The Buddha in the Attic

Locations
Call Number: Fiction / Otsuka, Julie
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Otsuka, Julie	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Otsuka, Julie	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Otsuka, Julie	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Presents the stories of six Japanese mail-order brides whose new lives in early twentieth-century San Francisco are marked by backbreaking migrant work, cultural struggles, children who reject their heritage, and the prospect of wartime internment.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Slight and Perfect submitted by Sara W on July 31, 2012, 9:38am This book is tiny, a slim 129 pages. Much about it, from the size, to the detail of the characters, to the way it is written seems meant to capture insignificance. The book is narrated by a group - everything is wriitten "we." "We set off across the ocean" "Some of us gave birth in barns." Nothing is about the individual, it is always separated by this group mentality, this impersonality. That manages to make it all the more tragic, as we follow these hopeful brides-to-be from their Japanese village, across the Pacific, to meet the husbands who exaggerated their youth, strength and wealth to lure them here.

It's ingeniously told and at the end, it seems more like you've just read a particularly moving poem than a novel. Beautiful.

Brief yet engaging read submitted by yamiyo on August 13, 2021, 11:50am Despite its brevity, this book was illuminating in tracing the journey of Japanese who first immigrated then settled in the United States. It touches on the variety of journeys that brides-to-be from Japan take to the types of lives they lived up to the Second World War including their future children and until the Japanese internment. As readers we travel alongside this group and see how embedded their presence is until it's not. Otsuka's writing is very engaging yet powerful.

Moving and informative submitted by suttonp on June 27, 2022, 12:59pm This book took I subject I was familiar with and made it deeply personal. I was so moved by the history of our country and how we continue to repeat the same errors.