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    Thalia Book Club: Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic
    Thalia Book Club: Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic
    Thalia Book Club: Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic
    Audiobook1 hour

    Thalia Book Club: Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic

    Written by Julie Otsuka

    Narrated by David Rakoff and Rita Wolf

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Julie Otsuka sits down with David Rakoff to discuss her novel Buddha in the Attic. Rita Wolf reads an excerpt from the book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSymphony Space
    Release dateFeb 1, 2012
    ISBN9781467663823
    Thalia Book Club: Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic

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    Reviews for Thalia Book Club

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    • 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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      This is a very interesting and powerful poem novella about the coming and going of Japanese immigrants around the time of WWII. I liked the style of the poem as Julie Otsuka told the story through the lives and point of views of many people at once. The repetitive verses made the poem fluid and the historical aspect made it enlightening.
    • 2/5
      The aggregated voice of the "narrator" was interesting at first, but it got old after the first couple of chapters. No distinct characters or plot....it is the combined perspective of these women from their arrival in the US through their internment during World War 2. They had things in common and had individual personalities, characteristics and situations. True of any group of people. I did not find it a compelling read.
    • 5/5
      The style of first-person plural is not an easy one to use in a novel. In this case it serves to remind the reader that the story describes the experience of a vast number of individuals. The text forms a rhythmic, steady pulse beating time to the inevitable conclusion. It is a heart-breaking reminder that for many immigrants, life in the new world was not what they expected. In this case the immigrants were Japanese "picture brides", carrying photos of their prospective husbands who in reality turned out to be quite different from their descriptions: the first of many disappointments. This book is a little jewel: important to history and to our multi-cultural society. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Such a good book! The Buddha in the Attic is about Japanese picture brides coming to America in the years before WWII. It's told from all of their perspectives and experiences from the boat ride, seeing their husbands for the first time, having sex, having children, working and then what happens to them, their families, the lives they built after Pearl Harbor happened. I love how it was written no set characters and it shows the diversity of these women's experiences during this time.
    • 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.
    • 4/5
      This was a quick, powerful read.

      Written in the first-person plural, the story is at once personal and essentially anonymous. It is not the story of just one person, but of a people. The use of the "we" brings attention to the "us" vs "them" nature of racism and prejudice, and in the last chapter when the "we" changes, it raises the question, "Who are 'we' anyway?"

      Otsuka takes us through the lives of picture brides from Japan, from their nervous but hopeful journey across the ocean to the harsh realities of their lives in America to their internment---along with their husbands and children and grandchildren---because they are deemed a threat to national security after Pearl Harbor.

      In the group at which we discussed this book, the conversation turned to why it is that we, even today, avoid seeing violations of civil rights and prejudicial treatment going on around us. Why, we asked ourselves, do we as a culture turn away rather than acting when we see injustice?

      We talked about the recession and how we've got our own stuff to worry about. We talked about how busy people are and how uninformed. We talked about the consolidation of media power and the resulting shallowness and one-sidedness of the news we consume. We talked about the compartmentalization that happens in social media and web searches and online bookstores that are designed to show us more of what already interests us. We talked about the lack of community.

      This was a comfortable, philosophical approach to our inaction. What was less comfortable was when I turned the question on myself.

      When I see an injustice, why don't I act? I used to act. I used to get up in arms and demonstrate and write legislators and help set up panel discussions. Why don't I any more?

      It's not that I'm uninformed. If anything, I think I'm better informed about issues than I was in my twenties during my activism heyday.

      It's not that I don't care. Discussions at church about how the Ecuadorean population of a nearby town are being mistreated in the wake of a recent tragedy leave me in tears. I feel compelled to do something and yet when it comes time, I balk.

      Why is this?

      The only reason I can figure is fear. Fear of taking a stand, fear of arguing, fear of being yelled at. I have an introvert's trepidation about meeting new people and talking in front of groups that's just compounded by the fact that the "new people" are part of a foreign culture and many of them don't speak my first (and pretty much only) language.

      I realize, too, that I'm afraid of intensity of emotion.

      I watch activists speaking and they can hardly talk, the words are all fighting to get out of their mouths at the same time. They cry frequently. Their passion is evident.

      I used to share that passion. In my twenties and early thirties, if someone mentioned birth, I had that same flood of words that crowded in my mouth. I could---and would---argue hammer and tongs about the evils of episiotomies and the importance of teaching doctors how to deliver breech babies vaginally rather than relying on surgery.

      But in the years since my son was born, my passion has cooled. And I do not miss it.

      I've made peace with many of my feelings about birth, and I don't want to go back to that out-of-control, all-consuming obsession with something I had little ability to change or even affect.

      I'm enjoying the calm, and I'm afraid of getting pulled back into the intensity.

      While I don't think the out-of-control type of passion is necessary for activism, I don't know how to be an activist without it. I want to be an equanimous activist. I want to stand in the river and let the current rush by me. But I've yet to figure out how to get into the river without the struggle, so I continue to stand on shore.

      With all of the things I fear, the biggest is that if I were put to a moral test like those that so many faced during World War II, I would fail.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      An uncommon book, given that it's written in the first person plural. The device worked well in my view, although it might not appeal to everyone. It came across to me as a sort of cubist patchwork of images, which resulted in a complex - and lovely - vision of the Japanese "picture brides" in California. Almost an extended poem, but very absorbing. At times I could hardly put it down, although it is in no way a typical page turner.
    • 3/5
      I'd give this book 3 1/2 stars, but while the writing style is initially very intriguing, representing the communal shared experience and ultimately shared responsibility, the first person plural without any one particular narrator (ie. our husband was a farmer. our husband was a migrant worker. our husband was a fisherman.) grew to be irritating. It was a successful in making me feel the breadth of experience of these Japanese mail brides on their journey to the US, their disappointment and struggles of finding themselves in a different world than they'd been promised, and through to their internment during WWII. But I'm really glad it was a short book, I couldn't have read many more of the lists of experience. Overall, I appreciated the book, but enjoyed Otsuka's previous book on the Japanese internment "When the Emperor was Divine" much better.
    • 4/5
      The Buddha in the Attic is sparse account of Japanese ‘picture brides’ experiences in America: the hopes and dreams of a new life in America; the disappointment of the meeting the men they are promised to; the abuses they faced from their husbands and from the others around them; the fear of and sadness of life in a new country; the harshness of manual labor working for as maids, laundress, groceries, and farm labors; the rejection they faced from society, from their husbands, and even from their children; the fear of the interment process; and even a few moments when life wasn’t disappointing. It was a pretty dark and depressing little novel. And told in the third person singular (we) forces the reader to recognize the collective nature of the experiences of these women. Lot of folks will find the writing style annoying and are unable to connect with these women. For this story had been told as a single person narrative it wouldn’t had been as impactful for a story with a wide ranging experience of picture brides and the interment of the Japanese people deserve. My only issue with the story is how diverse Otsuka made California sound. Her depictions of rural northern California and the lives of farmers was spot on. It was actually pretty cool for someone like me to get the places I grew up in name dropped and for those places to feel authentic (Yuba City, Gridley, Elk Grove, Chico, Lincoln, etc.). The problem is that the very small populations of these places just haven’t been all that diverse through our collective past. I think making the lives of the Japanese characters throughout California was to make their absence something more widely felt. But the sad reality is that internment went unnoticed by very large portions of the state.
    • 3/5
      Buddha In The Atticis a small book and different from a style of writing that I would usually lean to.I opened it hoping for something similar to the picture brides from HonoluluInstead, a Japanese narrator speaks in a "collective voice" and traces the picturebrides voyage and arrival, all the in betweens to the eventual prospect of internment.There is no individual to follow but many instead.Then an American narrator speaks collectively tracing the effects of the Japaneseno longer present in the city.Probably not my personal favorite but interesting, none the less
    • 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
      Just finished Buddha in the Attic -- what a total delight!! The author tells the story of the Japanese mail order brides who arrived in the US in the early 20th century. Story goes through the WWII years. It's written in first person plural which gives it a unique feel and adds a great deal to the book (imho). A short, quick read but so good I wanted to start right in to reread it as soon as I finished -- didn't though because so many others are calling. :-)
    • 5/5
      Julie Otsuka?s lyric novel depicts the lives of young Japanese women who came to the United States as ?picture brides? in the early part of the 20th century. It?s told in the 1st-person plural, as a chorus of voices describing individual experiences that are both similar and different. The first seven chapters chronicle the women?s voyage by sea, their experiences as newlyweds, including their first night of marriage, their interactions with other Americans, their child-bearing and child-rearing, their economic successes?and failures?and ultimately, their forced removal to internment camps during World War II. The final chapter shifts to the perspective of their neighbors, who respond to the disappearance of the local Japanese residents in differing ways.The language in the novel is enchanting. Here she is describing the pain of leaving a small child behind in Japan: ?On the boat we had no idea we would dream of our daughter every night until the day that we died, and that in our dreams she would always be three and as she was when we last saw her: a tiny figure in a dark red kimono squatting at the edge of a puddle, utterly entranced by the sight of a dead floating bee.? And here, she describes the affairs that some of the women had: ?One of us made the mistake of falling in love with him and still thinks of him night and day. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who beat her with a broomstick and then lay down and wept. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who divorced her and sent her back to her parents in Japan, where she now works in a silk-reeling mill in Nagano for ten hours a day. One of us confessed everything to her husband, who forgave her and then confessed to a few sins of his own. I have a second family in Colusa. One of us said nothing to anyone and slowly lost her mind.?It?s a testament to Otsuka?s talent that this rhetorical technique works so well: a shared telling of the story by multiple characters who are never fully distinguishable to the reader. This technique seems to play two purposes. First, it illustrates the extent to which the lives of her characters had shared themes, and melted together, but also, of course, included varied experiences. Second, it reflects the status of her characters in their communities during the days leading up to Pearl Harbor: not fully appreciated as distinct individuals?or at least, one thinks that must have been the case, or else their internment would have been unthinkable.
    • 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.
    • 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.
    • 5/5
      Enjoyable, insightful, evokes a wide range of feelings for the reader. Recommend it.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this different style of writing - no "characters" as such gives the impression (quite correctly) that these experiences were wide spread, and while the results and effects were different for many people, there is a common thread.
    • 4/5
      The Buddha in the Attic reads more like a prose poem than a novel. With the predominant theme of displacement running throughout, it is not the most lighthearted of reads. First the reader experiences the displacement of Japanese women making the uncertain voyage to America for arranged marriages, and then the displacement of entire Japanese American communities through their forced removal to internment camps during WWII. Not only does it remind the reader of a shameful moment in American history, but it also speaks to the difficulties immigrants face at any time. Short but strong work.
    • 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.
    • 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
      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.
    • 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
      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
      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.
    • 4/5
      Such a good book! The Buddha in the Attic is about Japanese picture brides coming to America in the years before WWII. It's told from all of their perspectives and experiences from the boat ride, seeing their husbands for the first time, having sex, having children, working and then what happens to them, their families, the lives they built after Pearl Harbor happened. I love how it was written no set characters and it shows the diversity of these women's experiences during this time.
    • 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.