the buddha in the attic review

I finished reading The Buddha in the Attic.

The Buddha in the Attic follows the many lives of women who sailed from their homelands in Japan to San Francisco as picture brides during the 1900's.

It is written in a way that reads like a mixture of a poem and a novella. The story is narrated in plural first person, which gives a sense of many different stories and what a lot of people went through--a single voice encompassing many by means of their shared experience. The novel goes over their major life milestones of sailing to America, learning to be in a marriage with a man they have just met, dealing with excruciatingly difficult jobs that were their only option, giving birth, raising kids that they don't understand, their neighbors viewing them as the enemy after the Pearl Harbor attack, and their relocation to internment camps during World War II.

The last chapter has a sudden narrator switch which discusses the mysteries of what ended up happening to the Japanese. Again, there is no action. No one does anything but speculate, and it ends up feeling so helpless and empty.

The prose is very lyrical, many sections only a paragraph long, which makes it feel light. I almost read the whole thing in one sitting because of how fast it went. There is no dialogue, no plot line, and no one specific characters that the reader gets to know and root for. Due to this, I can see this book being difficult for people expecting a more traditional way of telling stories. In my life, I have only read one other book written in plural first person, so it can be hard to get into since it reads so differently from what we are used to. In some ways, I wish the book had gotten deeper so that we could see one person's story be specific of the awful things they had to face. But just because I didn't get to feel close to any one person does not mean I did not cringe or want to cry while reading it.

As it is, the book as a whole felt like rumors, like I was gossiping with voices in the dark where we hoped no one would overhear us. It was like walking down the sidewalk in a neighborhood one night and sneaking glances in the windows, getting little glimpses of many lives. 





much love,
hedgie