“Julie Otsuka’s long awaited follow-up to When
the Emperor Was Divine (“To watch Emperor catching on with teachers and
students in vast numbers is to grasp what must have happened at the outset for
novels like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird” —The New York Times)
is a tour de force of economy and precision, a novel that tells the story of a
group of young women brought over from Japan to San Francisco as ‘picture
brides’ nearly a century ago. In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the
Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat,
where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures
in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first
nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and
scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new
language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as
mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their
history; to the deracinating arrival of war. In language that has the force and
the fury of poetry, Julie Otsuka has written a singularly spellbinding novel
about the American dream.”
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