Personal History

8.12 Buddha in the Attic

I read this in less than 24 hours and would challenge anyone to not do the same.  But I imagine that it would be challenging for a lot of people because once again Otsuka has played with the narrative voice to create a really original way of presenting history.  There are no individual characters and things just happen, kind of like life.  I am sure there are readers who will say it is just a list of things: this happened to her, and this happened to her, but my god it is so much more.  It is about women and mothers, family and livelihood, neighbors and betrayal.  It is an amazingly powerful little book.

I used When The Emperor was Divine when teaching American Studies, and found that it filled in a gaping hole of our WWII studies: what was happening in this country to our own citizens.  Emperor used alternating points of view to tell the story of fear in California and the ultimate internment of the Japanese during the war.  Buddha goes further back in history and uses a collective voice to show the experiences of young women (mail-order brides (?)) coming to San Francisco to be married and have a better life at the beginning of the 1900s.  It shows how they created lives and families, and it shows how ultimately fear destroyed everything they had worked for.

Frankly, I wish I had the last chapter of Buddha to use when I was teaching Emperor.  It is the only time we see the view of the Americans and is titled, The Disappearance.  It is scary how little responsibility is taken, how quickly things are forgotten, how blasé the adults are and how truly affected the children are.