![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Almost the entire story is told in the first person plural – we. Otsuka uses an unusual and highly effective way to tell the story of these women and these people. Sent over on the boat to California, they had no idea what to expect, even the photographs they were shown of their husbands were 20 years old. The Buddha in the Attic tells the story of a group of Japanese picture brides who came over to America shorty after the First World War. 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. The Buddha in the Attic is 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. ![]()
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