It was tough beginning Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic. Last year this time I was trying to complete a paper on Tim O' Brien's The Things They Carried, and the beginning of Buddha evoked memories of Ted Lavender and the paper I never finished.The way The Buddha in the Attic is written, there is no set narrator, rather a collected group of voices who tell the story of a boat load of women leaving Japan for new lives in America.
An example:
On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had originally been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.*I plowed through the first few pages, waiting to get to the good part. As my eyes devoured the words, I realized the whole book IS a good part. The style it is written in allows the reader to feel the existence of all the characters, so that the experiences of the Japanese women as a whole can be felt.
This is a powerful story of women as they explain their fears of meeting stranger husbands, discuss their misguided ideals about life in America, try to fit in once they reach America, then the uncertainty of being detained during World War II.
This book has been chosen as Philadelphia's One Book choice.
* Taken from Follow The Thread
Sounds like a great read! Many voices to share a story, now that is powerful...sounds familiar :)
ReplyDeleteI just read this book for my book club. Or, I should say half of it. I did not finish it even though it was short. I liked the style she used to give an impression of the different lives of the women. But I kept wanting to get to the story. The personal story of one of the women. I realized there was not one particular story of one of the woman when I got to the half way point. That's when I lost interest. We had good discussion about it at bookclub though. I just missed their being a personal story or dialog. Very cool though that we were reading the same book :-)
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