The Buddha in the Attic

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-5

Chapters 6-8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 6-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 6 Summary: “Traitors”

With the advent of the Second World War and the Japanese Army’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the women’s husbands begin to disappear on the suspicion that they are enemy traitors. There is talk of a list, and the Japanese American community speculates on how traitorous you have to be to get on it. Although German and Italian Americans also originate from Axis power nations, only Japanese Americans are on the list.

The women do not know where the men have gone. As more men disappear, the women embark on a more contained existence, keeping children home from school and removing their names from mailboxes. They even stop talking as they cross each other in the street, fearing that onlookers suspect them of exchanging secrets. The women lose business and are “unprepared […] suddenly, to find [them]selves the enemy” (85). They have to sacrifice the souvenirs, letters, and photos they brought with them from Japan in case the police search their houses. The women reproach themselves for “so long […] clinging to [their] strange, foreign ways” that have made Americans “hate [them]” (87).

One section of this chapter assumes the perspective of the Americans who are against the Japanese. These people “inform the authorities of any fifth columnists who might dwell in [their] midst […] because anyone, [they] were reminded, could be a spy” (89). This paranoia also results in government policies restricting Japanese people’s movement to five miles from home and an eight pm curfew, while causing the women to feel like they are increasingly under surveillance by both white Americans and other Japanese Americans who might inform on them.

The anticipation of having a husband taken away is agonizing, and the women prepare differently for this eventuality, with some even packing their husbands’ suitcases. The women fear being unable to support themselves and becoming destitute without their husbands’ support.

Finally, the government mandates that all Japanese citizens are to be evacuated to internment camps in three weeks’ time. Some of the women lament having ever come to America in the first place, or not having divorced their husbands and returned to Japan with their children. They spend the three weeks preparing for the evacuation by selling their businesses and bringing in the harvest. The latter activity, which is essential to the American economy, is imbued with the propaganda of being “an opportunity for [the women] to prove [their] loyalty” to “the folks on the home front” (101). When the day of the evacuation arrives, the women’s homes fall prey to looters. The women imagine that as they get on the trains to their destination, all traces of their efforts to make a life for themselves in America will vanish.

Chapter 7 Summary: “Last Day”

This chapter shows the diverse ways that the women leave their homes on the day they depart for the internment camp. This variety encompasses the departing women’s emotional states as well as their modes of dress and the articles they carry with them. The narrative also expands its focus from the women to consider the children and men who accompany them on the journey.

While some of the women comfort themselves that they will not be gone for long and leave carrying library books due the next week, the majority see the evacuation as an apocalyptic moment that requires them to redefine themselves. For example, one woman gets her hair done at the best salon prior to her departure, while another leaves “wearing her first pair of pants. They say it’s no place for dresses” (106).

While some women discreetly carry markers of their Japanese identity, such as portable Buddhist shrines or the suitcases they brought with them for Japan, they generally try to seem as patriotically American and non-threatening as possible. The women speak only English so that onlookers can understand them, and their college-age children leave with pins of the American flag fastened to their chests. While some women leave with their families, others leave alone, as their husbands have already been taken away and their children are living with their parents.

The day of departure is a prime people-watching opportunity, as previously unseen members of the Japanese American community come to light, including orphan children, sunburned ageing bachelors, and a woman who has been locked in the attic by her husband so that no stranger can see her beauty.

Chapter 8 Summary: “A Disappearance”

The final chapter assumes the perspective of the white people who see the Japanese Americans disappear after their evacuation to the internment camps. They have no idea where the Japanese have gone to, although the authorities assure them that they are safe. All of the Japanese Americans have left, with the exception of those who are hospitalized or in jail. Those left behind die alone.

At first, the Japanese Americans are noticeable for their absence. For example, neighbors walk by their evacuated homes and notice left-out laundry and a ringing telephone. Then the white people notice how Japanese shops and enterprises have been taken over and anglicized; “Murata Florist” becomes “Flowers by Kay” (115). Their possessions, such as chopsticks and Oriental rugs, end up in the homes of white people who covet their exoticism.

White Americans’ response to the Japanese evacuation is divided. While some are saddened by the disappearance, others admit that they feel safer without them, with one woman reporting, “[T]here was just so much about them we didn’t know […] I always felt like there was something they were trying to hide” (118).

Reports of where the Japanese have gone arrive in the form of letters and in propaganda claiming that they are well, and that the evacuation measure is necessary to ensure the country’s security.

As time goes on and the Japanese do not return, people of other ethnicities take over their positions and homes. Faced with loud, impoverished countryside neighbors, the white people “begin to long for [their] old neighbors, the quiet Japanese” (126).

Once a whole year has passed, the white people only remember the Japanese fleetingly. Whole towns have become accustomed to their absence, and it is as though the Japanese never even settled there. However, they know that “the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another” (129).

Chapters 6-8 Analysis

About 120,000 Japanese people were interned in camps between 1942-1946 following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The government-mandated plan to silo Japanese Americans off from mainstream society coincides with the women’s entry into middle age and their related sense of having established themselves in America. The women are therefore all the more shocked when their view of themselves as essential to American society is overturned by suspicious Americans who pronounce them traitors.

Rumor is a key element in these chapters, as various myths spread amongst the population about the nature of the list that causes Japanese men to disappear, and then about where the Japanese Americans have been interned. As the government deprives the civilian population of knowledge, ignorance leads to fear. This leads to the creation of an informer society, where Japanese people worry that others will report them to settle old scores.

In a sense, the experience of being collectively rounded up and put on trains parallels the women’s boat journey at the start of the novel. Just as the women who got on the boat had varied experiences informed by different upbringings and locations, the women who get on the train have made unique lives for themselves in America and integrated to different degrees. Otsuka’s increasing tendency to use the women’s names causes the reader’s sense of the women as a group to splinter just at the moment when the authorities are treating Japanese Americans as an undifferentiated enemy. “We,” the refrain of previous chapters, is replaced with “some of us” and “others of us,” indicating that despite the fact that the Japanese were collectively sent to the camps, they cannot be classed as a conglomerate. Ironically, the only group-tendency the women exhibit in these chapters is the collective effort to seem more American. In order to do this, they destroy the symbols that bind them to other women of their generation, burning the artifacts they brought with them on the boat and ceasing to speak their mother tongue.

While the women arrive at the fullness of their personalities in the penultimate chapter, the final chapter, voiced by the “we” of the left-behind white people, shows how the Japanese immigrants have impacted America. The white people who see overgrown gardens, dogs in search of their masters, and phones ringing have gotten used to their Japanese neighbors and initially expect them to return imminently. However, a sense of helplessness and forgetting grows as all traces of the Japanese American community’s influence are erased. The novel illustrates the incremental distancing of the Japanese in how “Murata Florist” becomes “Flowers by Kay” immediately after the internment before becoming completely unrecognizable as Foley’s Bar within a year (115).

What ultimately causes the white people to remember the Japanese is their replacement by countryside migrants and people of other races, who Otsuka claims are neither as apt at their jobs nor as refined in their presentation as the Japanese. While the white people were initially racist towards the Japanese, they find that they miss their discreet presence, and they project their hostility onto more vocal minorities who challenge their supremacy.