The Buddha in the Attic

“We dreamed we were back in the rice paddies, which we had so desperately wanted to escape. The rice paddy dreams were always nightmares. We dreamed of our older and prettier sisters who had been sold to the geisha houses by our fathers so that the rest of us might eat, and when we woke we were gasping for air. For a second I thought I was her.” 

The women traveling to America have nightmares about the rice paddies, which for them represent the worst outcome for the future. Rice paddy farming is a collective enterprise that puts the wishes and needs of the individual second to the overall profit. In traveling to America, the women think that they have escaped this sort of dehumanization, as well as the kind of poverty that means they stand to be sold off as geishas—female entertainers—to benefit their families. However, when the dreaming girls mistake themselves for their sisters, it foreshadows their actual fate; they have been sold off into marriage with a stranger so that their families will no longer have to provide for them.

“On the boat we carried our husbands’ pictures in tiny oval lockets that hung on long chains from our necks. We carried them in silk purses and old tea tins and red lacquer boxes and in the thick brown envelopes from America in which they had already been sent. We carried them in the sleeves of our kimonos, which we touched often, just to make sure they were still there.” 

The women have an intimate relationship with the pictures of their husbands that they have carried with them from Japan to America. The repetition of “carried” indicates that throughout the many experiences aboard the ship, the idea of the awaiting husband is a constant for the women. Keeping the picture in a place that is both close to the body and private indicates that the women treasure these images (ironically, in the full course of events, they will come to treasure the picture more than the reality). The detail of the women touching the sleeves of their kimonos to ensure that the pictures are still there indicates their slight doubt about the whole procedure—the feeling that this promise of a stranger awaiting them is too good to be true.

“When we first heard our names being called out across the water one of us would cover her eyes and turn away—I want to go home—but the rest of us would lower our heads and smooth down the skirts of our kimonos and walk down the gangplank and step out into the still warm day. This is America, we would say to ourselves, there is no need to worry.” 

This passage at the end of the first chapter describes the women’s feelings following their disappointment that their actual husbands do not resemble the men in their pictures. While one woman feels the full weight of the scam and wants to return home to what is true and familiar, the others compose themselves and prepare for a future that will still be better than what they could have had back home. Otsuka conveys their hope through pathetic fallacy, referring to “the still warm day” to underscore that the women expect that a hospitable welcome awaits them.

“They took us flat on our backs on the bare floor of the Minute Motel. They took us downtown, in second-rate rooms at the Kumamoto Inn. They took us in the best hotels in San Francisco that a yellow man could set foot in at the time […] They took us for granted and assumed we would do for them whatever it was we were told.”

The various locations of the brides’ wedding nights are a portal into their future economic situations. The construction “they took us” is an old-fashioned euphemism for a man having sex with a woman, but it also suggests the removal of an object from one place to another. Thus, the bride who gets taken to a motel will likely have an impoverished existence, while the one who gets taken to the best hotel that accepts Asian people will likely have the best life that an Asian person can have in America. The final use of the verb in the expression “to take for granted” indicates the wives’ ultimate fate in a patriarchal society: to do everything that men expect of them and never be thanked or rewarded for it.

“They took us on our knees, while we clung to the bedpost and wept. They took us while concentrating fiercely on some mysterious spot on the wall that only they could see.” 

Otsuka’s depiction of the men’s contrasting approaches to sex indicates that they, like the women, are individuals rather than stereotypes. While some men aim to master and intimidate their wives, giving them such painful experiences that they cower against the bed posts, others lack confidence in their performance, staring at invisible marks on the wall to either delay ejaculation or prevent themselves from becoming emotionally attached to their wives. The wives’ inability to see the marks that the husbands are staring at indicates their helpless sense of disorientation.

“They took us swiftly, repeatedly, and all throughout the night, and in the morning when we woke we were theirs.” 

The assertion that the women were taken repeatedly and throughout the night could refer to the experience of the women as individuals (i.e. each couple had sex multiple times) or as a collective (i.e. each couple had sex sometime during the night). Besides conveying the pent-up libido of men long deprived of sex, the passage again blurs the lines between the women as distinct personalities and the women as members of a unified group.

“We settled on the edges of their towns, when they would let us. And when they would not—Do not let sundown find you in this county, their signs sometimes said—we traveled on.” 

This passage illustrates how the women occupy a marginal position in racist America; they are only allowed to settle at the obscure edges of some towns, and they are excluded from settling at all in other places. Their status as second-class citizens contrasts with the women’s dreams of being at the center of a new existence. It also reflects the particular experience of many Asian Americans in relation to white America; rather than being excluded outright, they are often kept on the peripheries of power—better treated than other people of color but still subordinate to white Americans.

“Appear eager to please. Say ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ and do as you’re told. Better yet, say nothing at all. You now belong to the invisible world.” 

The submissive status of the women applies to both their positions as wives and workers. They are expected to perform their duty and only speak enough to be polite. When they are not directly of use to their employers or husbands, they would do best to make their presence scarce. The idea that the women belong to the invisible world robs them of their humanity in a way similar to their absorption into various collective identities.

“Because if our husbands had told us the truth in their letters—they were not silk traders, they were fruit pickers, they did not live in large, many-roomed houses, they lived in tents and in barns and out of doors, in the fields, beneath the sun and the stars—we never would have come to America to do the work that no self-respecting American would do.” 

The husbands falsely presented themselves as land-owning, first-class citizens in their letters. They were thus able to tempt women who faced a future in the rice paddies with the promise of improving their living situation. However, the tents and barns that constitute their real dwellings offer the women a loss rather than a rise in status. Many of the women feel betrayed and humiliated by this lie. They were not invited over to become American, but rather to improve the American economy without enjoying its benefits themselves.

“No matter how loudly we called out for our mother we knew she could not hear us, so we tried to make the best of what we had. We cut out pictures of cakes from magazines and hung them on the walls. We sewed curtains out of bleached rice sacks. We made Buddhist altars out of overturned tomato crates that we covered with cloth, and every morning we left out a cup of hot tea for our ancestors. And at the end of harvest season we walked ten miles into town and bought ourselves a small gift: a bottle of Coke […] a tube of lipstick, which we might one day have occasion to wear.” 

While calling out for their mother indicates the women’s futile wish to return to Japan, they are of a practical nature and try to obtain pleasure from the things that surround them. The way they go about this reflects their sense of existing between countries and cultures. They use everyday artifacts to make altars that bring them closer to their mothers’ rituals while at the same time participating in American consumer culture by cutting out pictures of cakes they cannot access and buying cheap goods that make them feel more American. They consider the lipstick a fanciful object that is out of place in their present lifestyle but may be apt for some future existence—a belief that suggests they still retain some faith in the promise of the American Dream.

“We cooked for them. We cleaned for them. We helped them chop wood. But it was not we who were cooking and cleaning and chopping, it was somebody else. And often our husbands did not even notice we’d disappeared.” 

The women feel as though manual labor has eroded their souls. While they continue to perform their duties like automatons, their true selves have left the scene. Their husbands are so out of touch with the women’s feelings that they do not even notice they are not themselves. This passage describes the women’s sense of isolation, both from their surroundings and from themselves, while also resisting it in one key sense; by bearing witness to each other’s struggles and seeing themselves in one another, the women avoid complete dehumanization.

“We gave birth on a Sunday, in a shed in Encinitas, and the next day we tied the baby onto our back and went out to pick berries in the fields. We gave birth to so many children we quickly lost track of the years.” 

This passage depicts birth as a matter-of-fact event that has to be incorporated into a worker’s schedule. The fact that this particular woman’s baby arrives on a Sunday (her day off work) is convenient, as she can avoid missing a day’s pay. The idea that the women bear so many children that they lose track of the years gives the impression that, in this age before reliable contraception, births are so frequent that the children themselves are unremarkable.

“We gave birth even though we had drunk the medicine the midwife had given us to prevent us from giving birth one more time. My husband was ill with pneumonia and my work was needed outside in the field.” 

The details of this passage—a husband’s pneumonia, the requirement of field work, etc.—evoke one woman’s experience; however, the sense of being too poor to care for all of the children they conceive is common to many of the women. The woman’s reliance on a midwife’s potion reflects her desperation, which is magnified when it does not stop her pregnancy from reaching full-term.

“We gave birth but the baby had already died in the womb and we buried her, naked, in the fields, beside a stream, but have moved so many times since we can no longer remember where she is.” 

This passage describes the stillbirth of a daughter and her burial in a location that the mother can no longer find. The profusion of commas supports the idea that the mother moved and settled several times. The dead daughter, buried in some anonymous field, also acts as a metaphor for the worker woman’s feeling that she has lost herself in manual labor.

“When they tired and began to cry out for us we kept on working because if we didn’t we knew we would never pay off the debt on our lease. Mama can’t come. And after a while their voices grew fainter and their crying came to a stop.” 

This passage shows how the women have to put their children’s needs second to their employers’ for the family to survive. The young children, who are born knowing only their own needs, mature precociously and learn to stop crying. This sacrifice on both the women and children’s part magnifies the sense that the women’s employers are exploiting them.

“Some of us, like our mothers before us, preferred our sons. They’re the better gain on the farm. We fed them more than we did their sisters. We sided with them in arguments. […] Because we knew that our daughters would leave us the moment they married, but our sons would provide for us in our old age.” 

The women continue their mother’s enforcement of the patriarchy for the pragmatic reason that the sons will provide for them. In contrast, the daughters, who will be married off into other families, reflect the women’s own ephemeral value to their families of origin. Although the women too were forced to leave their families, they experience their daughters’ leave-taking as a betrayal.

“They spent their days now living in the new language, whose twenty-six letters still eluded us even though we had been in America for years. All I learned was the letter x so I could sign my name at the bank.” 

This passage describes the linguistic divide between the women and their Americanized children. While the women, who have never received formal language training, struggle with the alphabet and are illiterate in English, their children are fluent. The idea that the children are “living” in English indicates that they exist in a separate culture and world; an estrangement thus develops between the generations. The women’s signing of the letter X is also significant, as X often denotes an absence in the English-speaking world—thus conveying that the women are not there at all.

“Even though our husbands had warned us—They’re afraid—still, we were unprepared. Suddenly, to find ourselves the enemy.” 

The women are shocked to find that after so many years of service to America they are suddenly enemies in the same country. The attack on Pearl Harbor that has brought this about seems to have nothing to do with the women and their work, and they feel the unfairness of being in the wrong time in the wrong place. The passage underscores the abruptness of this realization through its unconventional use of punctuation; Otsuka places a period in the middle of what would otherwise read as a complete sentence (“we were unprepared suddenly to find ourselves the enemy”), making the word “suddenly” that much more jarring.

“Chiyomi’s husband began going to sleep with his clothes on, just in case tonight was the night. Because the most shameful thing, he had told her, would be to be taken away in his pajamas (Eiko’s husband had been taken away in his pajamas).”

As more Japanese men disappear, those who remain waiting anxiously find practical ways of coping with their loss of control. For example, Chiyomi’s husband feels that if he cannot control when he will be taken, then at least he can prevent the humiliation faced by Eiko’s husband by going to sleep with his clothes on. The fact that Otsuka refers to the men as particular wives’ husbands rather than by their names aligns with the novel’s woman-centered story and reverses patriarchal norms that identify women in relation to (if not as the property of) their husbands.

“We packed our bags. We gathered up our children and from every town in every valley and every city up and down the coast, we left.” 

The women’s ritual of bag-packing and leave-taking mirrors their actions when they left Japan. However, this time they are loaded with the children they have conceived and notions of themselves as Americans. The idea that they are leaving from every single valley and city up and down the coast indicates their great numbers and how established they have become in America. The “we” who leave are therefore even more scattered and diffuse than the group who got on the boat.

“Asayo—our prettiest—left the New Ranch in Redwood carrying the same rattan suitcase she had brought over with her twenty-three years ago on the boat. It still looks brand-new.” 

This passage directly links the boat journey to the one to the internment camp. Asayo seems an exception to the general rule in having retained both her good looks and an immaculate suitcase despite the 20-year gap. She is a spectacle to the women who have moved many times and likely have tattered suitcases. The passage also shows that the internment camp departure is a people-watching opportunity; the Japanese Americans attain prime levels of visibility and individuality before they disappear.

“Haruko left a tiny brass Buddha up high, in a corner of the attic, where he is still laughing to this day.”

The idea of a Buddha in the attic that remains until this day is the title concept of the book. In her own subtle way, Haruko resists erasure by leaving this supremely Japanese symbol behind. The laughing Buddha is also a symbol of wealth and abundance that demonstrates Haruko’s resilience in the face of adversity.

“On block after block, Oriental rugs materialize beneath our feet. And on the west side of town, among the more fashionable set of young mothers who daily frequent the park, chopstick hair ornaments have suddenly become all the rage. ‘I try not to think about where they come from,’ says one mother […] ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know.’” 

This passage, told from the perspective of the white people left behind when the Japanese Americans leave for internment camps, describes how the artifacts belonging to the latter are now in the hands of the former. Ironically, while the people themselves are no longer welcome, the symbols of their culture are considered harmless and even attractive. However, the injustice of the internment taints these objects. The woman who repurposes the chopsticks for her hair expresses this disquieting sentiment, saying she prefers not to think about where her ornament came from. This willful ignorance was typical of many white people during the internment period.