, the difference. Unfortunately it keeps going and going and going. By the end I was thankful it was so short. So a mixed experience for me.
    • 5/5
      Enjoyable, insightful, evokes a wide range of feelings for the reader. Recommend it.
    • 3/5
      This is a recent short novel about Japanese picture brides coming to San Francisco at some undefined time in the early 20th century (1910's most likely.) It is told in a very artistic manner that initially I found refreshing until I realized the entire story was going to be told like this. We have eight vignettes at different points in time and place of the women/girls from Japan. To me the strongest chapter was the first with the passage across the ocean from Japan to California with a collection of hopes, dreams and fears. The story does not have individual characters to follow through time. There is always a collective "We" with the occasional mention of names, but not anything like a "normal" continuity. As I said the method of storytelling was initially refreshing, but for me ultimately unsatisfying. I am sure other readers may have different reactions. The story is also much darker than I expected. This is the 20th century after all, with all the plusses and minuses that go along with that and we spend a lot of time on the dark side. I didn't like the story but I can admire the skill that created it. There's an odd cadence to much of the writing and while reading this it was almost like a rhythmic chanting of the sentences.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful. I loved the "hive mind" approach to fictionalising oral history, although I know it annoyed some readers: a few members of my book club would have preferred to have followed the individual stories in a more traditional manner. My thought was that to write it that way, while retaining the diversity of experience, would have resulted in a book at least 10 times as long and lacking in the delicious lightness of touch that blesses this slim and enchanting volume. This made me want to know more about the subject, so I was glad to see Julie Otsuka's long list of references at the end. I'm very keen to seek out more of her writing.
    • 2/5
      The story is well told--I loved the first line--and moves along pretty well, but there are no individual characters to latch on to. The book feels much more like a documentary than a novel.
    • 3/5
      I read the author's When the Emperor Was Divine on Feb 11, 2005, and was quite taken by it so I thought I should read her second novel, published in 2011. It is an account of brides selected by Japanese men in the USA from women in Japan. The account tells of the trip to the USA, and the often doleful fate of the women who came expecting a better life but ordianrily most valued for the work they did for their husbands. There are no identified characters as such, and the story is told in the first person plural. I think this detracts from one's identification with the narrators. Sometimes the point of the recitation of dolefulness becomes crushingly monotonous, sorry though one is for teh sorrows the Japanese go through, especially when they are uprooted from their homes in 1942.
    • 5/5
      In the early 1900s, many Japanese women traveled from their villages to California as "picture brides," the intended of men already in America who sent them letters and pictures and the money to come to the U.S. to marry them and work with them. Told in a collective "we," this is the story of many of those women from their time on the boat to the internment during World War 2.This slight book is at once a potentially quick read and one that you want to take your time reading. The unique narrative structure seldom focuses on one individual - though there are moments when an individual speaks or otherwise stands out from the crowd - but gives a panorama of a collective experience. A fascinating, challenging read that would be perfect for a book club willing to read more experimental, literary fiction.
    • 3/5
      I didn't like it at first. The fact that all of the characters at once are talking was not appealing at first, but grew on me. It is the story of Japanese brides who come to join their Japanese husbands and are treated badly to say the least.