The Buddha in the Attic in Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge

Nov 23, 2022 Laura Vultaggio rated it really liked it

This hauntingly beautiful and lyrical novel follows a group of young women who travel from Japan to California as “picture brides” in the early 1900s. The novel is broken into eight sections and follows these women throughout their lives and varied circumstances in America with their new husbands whom they only knew from photographs.

They arrive in San Francisco and spread out across the state working in a variety of fields, learning a new language and culture, and raising children. The novel co ...more

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Nov 22, 2011 Jen rated it liked it

Shelves: american-literature, historical-fiction

The part of this book that appealed to my history sensibilities really enjoyed it. It gives a good idea of what Japanese women went through when immigrating to America in the first half of the twentieth century. The literary part of me though felt like something was lacking. Instead of focusing on one woman or one family, this book is very general and I think it would have been a stronger story if we could have gotten a more personal look at specific characters instead of a running list of chang ...more

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Oct 18, 2012 Audacia Ray rated it it was amazing

Shelves: library-reads, fiction, read-in-2012

wow. I don't think I've ever read a mostly first but sometimes also second personal plural book pulled off this way (one exception - Reinaldo Arenas' The Doorman).

The Buddha in the Attic has both no main characters and thousands of them. Every sentence is its own story. stunning book. ...more

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Aug 29, 2019 Deedee marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: 00-august-23-to-september-22, historical-fiction, usa-california, cover-brown, new-york-times-100-notable-2011, immigrants, year-2011, impac-dublin-literary-award-nominee, title-repeating-the, o

First lines:
On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice and gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old.....

The entire novel appears to have been written from the point of view of "us", with sentences beginning with "we" and "our". ...more

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Jan 09, 2016 Hardcover Hearts rated it it was amazing

Absolutely haunting and powerful collection of a generation of Japanese women arriving full of promise in San Francisco and the lives they led, men they married (happily or not), families they started until WW2 broke. So beautiful. So heartbreaking.

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