Book Review: The Buddha in the Attic
The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Buddha in the Attic is a historical fiction novel by Julie Otsuka, focusing on the experiences of the Japanese-American women who came to the US during WWII to be mail-order brides for (what I assume are) Japanese men. This book was recommended to me by one of my professors at university and I really enjoyed it. I am especially interested in Asian American history, which is why he thought I would like it. I give it 4/5 stars.
As always, here are three good things and three not-so-good things about this book.
Good
This book gives a firsthand account of the Japanese-American experience during WWII and the internment camps. Personal accounts really help you to feel what these people were feeling at the time, and it’s quite accurate to what actually went down in that period of American history.
This time in history, which is often sensationalized in the media, is given the proper respect and care by the author, rather than “she just took advantage of this thing to make a quick buck.”
This is subjective to me, and anyone familiar with me and my review style will understand this, but this is a short read, which means you can finish it quickly and go on to the next shiny book! I devoured it in maybe ninety minutes start to finish, and it really isn’t that difficult of a read.
Bad bits
According to some other reviews I’ve seen of this book, the writing style can get rather annoying. It gives three or four pages of a “slice of life” type of story and then whisks you a way to a completely different time and place. I didn’t mind it; it reminded me rather of Shizuko’s Daughter by Kyoko Mori, but depending on who you ask, it’s not such a good thing.
Yes, it’s a short read, but that’s also a disadvantage because it leaves you wanting to read more. It doesn’t give very many details about what happened in a certain scene, and I often wanted more. More stories of the women who were tricked into coming over and ended up as domestic labor and sex slaves by their husbands. More of the women who raised their children in the heart of San Francisco’s Japantown. More of the women who were sent away to internment camps.
Again, depending on who you ask, this might be a good or bad thing, but I didn’t mind it. There are no individual characters to connect to. In my case, I thought it was a clever storytelling device by the author–many of the Japanese-Americans who were unlawfully arrested during WWII were treated as mere numbers, statistics. The government, the non-Japanese, etc. all treated them as “the Japs.” So in essence, not having a single character to be able to relate to as in a traditional story was a way for the reader to experience the marginalization of these people.
In summary: A short little read that does a good job showing what WWII was like on the homefront for Japanese-Americans.
This will be my last book review for a while, everyone–next week and the week after that, you will certainly see blog posts from me, but they won’t be reviews. Instead, I’ll be interviewing a few very special guests here in anticipation of an upcoming release! So stay tuned!
Have a good week, everyone!
Corinne 乙女
